GENERAL Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) and the only son of President Yoweri Museveni, has over the past fortnight escalated a years-long pattern of social media threats against the media, the judiciary, Parliament and the opposition into what critics now describe as an open campaign of intimidation against anyone who crosses him.
In a rapid-fire series of posts on X, the General has vowed to shut down Daily Monitor and NTV Uganda, the country’s two most prominent independent newsrooms, both owned by Nation Media Group, accusing the outlets of years of coverage he regards as hostile to his family. He has separately declared that his political outfit, the Patriotic League of Uganda (PLU), will move to remove Joel Ssenyonyi as Leader of the Opposition in Parliament — a position held by an NUP legislator inside a House his father’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) dominates — and has threatened to arrest both Ssenyonyi and former Kira Municipality MP Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda for criticising his conduct.
“I have instructed PLU to study how to remove @JoelSsenyonyi from being leader of the opposition as soon as possible,” Muhoozi posted this month, adding in a follow-up post: “I want a new leader of the opposition in Parliament. And I will get him.” He has insisted that nothing in Uganda’s laws prevents him from installing his own choice in the role, a claim constitutional experts and opposition figures have rejected outright.
A pattern of impunity culminating in Lukwago’s abduction
The threats follow the most serious episode yet: the seizure of former Kampala Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago, lead defence counsel for jailed opposition leader Dr Kizza Besigye, from his Wakaliga home on 15 June 2026. According to his wife, Zawedde Lubwama Lukwago, armed men in military uniform forced their way into the couple’s bedroom, twisted her arm and threw her to the ground before bundling her husband into a vehicle. Lukwago, who had been preparing to formally serve Muhoozi with court papers in a rights case filed by Besigye, was charged days later with misprision of treason and remanded to prison.
Muhoozi claimed direct responsibility for the operation, posting a photograph of a blindfolded Lukwago on a tiled floor and describing the location as his “basement” – a term opposition figures and rights defenders say has become shorthand for unlawful military detention sites where government critics are allegedly held and mistreated. “I have captured a FOOL and taken him to the basement,” one of his posts read, adding a threat to arrest “whoever serves” him with the court documents. Lukwago’s wife has since petitioned the High Court, describing her husband’s continued detention, including images of him shared online in what she called a degrading state, as unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional.
The episode is the latest in an established pattern. In May 2025, Muhoozi publicly claimed missing opposition activist Eddie Mutwe was being held “in my basement” and threatened to castrate him, a detention the Uganda Human Rights Commission subsequently declared unlawful. He has separately vowed in writing to “hang” Besigye, calling him a “dead man walking,” statements Besigye’s lawyers cite in a pending application accusing the CDF of prejudicing his treason trial through repeated public pronouncements of guilt.
Senior politicians on notice
Following Lukwago’s arrest, both Ssenyonyi and Ssemujju publicly condemned the CDF’s conduct. Muhoozi responded by warning that they, too, would be arrested. “Semujju and Joel will follow very soon,” he wrote on 18 June, alongside a photograph of Lukwago and Besigye in prison uniform captioned, “You’re next!”
Ssemujju has refused to back down. “I’m not afraid of you, you’re not immortal,” he told the General, arguing that only history and “God” hold ultimate authority over those who rule by arrest, torture and intimidation. Ssenyonyi, addressing journalists and more than a dozen lawmakers at Parliament, went further: “Everyone is unsafe with Muhoozi’s behaviour of abducting and torturing Ugandans at will,” he said, adding that even ruling-party MPs and army generals “are not safe either,” and calling on the General to resign his commission if he wishes to pursue politics.
Both men have invoked Uganda’s darkest political memory to frame the moment. They argue that the abductions, the silencing of media, and the erosion of parliamentary and judicial independence now underway echo the dictatorship of Idi Amin Dada — the very era Museveni’s 1981 guerrilla struggle, and the liberation mythology the NRM has built around it for forty years, claimed to have ended for good.
A newsroom under siege
The threat to Daily Monitor and NTV is not new ground for the Kainerugaba family. In 2013, police raided the Monitor’s premises and shut down its operations, along with two affiliated radio stations, after the paper published a leaked letter warning that opponents of a Muhoozi succession would be assassinated. More recently, Nation Media Group’s Uganda outlets have been barred from covering President Museveni’s public events since March 2026 and were briefly blocked from Parliament, restrictions government officials have given conflicting explanations for. The Aga Khan Fund, the Monitor’s controlling shareholder, has separately agreed to sell its stake in Nation Media Group to a Tanzanian buyer, a transition that comes as the paper’s editorial independence faces its sharpest test in years.
Muhoozi has also turned his fire on NTV directly over its coverage of Besigye’s legal team, demanding the broadcaster pay him 10 billion Ugandan shillings after it reported that he had been issued a court ultimatum to file a defence in the case. “@ntvuganda is given 1 week to pay me 10 billion shillings,” he posted, even as his own lawyers struggled to locate him to formally serve the underlying suit.
The Museveni factor
What unites all of these episodes, Ugandan analysts argue, is the conspicuous silence of the one man with the constitutional authority to rein his son in. Writing in the Journal of Ideas in African Politics, the academics Gerald Bareebe and Ivan Ashaba describe Museveni’s posture as one of deliberate “strategic ambiguity”: never explicitly endorsing Muhoozi’s succession, never explicitly restraining his conduct, and intervening only on the rare occasions his son’s outbursts threaten Uganda’s foreign relations, as when a 2022 threat to capture Nairobi forced a presidential apology to Kenya. In every domestic case, including the Lukwago abduction, the elder Museveni has said nothing publicly, even as soldiers answer only to the chain of command he appointed his son to head.
Critics say that calculated silence is itself the message: that the first son enjoys a freedom no ordinary citizen, minister or general could survive testing, because his father’s authority stands behind him. For Uganda’s independent press, its opposition leadership and a public preparing to mark forty years of NRM rule, the question both Ssemujju and Ssenyonyi have now put to the country is whether anyone, in or out of office, is safe from a Commander-in-Chief’s son who answers to no one but himself.
