On the surface, Uganda staged the full theatre of democracy this year: ballots cast, results declared, President Yoweri Museveni sworn in for a seventh consecutive term. But the man who has done more than anyone to expose the hollowness of that theatre is not an opposition figure. It is the President’s own son.
Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Chief of Defence Forces and the man widely regarded as Museveni’s anointed successor, has spent recent weeks demonstrating – in real time, on a platform anyone can read – that Uganda’s courts, parliament and security services answer to him before they answer to the law.
He has not needed to hide it. Uganda’s most powerful man conducts the business of state on X, formerly Twitter, where his posts function less like commentary from a public official and more like instructions that the country’s institutions then move to carry out.
A lawyer in the dock for defending his client
The clearest illustration is the case of Erias Lukwago, the former Kampala Lord Mayor and lead defence counsel for jailed opposition figure Dr Kizza Besigye. Lukwago was seized from his Kampala home on 15 June by armed men who scaled his perimeter wall, days after telling reporters he intended to serve Muhoozi with a court summons over the general’s treatment of Besigye, who was abducted from Nairobi in November 2024 and has been held without bail ever since.
Muhoozi did not wait for a police statement. He went straight to X to claim the arrest as his own, posting images of a blindfolded Lukwago and vowing to inflict pain on the man he called a criminal. He has since declared Lukwago’s detention permanent.
“He is in prison and he will never come out.”
Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, on X
Lukwago was duly charged with misprision of treason – failing to report an alleged plot by his own client – and was this week denied bail by Makindye Chief Magistrate Sarah Basemera, who cited his “influence” as grounds for keeping him on remand, despite finding his proposed sureties substantial. He returns to court on 30 June, the same day Besigye himself is due back before the High Court.
Outside the courtroom, the conclusion many drew did not need spelling out. Uganda People’s Congress leader Jimmy Akena put it plainly: the judicial office, he said, has no real independence, because the decisions are being made elsewhere.
Barred at the border
Days before that ruling, Kenyan senior counsel Martha Karua – part of Besigye’s defence team and one of the continent’s most respected human rights lawyers – flew into Entebbe International Airport to join Lukwago’s legal team ahead of the bail hearing. She was detained on arrival, held incommunicado, and put on a flight back to Nairobi, while a colleague travelling with her was waved through without incident.
The Uganda Law Society could obtain no official explanation for her expulsion. Karua’s own legal team was blunter, tracing it directly to Muhoozi’s prior warnings on X that Lukwago’s arrest was only the start of a wider campaign and that more arrests would follow. Turning away a foreign advocate at passport control, they argued, was the campaign being executed in real time.
Coming for the opposition’s leader, too
If the message was not yet clear, Muhoozi removed any doubt himself. On 18 June, he announced that he wants Joel Ssenyonyi, the sitting Leader of the Opposition, removed from that office – a position determined under Uganda’s own parliamentary rules by the largest opposition party, not by the army.
“I want a new leader of the opposition in Parliament.” — Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, on X
He added that his preferred replacement would carry his personal endorsement. A member of his own political vehicle, the Patriotic League of Uganda, replied publicly that his role was simply to carry out the instruction. Ssenyonyi has not backed down, telling Muhoozi that if he wants to do politics, he should leave the army and contest a seat like everyone else. Days later, Ssenyonyi said he was being lined up for implication in an unrelated terrorism case – part, he said, of the same pressure campaign.
An admission that needs no investigation
What makes the Ugandan case unusual is not that an army chief might lean on a judiciary or a legislature. That is an old story across the continent. What is unusual is that the leaning is announced, in writing, by the man doing it, to an audience of more than a million followers – and that the institutions affected then proceed exactly as instructed. Muhoozi has, this month, also asserted that the Speaker of Parliament and her deputy function as envoys to his political project rather than independent officers of the legislature. Neither has publicly disputed it.
What it means
For Museveni, who has ruled Uganda since 1986 and has given no indication of when, if ever, he intends to step aside, the spectacle sharpens a question the opposition has been asking with growing volume: if the constitution’s checks on power cannot restrain his own son, what exactly are they checking? The Uganda Law Society has called a nationwide lawyers’ strike over Lukwago’s treatment; the East Africa Law Society has condemned Karua’s expulsion as a breach of regional treaty obligations. Neither has yet produced any change in conduct from Kampala.
What is certain is that the next test arrives within days. Besigye and his co-accused Hajji Obeid Lutale return to the High Court on 30 June – the same day as Lukwago’s own substantive hearing – with the lawyer who tried to hold the general accountable now sitting, quite possibly, in the cell next to his client.
