He was inside for over two weeks. No visits. No calls demanding his release. Nobody showing up at court.
Just silence — from the exact people whose songs he had spent years producing.
Producer Dmario — born Isaac Kahuju and the man behind Legend Production Studios — walked out of Luzira Prison at the start of June, released after an arrest that he says was the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time during Arsenal’s Premier League title celebrations.
He came out grateful to God. He came out with his family beside him.
And he came out with something else too — a very clear memory of who showed up, and who didn’t. What he has to say about Feffe Bussi alone will make your jaw drop.
The night of May 22 was not supposed to go the way it did.
Dmario had gone to a bar to watch a live band performance — nothing unusual, nothing suspicious. But Arsenal had just won the Premier League title, and the same venue was filled with fans celebrating loudly. Things got chaotic. Police moved in and rounded up people in the area.
Dmario was among them.
“I was at a bar to watch a live band performance, but on the same night, there was an Arsenal match,” he explained. “They were celebrating, so there was some chaos at the bar. When police rounded up people, I was also arrested.”
He would spend the next two weeks inside Luzira Prison — one of Uganda’s most notorious detention facilities — on allegations of assault that he maintains were wrongful.
Two weeks is a long time. Long enough to find out who your real friends are.
What he found out was not what he expected.
“None of my friends for whom I produced songs visited me in jail or appeared at the court,” he said, the weight of that sentence impossible to miss. “I was arrested on 22nd May, so I spent two weeks in jail, but not a single artist checked on me in jail.”
He paused before delivering the part that stings most.
“I only saw them soliciting money from people online in my name. Only my family stood with me.”
Read that again. The friends weren’t absent. They were online — raising money in his name — while he sat in a prison cell without a single visit.
But that’s not even the wildest part.
Dmario, born Isaac Kahuju, is one of Uganda’s established music producers — the founder and boss of Legend Production Studios, a name that carries genuine weight in the local industry. Over the years he has worked with and supported numerous artists, building relationships that he clearly believed ran deeper than professional transactions.
His arrest on May 22 came amid what he describes as a case of mistaken circumstance — caught in a police sweep during the chaos of Arsenal’s title celebrations at a bar he had visited for entirely unrelated reasons. He was held at Luzira Prison, Uganda’s maximum security facility, for over two weeks before being released in early June.
The Arsenal Premier League title win — a historic moment for the club after a long wait — triggered widespread celebrations across Kampala. That a night of football joy became the backdrop for a producer’s wrongful arrest is the kind of irony that nobody planned for and nobody found funny.
Feffe Bussi, the rapper whose name Dmario specifically raised when asked about the silence of close friends, is one of Uganda’s most recognizable hip-hop figures. The two have been publicly identified as close associates — which makes the silence, and what followed, considerably more pointed.
The moment Dmario’s account began circulating, fans immediately zeroed in on two details that made the story impossible to scroll past.
The first was the image of artists soliciting money online in his name while he sat in Luzira without a single visit — a contrast so stark that people kept quoting it in disbelief, asking each other if they had read it correctly.
The second was the Feffe Bussi element. When asked directly whether his closest friend had helped, Dmario’s response landed like a slow-motion collision.
“He must have known about it. There is no way he couldn’t have known about my arrest — because his driver was on TV falsely claiming they got me a lawyer and a production warrant.”
A driver. On television. Making claims. While the man in prison had seen none of it.
That detail spread fast and did not slow down.
The public reaction was swift and largely sympathetic toward Dmario — with particular anger directed at the image of people leveraging his arrest for online fundraising without showing up in person.
Many fans and industry observers expressed disbelief that a producer with Dmario’s track record of supporting artists could be left completely alone during a two-week imprisonment. Several commentators drew direct comparisons to the Master Parrot conversation — noting an uncomfortable pattern in how Uganda’s music industry treats its own during moments of genuine crisis.
The Feffe Bussi angle generated its own firestorm. Some fans called for a direct response from the rapper. Others speculated that there may be more to the relationship breakdown than a single incident of silence. It is unclear whether Feffe Bussi has responded publicly to Dmario’s remarks, but the pressure for an explanation is building with every share.
Some observers believe Dmario may be selectively naming names — and that the full list of people who went quiet is longer than he has publicly stated.
Strip away the names, the beef, and the social media angle — and what remains is a man who spent fourteen nights in Luzira Prison, looked toward the people he had invested in professionally and personally, and found nothing.
That kind of silence has a particular texture. It is not just disappointing. It reconfigures things. The relationships you thought were real, the loyalty you assumed was mutual, the friendships that felt solid until the moment they were tested — all of it gets reassessed from a prison cell when nobody comes.
Dmario said only his family stood with him. In the end, for many people in that situation, family is the only answer that actually shows up. But it should not have been the only one.
Here is the detail that tied everything together and nobody could shake: Feffe Bussi’s driver appeared on television claiming the camp had secured a lawyer and a production warrant for Dmario — while Dmario himself, still inside Luzira, had seen no lawyer, no warrant, and no visit from anyone connected to that claim.
Someone was on TV talking about helping a man in prison. The man in prison had no idea any of it was happening.
God got him out, he said. Not his friends.
Dmario is out, he is free, and he is talking — and the people he is talking about have been very, very quiet. The question now is whether that silence was a mistake, a choice, or something they are going to have to answer for publicly very soon.