Gen Muhoozi drops out of 2026 race (I saw it coming)

Even foreign countries through their embassies in Kampala or visiting delegations now consider it an essential part of their tour of duty to pay him courtesy calls.

In neighbouring Rwanda, he is received almost as a head of state. He is obviously an insider and that entity of which he is an insider is the First Family – which many think is the real power centre of the Ugandan State.

It matters to many sections of Ugandan society. The economy is not doing well; or rather, it is still growing but its maximum growth rate as seen in the mid-1990s to early 2000s is now behind us.

Businesses are struggling under the weight of bank loans, unpaid rent, and low consumer demand.

From musicians to steel producers, hotel owners to media house owners, manufacturers to transporters, everyone needs a financial bailout or debt forgiveness and the only entity that can now intervene is the State, that is, the President.

What Muhoozi says in public, on social media, matters. Businesses, marriages, and reputations now hang in the help that the Museveni family can offer them.

Muhoozi, however, has violated virtually every code of conduct of power politics. The mystique of power depends on the maintenance of confidentiality. He has made public what in politics are usually kept a tightly-guarded secrets.

Reading Muhoozi’s tweets is getting a free firsthand view of the Museveni presidency. Nobody seems able to rein him in or stop his tweeting for very long.

During the Easter Sunday holiday in 2023, Muhoozi and his wife met President and Ms Museveni for lunch. A photo of this meeting was distributed on social media.

Not to go into details, let’s say Muhoozi was requested to stop his tweeting.

This he did, which is why for the rest of 2023 he barely said anything on social media and for the first half of this year.

Apart from acknowledging birthday greetings, wishing his associates a happy birthday and re-tweeting news items posted by media houses, the last half of 2023 and the first half of 2024 was largely a quiet period for Muhoozi.

Then suddenly at the end of July 2024, Muhoozi broke his silence and returned full blast with a new season of bombastic tweets.

Ignoring his father’s cautious position on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Muhoozi on August 4 stated:

“Last year, I was ready to go defend Moscow against aggressors. Thankfully, our Russian allies have won that war. Today, I am even more ready to defend Israel and Jerusalem against any threat…If anyone threatens Israel, we shall defeat them.”

His declaration of support for Russia in the first weeks of the start of the war in 2022 got him into trouble with his father, leading in part to his announcement on March 18, 2022, that he was resigning from the army.

This August 4 tweet indicated his unrepentant support for Russia and disregard for the official, neutral position of the Uganda government and President Museveni.

He went quiet for more than 10 days, then on August 16, returned with yet more effusive, hyperbolic commentary:

“The USA must apologise to Uganda, for removing us from Agoa. We must immediately be reinstated. Then we will talk about compensation for all the soldiers we lost in Somalia. On their orders.”

All this is to give some context to readers who might not be on social media, might not be on the platform X, formerly called Twitter, or even for some who are, are confused by these stream-of-consciousness quips and comments from the Chief of Defence Forces (CDF).

It leads us to Muhoozi’s post last week. Even after two years in which much of the social media crowd and commentator-political class had got used to his tweets, this was really dramatic.

September 21: “I would like to announce that I will not be on the ballot paper in 2026. Almighty God told me to focus on His army first. So, I fully endorse President Yoweri Museveni in the next elections.”

He posted this at 1.58am. Eight hours later at 9.28am, he posted a follow-up: “All my millions of supporters. All the supporters of PLU. We shall all of us, as one man and without exception support President Museveni in 2026.”

“On PLU members who want to contest for Parliament, nothing is stopping you from doing that. PLU is a civic organisation, not a political party. You are absolutely free to contest. For now, I advise you to subscribe to NRM. That's the political party that is most closely aligned to our values.” (2.26pm)

Since Muhoozi’s birthday events in 2022, the general public, local media, political class, and international media concluded that this was the moment that Uganda had been waiting for since the late 1990s.

Here at last, many thought, was President Museveni formally presenting his son to the public to be introduced as the Crown Prince.

The succession process was now underway, went the view of the public.

Regular readers of the Sunday Monitor will know that this writer was among the few voices in the country to hold a contrarian view.

In a column here in the Sunday Monitor in early May 2022, I argued that the Muhoozi birthday party and rallies had taken both the President and the First Lady by surprise.

Only when President Paul Kagame of Rwanda confirmed he was coming for the birthday dinner at State House on the invitation of Muhoozi, did the first couple hastily put together the birthday dinner.

Even as the political rallies gathered momentum and later the “MK Movement” was renamed the Patriotic League of Uganda (PLU), even as Muhoozi appeared to kick off a nationwide campaign at a rally in Masaka, I remained consistent in my view that all this was bluster and window-dressing.

Museveni was not behind Muhoozi’s political activities and, as I wrote here, they were actually tearing the First Family apart.

When Muhoozi was appointed CDF, surely this was the final step in the succession plan. Not so, I argued; it was actually a disciplinary demotion by Museveni.

In a mini-Cabinet reshuffle this March, he appointed some of Muhoozi’s PLU mobilisers to the Cabinet, not as preparation for the smooth handover of power from father to son as most kept thinking, but as a tactical move to demobilise Muhoozi.

I posted this on X/Twitter on March 22: “Faced with serious splits within his family, [Museveni] breaks up the MK Movement by absorbing some of its key hands into his Cabinet and tying MK [Muhoozi Kainerugaba] down in the full-time CDF job.”

Therefore, last week’s announcement by Muhoozi that he would not be on the presidential ballot and his urging of his supporters to support President Museveni for 2026, was in no way a surprise to me.

I had stated this all along, consistently since March 2022.

What is left to analyse in a future Sunday Monitor column is this statement below by Muhoozi, also on September 21, in which he dropped all remaining appearances of democracy and gave the country a glimpse of the post-Museveni era: “No civilian will lead Uganda after President Museveni. The security forces will not allow it. The next leader will be a soldier or policeman.”

Muhoozi later deleted it, but in this Internet and digital devices era, there will always be people to take screenshots of social media posts for the record.

Muhoozi’s tweet was clear: After Museveni = military dictatorship.