Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, has attracted international attention with a range of striking tweets in recent months – starting with a veiled threat to invade Kenya in October and most recently last week, when he offered to deploy Ugandan troops to defend Moscow from “imperialists”.
But the running theme in his tweets is the suggestion that he will soon take over from his father.
Muhoozi Kainerugaba – known as “Muhoozi” – first attracted widespread international attention on Twitter last October when he spoke of the ease with which he could invade neighbouring Kenya: “It wouldn’t take us, my army and me, 2 weeks to capture Nairobi,” he posted.
President Yoweri Museveni, 78, responded by sacking Muhoozi from his role as commander of Uganda’s land forces. Museveni also said his son “will leave Twitter”.
But Muhoozi is still on the social media platform. After tweeting, “Respect this man!” alongside a picture of Russian President Vladimir Putin in October, he tweeted on Thursday that, “Uganda shall send soldiers to defend Moscow if it’s ever threatened by the Imperialists!”
Douglas Yates, a professor of African politics at the American Graduate School in Paris, likened Muhoozi’s tweets to those of former US president Donald Trump.
Characterising Muhoozi’s tweets as “irresponsible comments” by the “heir to the palace”, Yates said: “[M]any leaders think they can act like Trump and say anything they want, [although] all of them will learn, one day, as will Trump, that words are things, have consequences, and matter.”
‘Positioning himself as an outsider’
Indeed, analysts suggest Muhoozi’s most consequential tweets are those about domestic Ugandan politics. The same day he tweeted about Russia, Muhoozi announced the creation of TV and radio channels devoted to his “MK Movement”, an organisation named after himself.
This came after a series of tweets hinting that Muhoozi, a general who was educated at Britain’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, should take over from his father sooner rather than later. Over the past month, he twice tweeted – and deleted – his desire to stand at the next presidential elections in 2026. Muhoozi said that, by that point, “it will be 40 years of the old generation in charge”, suggesting he represents the Ugandan youth.
That was not Muhoozi’s only tweet excoriating the National Resistance Movement (NRM), which Museveni founded in 1986 and which has ruled Uganda under his leadership ever since. Muhoozi tweeted in December that the NRM is “probably the most reactionary organisation in the country” – adding that it “certainly does NOT represent the people of Uganda”.
Like the populist Trump, Muhoozi “may be trying to distance himself from the power in place and position himself as an outsider”, Yates said.
The political context of Muhoozi’s tweets is that the question of who will succeed his father is looming ever larger in Ugandan politics, noted Kristof Titeca, a professor in the politics of development at Antwerp University specialising in Ugandan politics.
“It’s no longer hypothetical, given Museveni’s advanced age,” he said. “There’s been a strong concentration of power that eventually zeroed in on the family. And it was clear that after 2021 Museveni was putting forward his son to test the water – to see if he could prove himself, a bit like Logan Roy in [the HBO TV series] ‘Succession’.”
“But those tweets caused more and more concern within Uganda’s political and military establishments, among the generation of so-called ‘historicals’ that came to power along with Museveni. And it was clear that the question asked was, ‘Is he really up to the job?’” Titeca continued. “When he was taken out of the military command structure, Muhoozi was sidelined by the rest of the leadership as well as by his father.”
