IN a pattern that has become Uganda’s most brazen hallmark of governance by coercion, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba – Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), son of President Yoweri Museveni, and a man courts have now formally directed to answer for his conduct – confirmed on social media platform X that his forces had seized Advocate Erias Lukwago from his home in the Wakaliga suburb of Kampala.
Lukwago was preparing to serve Muhoozi with a High Court summons at the very moment armed men, acting on the General’s orders, scaled his perimeter fence and bundled him into what witnesses described as a “drone” vehicle before spiriting him to an undisclosed location.
The abduction did not merely happen in the dark. The General announced it himself.
“On Muhoozi’s orders, military men have raided and abducted Lukwago from his home in Wakaliga before whisking him away in a drone to an unknown destination. The abduction has been confirmed and closely followed by posts on Twitter from Muhoozi, boasting that he has taken him to the ‘basement’ to torture him just like he did to comrade Eddie Mutwe in April 2025!”
Robert Kyagulanyi (Bobi Wine), NUP President, posting on X
The posts on X, consistent with a pattern Muhoozi has deployed repeatedly in Uganda’s unfolding political crisis, amounted to a public confession that a sitting military commander had ordered the abduction of a practising lawyer engaged in active litigation before a civilian High Court. The implications for Uganda’s constitutional order are devastating.
A COURT ORDER HE CHOSE TO EVADE
The sequence of events that led to Monday’s abduction is not murky. High Court Criminal Division Justice Emmanuel Baguma, sitting in Kampala, issued an order on Thursday, June 12, directing Muhoozi Kainerugaba, along with Col Peter Ahimbisibwe, Lt Col Ephraim Byaruhanga, and the Attorney General, to file their defence within seven days in a human rights enforcement petition lodged by Dr Kizza Besigye and his co-accused Hajji Obeid Lutale. The petition — Miscellaneous Application No. 922 of 2026 — alleges grave constitutional violations, including unlawful abduction, torture, prolonged incommunicado detention, and the making of prejudicial public statements by Muhoozi himself that threaten Besigye’s right to a fair trial.
The documentation of those social media posts in the court record is damning in its own right. According to the court application, Muhoozi posted on January 16, 2025: “We will hang KB on Heroes’ Day. That’s the best day for him to die.” On February 19, 2026, he is alleged to have posted: “Besigye wanted to kill Mzee, so as far as we are concerned, UPDF, he is a dead man walking.” The court found these statements sufficiently serious to order a hearing for June 30.
Lukwago, as lead defence counsel, had successfully served the Attorney General and was preparing to serve the remaining military respondents — including Muhoozi himself — when soldiers struck. His legal team had publicly appealed for Muhoozi’s WhatsApp number after being stonewalled at the General’s offices by soldiers who refused to acknowledge them. The answer they received on Monday morning was not a phone number. It was armed men over a fence.
THE BASEMENT: A RECURRING SYMBOL OF LAWLESSNESS
The reference to “the basement” is not new, and that is precisely the point. In April 2025, Muhoozi used the same X account to publicly confirm that Eddie Mutwe — Edward Ssebufu, the chief bodyguard of opposition leader Bobi Wine — had been taken and was being held in what the General described as his basement. The posts were grotesque in their specificity: Muhoozi boasted that Mutwe had been “beaten to pulp,” that his head had been shaved “like an egg,” and that he was being made to salute a portrait of President Museveni each morning before breakfast. He also threatened that Bobi Wine was “next.”
“He is in my basement. Learning Runyankore. You are next!”
Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, posting on X, May 1, 2025, on the detention of Eddie Mutwe
The international community reacted with horror. Al Jazeera, Reuters, and The Globe and Mail covered the posts extensively. Uganda’s security agencies declined to comment. No accountability followed. Mutwe was eventually produced in court in Masaka City, reportedly limping. The General faced no legal consequence. No charge. No reprimand. No disciplinary proceedings within the Uganda People’s Defence Forces.
That impunity has now reproduced itself. The same general. The same platform. The same boast. A different victim — this time not a bodyguard, but a Senior Counsel actively engaged in court proceedings before a sitting judge on a case in which Muhoozi himself is a named respondent.
THE CONTEXT OF THE BESIGYE CASE
Dr Kizza Besigye — the veteran opposition politician and four-time presidential candidate who has long been Museveni’s most formidable electoral rival — was, according to the court application filed on his behalf, “unlawfully, forcefully and violently abducted by Ugandan security agencies” from Nairobi, Kenya, on November 16, 2024. He had travelled to Kenya at the invitation of lawyer Martha Karua. He was driven back to Uganda under cover of night and held incommunicado at Makindye Military Barracks for four days before being produced before the General Court Martial on treason-related charges.
The government alleges that Besigye, his co-accused Lutale, and Captain Denis Oola plotted to overthrow President Museveni through meetings in Geneva, Athens, Nairobi, and Kampala, and by soliciting funds, weapons, and military training. Besigye’s defence team — which includes Kenyan Senior Counsel Martha Karua and Advocate Lukwago — has argued that the entire prosecution is contaminated by the manner of his arrest, by Muhoozi’s public death threats, and by the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling in Attorney General v Michael Kabaziguruka restricting the trial of civilians before military courts. The team has boycotted evidence-review sessions over access restrictions at Luzira Upper Prison. Besigye himself has refused to physically attend court proceedings.
Into this fraught environment, Muhoozi inserted himself repeatedly and aggressively through social media, posting what any reasonable reading would characterise as threats to kill the accused. A High Court judge found those posts serious enough to issue a court order. The response of the man ordered to appear before that court was to abduct the lawyer seeking to serve him.
OPPOSITION REACTS: ‘BRAZEN IMPUNITY’
Opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi — the musician-turned-politician known as Bobi Wine, who leads the National Unity Platform and has declared his intention to challenge Museveni in the 2026 general election — was among the first to respond publicly after the abduction was reported. He was unequivocal.
Robert Kyagulanyi (Bobi Wine), on X
“Just learnt of the violent abduction, this morning, of former Kampala Lord Mayor, Advocate Erias Lukwago as he prepared to serve Court Summons upon Museveni’s son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba. Lukwago is a lead lawyer in the bogus treason case against Dr. Kizza Besigye, and in a case Besigye filed against Muhoozi for abducting him from Kenya, torturing, and undertaking to kill him from prison… I call upon all of us to REJECT and RESIST this brazen impunity. UGANDA WILL BE FREE!”
Kyagulanyi’s statement drew a pointed response on X from followers who noted his current location in the United States. Some accused him of “ranting from the diaspora” rather than engaging on the ground. The criticism reflects a genuine tension within Uganda’s opposition movement between those who believe physical presence is essential to credible leadership and those who argue that exile or travel is itself a product of the dangerous conditions the government has created. Kyagulanyi has previously stated that he cannot guarantee his safety if he returns to Uganda under current conditions.
The People’s Front for Freedom (PFF), the political party of which Lukwago is President, condemned the arrest, accusing the government of deploying security agencies to suppress political dissent.
THE PATTERN AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
What distinguishes the Lukwago abduction from a mere political incident is its institutional target. This is not a bodyguard, a rally organiser, or a student activist. This is Senior Counsel Erias Lukwago, a former Lord Mayor of Kampala, a practising advocate of the High Court, and the lead defence lawyer in an active criminal case. He was, at the moment of his abduction, executing a judicial mandate — serving court documents issued by a High Court judge with proper jurisdiction.
The Ugandan Constitution guarantees the independence of the judiciary and the right of accused persons to legal representation. International human rights instruments to which Uganda is a signatory — including the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights — protect the right to counsel as non-derogable. The abduction of a defence lawyer engaged in court-mandated service of process is, on any serious reading, not merely a human rights violation. It is an assault on the judiciary itself.
More than that, it represents a direct response by an army general to a court order. The message is unambiguous: Muhoozi Kainerugaba will not be served. He will not appear before civilian courts. He will not file a defence. He will, instead, remove the lawyers who seek to compel him to do so.
This pattern — abduct, boast on X, evade consequences, repeat — has now defined the Museveni administration’s approach to rule of law in its final political chapter. Whether this constitutes a preparatory consolidation of power for a dynastic transition, or simply reflects the unchecked impunity of a senior military officer whose father is the head of state, the practical result is the same: Uganda’s courts are being rendered meaningless by the men they seek to hold accountable.
WHAT COMES NEXT
Justice Baguma’s order requires responses from all respondents by June 18, with the matter listed for hearing on June 30. Whether the court will take cognisance of Monday’s events — which constitute, at minimum, obstruction of judicial process — remains to be seen. There is no precedent in recent Ugandan legal history for a court compelling a serving military commander who is the President’s son to appear or comply with civil process.
Internationally, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the AU Peace and Security Council, and the UN Human Rights Council have all, at various points, expressed concern about Uganda’s democratic trajectory. Those expressions have not thus far translated into measurable pressure on the Museveni government. With Uganda’s January 2026 general election approaching, the abduction of Lukwago — and the social media celebration of it — marks a significant escalation in what civil society organisations have described as a systematic effort to decimate the institutional architecture of accountability before voters go to the polls.
What Muhoozi Kainerugaba has done, in posting his way through each successive abduction, is remove all ambiguity. There is no “not knowing” what happened to Lukwago. No “circumstances to be investigated.” The General said so himself. That is not confidence. That is the behaviour of a man who has concluded that no institution in Uganda can touch him.
He may be right. That, above all else, is the story that demands the world’s attention.
