By Kiiza Mujuni

On the night of 31 October 2026, Makerere University’s Freshers Ball at Impis Rugby Grounds produced an image that will be difficult to unsee.

Guild President Gracious Kadondi stepped onto the stage during Fik Fameica’s performance and sought the microphone. The artiste refused.

“Leave my stage! I have work to do,” he told her.

Parts of the crowd answered by chanting his name. She and her team eventually withdrew. He finished the set. The exchange was short, public, and revealing.

Kizza Mujuni

Six months earlier, the Radical New Bar President of the Uganda Law Society and Head of the Bar Isaac K. Ssemakadde SC had greeted her election with unusual directness.

Bare-knuckle fighter

In a widely circulated congratulatory note, the nation’s top lawyer praised the gallant Makerereans for choosing an “uncompromising, bare-knuckle fighter for justice and institutional independence.” He insisted that her mandate carried “a heavier national responsibility than guild affairs alone.”

He further urged her to abandon the “prefectorial posture” of her predecessor, draw strength from the 2024 Bangladesh student uprising, and immediately demand the unconditional release of political prisoners while dismantling “gamba nogu” tyranny.

Makerere, the RNB Supreme Leader observed, had long laboured under a “suffocating dictatorship” of viceroy Barnabas Nawangwe.

Kadondi’s victory, the ancestor’s note declared, “must mark the beginning of a renewed student-led offensive against this entrenched tyranny.”

Even the defeated former Miss Uganda Hannah Karema received pointed advice: leave “the politics of being a pageant for a junta.”

Things Fall Apart

Kadondi did not take up the challenge. In the months that followed, the national questions , a never-ending series of abductions, political prisoners whose plight it has become taboo to even mention, and the climate of fear orchestrated by sabre-rattling from supporters of the Patriotic League of Uganda and its ever-tweeting chairman drew no sustained public response from her office.

On 4 October 2026, the guild president was inexplicably a no-show at a virtual town hall to discuss the role of the students’ fraternity in confronting the Chief of Defense Forces General Muhoozi Kainerugaba and the lawlessness crisis he has caused in the country. Her reasons, half-heartedly conveyed through NUP Deputy President Dr Lina Zedriga, were frankly unconvincing. She did not even send a delegate. “What was she afraid of?” many students wondered.

What is certain about Kadondi’s presidency so far is her focus on campus protocol and personal visibility.

The Freshers’ Ball confrontation was the first visible cost of that choice. The second arrived almost immediately.

On 2 November, Mutebi Edward, the 92nd Guild Minister of Culture, Mobilisation and Social Affairs, resigned in a letter written “with a light heart and a bright smile.”

He recorded that planning meetings with the Dean of Students, security, and sponsors had gone ahead without the Guild President and her Vice President.

She arrived late, he wrote, accompanied by family and friends, forced an unaccredited entourage backstage, and attempted to seize the stage against the pre-agreed protocol.

The resulting clash with security, sponsors, and the artiste was “entirely self-inflicted.” It should have taught humility, servant leadership, and the ability to read a crowd qualities he said she “sorely lack[s].”

Mutebi listed the practical work that had kept campus social life functioning: securing Made in Uganda as a headline sponsor for the bazaar, bringing Coca-Cola back after years of absence, delivering the FIFA World Cup watch party, staging the Freshers Ball itself, and reviving movie nights with Mary Stuart SCR.

He thanked his deputy and aides, the administration, and the student body. Then he scathingly described the leadership style he was leaving: credit claimed for work not done, constant frustration of the ministry’s efforts, insults directed at those who delivered results, personal gain placed above students’ interests, and the once hallowed office of Guild President now reduced to “a tool of petty control and sudden moods.”

He departed “cheerfully, with his dignity intact and richer in friends and experience.”

No Longer At Ease

Hon. Mutebi Edward’s resignation letter supplies the detail about his fickle boss that had been missing from the public record.

It does not describe a radical under siege by external forces. It rather describes a flippant leader who skips the unglamorous work of planning and coordination, asserts personal authority at the last moment, falls into predictable embarrassment, and still reaches for the credit.

The “bare-knuckle fighter” image of April now looks more like campaign clothing. What remains is familiar campus politics: selective presence, credit appropriation, mood-driven control, and an inability to put collective preparation ahead of personal optics.

Hon. Mutebi Edward’s concrete claims deserve acknowledgement. Reviving major commercial partnerships, delivering large events under constrained conditions, and trying to restore ordinary student social life are measurable contributions.

A public resignation that records both the work and the friction sets a higher standard of accountability than the silence that has surrounded the national questions placed on Kadondi’s desk in April.

Takeaway Lessons for Future Guild Leaders

The lessons from this kerfuffle are too many to list. A few, however, are compelling.

Big talk at the national level means nothing without competence at the local level. A leader who cannot coordinate her own culture ministry, security, and sponsors before a Freshers’ Ball is poorly placed to demand the release of political prisoners or confront entrenched power.

Who gets the credit tells you a lot. When the people who actually did the work start documenting what they built — and what held them back — the gap between image and reality becomes clear.

Crowds are ruthless auditors. Students chanted for the artiste, not the Guild President.

Ignoring early advice has a cost. The April note from the RNB supremo told Guild President-elect Kadondi Gracious the mandate was heavier than guild affairs. Yet she treated the office as a glorified prefectship. The public rebukes and resignation are the interest on that decision.

Some students are now asking her to apologise to her defeated rival, former Miss Uganda Hannah Karema. Karema was advised to leave the politics of pageantry and quietly heeded. Kadondi stayed inside it and is now collecting the receipts. What was she doing on stage, fighting for a mic with a multiple-award-winning crooner menacingly called King Kong?

The mask is slipping. Students who elected a NUP-backed fighter for justice are watching a different performance — one in which the hardest battles she is willing to fight are over stage time and internal credit, while the legacy-defining national questions remain unanswered.

The author is a third year law student at Bishop Stuart University, Mbarara.