Kizza Besigye. (Photo: Reuters).

Uganda’s veteran opposition leader Dr. Kizza Besigye, who was arrested in November 2024 and remanded to Luzira Maximum Security Prison in Kampala has gone on hunger strike, according to local media.

Besigye was detained and forcefully returned to Uganda – while on a visit to Kenya to attend the launch of a book by opposition politician Martha Karua – in an incident that sparked fear and widespread condemnation.

The leader of Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) was arrested together with his close associate Hajj Obeid Lutale and both have been on trial for the charges of treachery, unlawful possession of ammunition and a firearm.

Sources cited by popular Daily Monitor newspaper said Besigye refused to meet his lawyers to protest his continued detention even as Uganda’s Supreme Court ruled in January 2025 that the trial of civilians in military courts is illegal.

The court had ordered the immediate cessation of prosecution of civilians in General Court Martial and transfer them to ordinary courts with competent jurisdiction.

On Monday, Besigye’s wife Winnie Byanyima told VOA Africa that her husband disclosed that he was contemplating a hunger strike to protest his continued and “unjust” detention – when she last visited him on February 7.

“I last saw him on Friday and he sounded like ‘there is go to be an end to this. I can’t sit here in prison when the warrant for my arrest was nullified. I am sitting here illegally, and I am not going to be hopeless but I am going to do something’,” said Byanyima.

Besigye has contested and lost four presidential elections against President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986. He has been less active in politics recently, and did not contest the 2021 election.

But in 2024, Besigye formed the People’s Front for Freedom (PFF) after breaking away from the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), which he founded two decades ago.