When Prof. Isaac Christopher Luboogo sat down to write his latest manuscript dated 4th September 2026, titled Killing the Chicken to Scare the Monkey and Contemporary Uganda, he did not start with a statute or a Latin maxim as many lawyers do. He started with a proverb every grandmother in Africa knows: killing the chicken to scare the monkey.
What looks at first like village wisdom about fear, he argues, is actually a complete theory of how modern states govern through exemplary power, and what follows is not a political pamphlet but a serious piece of legal scholarship that demands to be read slowly and carefully.
How Long Is It and What Genre Does It Belong To?
In terms of size, the manuscript runs to about six thousand words of main argument and over eight thousand words with references and case law, which in publishing terms is roughly twenty to twenty-five pages of a law journal, about four full broadsheet newspaper pages, and about thirty-five minutes of reading for a lay reader and close to an hour for a scholar.
That length matters because this is not an op-ed or a social media thread. It is a long-form academic article. In an 8,000-word jurisprudential tour de force that travels from Machiavelli’s palace to Foucault’s prison and back to Ubuntu in Busoga, Lubogo says fear may work, but it is not law.
Its genre is what makes it stand out in Ugandan legal writing. It belongs to interdisciplinary constitutional jurisprudence, a demanding genre that fuses law, philosophy, sociology, and African ethics in one sustained argument.
More precisely, it operates on four levels at once. On one level, it is a jurisprudential essay in the tradition of H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin that builds a legal theory from a single concept.
On another level, it is socio-legal and law-and-philosophy scholarship that links black-letter law to political theory. On a third level, it is decolonial African legal theory that deliberately starts with an African proverb as theory, not as decoration, and then forces Western thinkers to dialogue with it. And on a fourth level, it is applied constitutional critique that uses contemporary Uganda as a laboratory to test its propositions.
Style And Literary Tools: Why It Does Not Read Like Abusive Writing.
Unlike some writers today who are abusive and confrontational or aggressive and provocative, who insult personalities, shout slogans, and mistake anger for analysis, Prof. Luboogo writes in a style that is restrained, expository-analytical, and Socratic.
Where the confrontational writer says the regime is criminal, Luboogo asks was the person lawfully selected for enforcement or selected because an audience needed warning?
Where the provocative writer says they hate opposition, Luboogo asks does the public message concern the content of law or principally the reach of power? His style persuades through distinction, not through abuse, and that is why it survives scrutiny.
How does he bring forth his message? He employs a set of literary and scholarly tools that are worth naming because they are what make the article joyful reading.
First, he uses conceptual metaphor as analytical framework, converting the chicken and monkey proverb into a four-element legal test that recurs throughout the text, namely an identifiable immediate subject, an intended audience, a communicative act that makes the treatment visible, and a behavioral objective.
Secondly, he uses genealogy of ideas, tracing the same question of whether it is right to punish one to deter many across four hundred years of thought, from Machiavelli in 1532 to Arendt in 1970, showing that the African proverb already contains what Western philosophy debated for centuries.
Thirdly, his favorite tool is conceptual distinction as method, where he defines by separating. Throughout the manuscript he separates efficacy from legitimacy, coercion from authority, direct repression from anticipatory compliance, offender from scapegoat, legal from juridical, power from violence, rule BY law from rule OF law. This binary discipline is what gives the writing clarity.
Fourthly, he grounds philosophy in doctrinal legal analysis, anchoring abstract ideas in Article 1 on sovereignty of the people, Article 29 on freedoms of expression and assembly, Article 43 on justifiable limitations and prohibition of political persecution, Article 44 on non-derogable rights like fair hearing and freedom from torture, and Article 126(2)(e) on reconciliation, plus the Human Rights (Enforcement) Act 2019 and the Prevention and Prohibition of Torture Act 2012.
Fifthly, he employs case law analysis, citing recent judicial correction as evidence that constitutional review can function, including the Supreme Court judgment of January 2025 banning trial of civilians in military courts and the Constitutional Court judgment of March 2026 in Alternative Digitalk Ltd and Others v Attorney General, Constitutional Petition No. 14 of 2022.
Sixthly, he builds typology and proportionality testing, creating a five-prong test any citizen can use to distinguish legitimate exemplary punishment from exemplary terror, asking about selection, procedure, proportionality, equal application, and message.
Seventhly, he uses Ubuntu hermeneutics, drawing on African communitarian ethics not as culture but as normative law, to argue that if personhood is relational, humiliating a citizen to scare others damages the social relationship law is supposed to protect.
Finally, he deploys epistemic paradox, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, to argue that fear-based stability makes government epistemically blind, because citizens learn candour is risky, and silence may mean caution, not consent.
It is this combination of tools that allows him to be critical without being abusive, and analytical without being aggressive.
The Philosophers in The Village Meeting – Properly Introduced and Cited.
To avoid dry theory, Luboogo stages a dialogue between African ethics and seven canonical thinkers, each properly situated within their school and cited in scholarly manner.
The first interlocutor is Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the English philosopher, jurist, and founder of classical utilitarianism. His foundational text, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), argues that all law must be judged by utility, understood as the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and that punishment is in itself an evil which can only be justified where it prevents a greater evil.
In The Rationale of Punishment (1830), Bentham further insists on principles of proportionality and parsimony. Luboogo appropriates Bentham critically, arguing that killing a chicken with a hammer to scare monkeys may be efficacious but fails Bentham’s own test of necessity if a smaller stick would have achieved the same preventive purpose, and this becomes the jurisprudential foundation for proportionality and Uganda’s Article 43 test.
From Bentham’s calculus, the manuscript moves naturally to Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), the Florentine diplomat and founder of modern political realism. In Il Principe / The Prince (De Principatibus, written 1513, published 1532), particularly Chapters VIII, XVII and XIX, Machiavelli presents his famous discussion of whether it is better for a ruler to be loved or feared, and introduces the doctrine of crudeltà bene usate or cruelties well used.
Luboogo reads Machiavelli not as apologist for brutality but as analyst of how rulers instrumentalize exemplary coercion to secure order, with chicken as exemplary subject and monkey as political audience, while also exposing its fragility, since fear secures obedience without generating allegiance.
If Machiavelli explains temptation of fear, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the English philosopher and central figure in social contract theory, explains necessity of enforcement. In Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651), Part II, Chapters XVII to XXI, Hobbes argues that covenants without the sword are but words and that political order requires a Leviathan capable of enforcing common rules.
He accepts Hobbesian premise but adds constitutional proviso that credible enforcement capacity must itself be legally constituted and institutionally bounded, lest citizens learn about reach of state power rather than content of law.
The argument then turns from order to meaning, and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), the French sociologist and founder of functionalist sociology, enters. In De la division du travail social (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893) and later in L’Année Sociologique, Durkheim argues punishment is a social function that expresses and reaffirms the conscience collective about violated norms.
Luboogo applies Durkheim to proverb, noting punishment of chicken communicates seriousness of norm to monkeys, but where punishment is perceived as partisan or selective, its symbolic function reverses and communicates not shared morality but unequal citizenship, thereby fragmenting rather than affirming collective conscience.
That fragmentation leads to Max Weber (1864-1920), the German sociologist and theorist of legitimacy and founder of interpretive sociology.
In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society, 1922) and Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation, 1919), Weber distinguishes Macht or capacity to secure obedience from Herrschaft or legitimate authority, and identifies three ideal types of legitimacy: traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational.
Luboogo uses Weber to craft two ideal-typical messages in every exemplary act, one being domination which says this is what we can do to you, and the other being legal-rational authority which says this is what law provides and same law governs us all.
Once legitimacy is in doubt, fear becomes more subtle, which is why Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the French post-structuralist philosopher and historian of disciplinary power, becomes essential.
In Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1975), Foucault argues modern power shifts from spectacular punishment to panoptic discipline, where subjects internalize surveillance and discipline themselves.
Luboogo translates Foucault into contemporary Ugandan terms as anticipatory compliance and chilling effect, arguing constitutional analysis must count not only arrests but also the silence, self-censorship, and meetings not held that follow.
The philosophical journey closes with Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the German-born American political theorist in the republican and phenomenological tradition.
In The Human Condition (1958) and On Violence (1970), Arendt draws a sharp analytical distinction between power and violence, arguing power corresponds to human ability to act in concert and derives from collective action and legitimacy, while violence is instrumental, mute, and relies on implements to compel. A state can have overwhelming violence while experiencing declining political power, because nobody believes in it anymore.
Luboogo applies Arendt to warn that multiplication of arrests may reveal not strength but that consent and participation are becoming weaker foundations of authority.
Finally, he anchors all this in African ethics, drawing on John S. Mbiti (1931-2019), the Kenyan philosopher and theologian, whose formulation I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am in African Religions and Philosophy (1969) establishes personhood as relational, and on Kwame Gyekye (1939-2019), the Ghanaian philosopher, whose work Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (1997) develops qualified communitarianism where community constitutes person but does not erase individual moral agency.
What Juridical Means & Why It Matters.
Running through all these encounters is the word juridical, which Luboogo distinguishes from merely legal. Legal means something is on paper. Juridical, as used in continental jurisprudence from Hans Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre (Pure Theory of Law, 1934) to contemporary constitutional theory, means brought under full discipline of law, including legal basis, institutional competence, procedural fairness, evidentiary standard, proportionality, and meaningful judicial review.
When he says coercion must be juridically domesticated, he is asking whether there was clear legal basis, whether actor possessed lawful authority, whether subject was treated as rights-bearing person, whether sanction was proportionate, and whether review exists. If yes, act communicates authority of law and we have Rule OF Law. If no, we have Rule BY Law.
He then tests this architecture against contemporary Uganda with scholarly restraint. He notes official results of January 2026 presidential election where President Yoweri Museveni was declared re-elected with 71.65 percent while Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu known as Bobi Wine received 24.72 percent, alongside nationwide internet shutdown, and distinguishes declared results from allegations concerning conditions of competition.
Citing reports by Human Rights Watch and CIVICUS Monitor concerning arrests, restrictions on assembly and association, suspension of civil society organizations and communications restrictions, he emphasizes these should be treated as reports and allegations by independent organizations and not as judicial findings.
He argues none of the mechanisms he analyzes is inherently unlawful in every circumstance, because public order laws can be legitimate. The constitutional problem arises when legality becomes merely formal while practical objective is to make political participation itself unusually costly.
He closes where proverb, philosophy and Ubuntu meet, reminding us that authoritarian logic is simple, punish one so that many will fear, but constitutional logic is more demanding, enforce law against one in such manner that many understand law, and ultimate triumph of law is not efficiency with which it kills chicken, but creation of society in which chicken no longer needs to die for monkey to understand law.
About The Exposure Uganda (TEU) & Why We Carry Such Scholarship.
We at The Exposure Uganda with our acclaimed slogan We Expose, You Decide value such scholarly writing because unlike numerous websites opened for the sake of likes and views, we are a revolutionary digital news platform with adequate capacity to literally dissect any topic and make it simple and palatable for our readers and it is the reason we always strive to enrich our menu.
At The Exposure Uganda, we believe journalism must do more than report what happened yesterday, it must explain why it matters tomorrow.
While the digital space is crowded with copy-paste websites chasing traffic and with abusive, confrontational, aggressive and provocative writers who mistake insults for insight, we have built a newsroom that can take an eight-thousand-word jurisprudential manuscript quoting Bentham to Arendt, break down its genre, its literary tools, its philosophical schools, and its meaning for any literate citizen in any part of the country and world and a law student in any of our universities, without losing its intellectual integrity and without abusing any personality.
That is our revolutionary difference. We do not dumb down, we open up. We do not shout, we show. We do not fear complex ideas, we translate them. We dissect law, philosophy, human rights, politics and culture with clarity, context and courage, so that our reader is not just informed but empowered.
This is why we enriched this feature with scholarly citations, with explainers on Jeremy Bentham and Hannah Arendt, on utilitarianism and phenomenology, on what juridical means, and on what literary tools Prof. Luboogo employed. Because at The Exposure Uganda, we respect our readers enough to give them the full theory, not just the headline.
We expose the facts, the theory and the law behind the power, and you decide what it means for Uganda’s constitutional future.
Follow our full series on Prof. Luboogo’s constitutional theory only on The Exposure Uganda.
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