He Jokes About Trump and Invading Kenya—and May Be Uganda’s Next President

He boasted about torturing the bodyguard of Uganda’s main opposition leader in his basement.

Except that last one wasn’t a joke.

The bodyguard, Edward Ssebuufu, known by his nickname Eddie Mutwe, really was in a basement, being waterboarded, batoned in the groin, whipped on the soles of his feet and jolted with electric shocks, according to three people he told about the ordeal.

Ssebuufu’s captors forced him to kneel and swear allegiance to Muhoozi, who is commander of Uganda’s armed forces, and to his father, President Yoweri Museveni. Muhoozi himself bragged about using Ssebuufu as a “punching bag.”

“I take FULL responsibility for the actions of my soldiers! Including the long overdue beating of Eddie Mutwe,” Muhoozi gloated on social media. “That was an appetizer!”

In 1986, Muhoozi’s father rolled into Kampala, the East African country’s capital, at the head of a rebel army that had emerged victorious from a five-year bush war. The world largely welcomed him as a popular, democratically minded leader who had stopped ethnic slaughter perpetrated under his predecessor, Milton Obote.

 

“The problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular,” Museveni said in his inaugural address, “is not the people, but leaders who want to overstay in power.”

Over four decades as president, Museveni, now 80 years old or so, has become one of those leaders, manipulating legal limits to allow himself term after term in office. He just announced his intention to run again in next year’s elections.

The president, however, has done little to discourage the 51-year-old Muhoozi, widely known by his first name, from thinking he’s next in line.

“In the name of Jesus Christ my God, I shall be President of this country after my father!” Muhoozi wrote in July on X, his preferred way of sharing his thoughts with the public.

Muhoozi’s erratic behavior leaves many Ugandans and Western officials worried about the future of a country that, under his father, has largely been a stabilizing—if repressive and economically self-interested—influence in an unstable region.

Ugandan troops have fought Islamic State adherents in the Democratic Republic of Congo and al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab militants in Somalia. They joined U.S. Green Berets in the hunt for Joseph Kony and his notorious child-kidnapping Lord’s Resistance Army in the forests of Congo and Central African Republic.

“There are reasons why Muhoozi is feared by many as a loose cannon who, if he did come to power, would use military and political violence against his opponents,” said Uganda specialist Derek Peterson, professor of history and African studies at the University of Michigan.

Muhoozi didn’t agree to requests for an interview, nor did he answer written questions.

Adviser Andrew Mwenda, a friend since their high-school years, says Muhoozi’s statements are intended to amuse and provoke, rather than guide Ugandan national policy. “It takes a more-sophisticated mind than is currently rooted in the politics of Uganda to get it,” Mwenda said in an interview.

The president himself, however, swings between seeming embarrassment over his son’s proclamations and a determination to help him amass power. “Museveni’s Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D is Muhoozi,” said a person who has known Muhoozi since they were young. “There’s no transition plan in Uganda.”

Museveni was fighting in the bush during stretches of Muhoozi’s childhood, and he spent much of that time moving around with his mother and sisters. Muhoozi was born in Tanzania, went to school in Kenya, lived in Sweden and finally settled in Uganda after his father took power.

He attended King’s College, Budo, an Anglican boarding school set up in Uganda in the early 20th century for the sons of royals and chiefs.

To finish high school, he moved to St. Mary’s College Kisubi, a Catholic school founded by the White Fathers Congregation and affectionately known as SMACK. Like King’s, it was known for academic rigor, framed more as a close reading of textbooks than promotion of creative thinking.

Teachers at both schools were strict, with students locked in the SMACK residential quadrangle at night and the threat of caning looming over those who violated the rules.

“There’s a fear of authority that is inculcated into all students,” recalls one of Muhoozi’s SMACK schoolmates.

Muhoozi was tall, with a liking for kung fu movies. Those who knew him in his school days say he was shy, even guarded. “He’s a very calm and reflective person,” said Mwenda, who met him through high-school debating competitions.

Being the president’s son gave him certain privileges; he was allowed to stay at home when he wanted while other boys could not. Other students assumed he had gotten into the ultracompetitive school because of his father.

More than anything, Muhoozi struggled to live up to the expectations of his larger-than-life father, who was a strict disciplinarian in those days, according to the person who has known Muhoozi since childhood.

Museveni says he doesn’t see himself as a domineering father. “I’m always relaxed with the children,” he told The Wall Street Journal in a 2022 interview. “I give them my opinion and don’t insist on imposing.”

Muhoozi showed no clear direction after high school. He studied at Nottingham University in the U.K. He dabbled in pan-African student movements and the writings of Che and Mao. He put together a left-leaning magazine called Front Line.

His life shifted in 1999, when he married Charlotte Kutesa, herself a member of a prominent political family. At a wedding party at his ranch in western Uganda, the president gave a brief speech, announcing he had set aside land and cattle for the newlyweds. Then he sat down.

Shortly after the wedding, Muhoozi left Uganda and took up studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the famous crucible for British officers. Military courses followed in Egypt and South Africa and at the U.S. Army’s prestigious Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

The person who has known Muhoozi since childhood said, despite the high-end training, he never seemed especially interested in the military. His uncle, himself a revered veteran of the Ugandan Bush War, once publicly suggested Muhoozi go into business instead.

“He’s a victim of obsessive parenting where we want our children to be what we are,” said Yusuf Serunkuma, an anthropologist at Uganda’s Makerere University.

Muhoozi wrote a book, “Battles of the Ugandan Resistance: A Tradition of Maneuver,” that explored whether there is an African way of war. With its references to Thermopylae and the Battle of Fallujah, friends saw it as his bid to prove himself a more professional soldier than his dad, the wily guerrilla commander.

Muhoozi shot up through the ranks, leading Uganda’s special forces and becoming commander of all land forces in 2021.

The following year he took to social media to muse about invading Kenya, Uganda’s next-door neighbor. “It wouldn’t take us, my army and me, 2 weeks to capture Nairobi,” Muhoozi wrote. He went on to discuss which neighborhood he’d live in once he seized the Kenyan capital.

Mwenda, Muhoozi’s adviser, says it was all just a gag. Kenya didn’t even take the threat seriously enough to send troops to reinforce the border, he said. “Maybe it might not have been an appropriate joke” for a top Ugandan army commander, Mwenda said. “But first acknowledge that it’s a joke.”

President Museveni, however, apparently didn’t see the humor in it, quickly stripping his son of his command. “I ask our Kenyan brothers and sisters to forgive us for tweets sent by General Muhoozi, former commander of land forces here, regarding the election matters in that great country,” Museveni said in a statement.

But at the same time, Museveni promoted his son—previously a lieutenant general—to full general. “This is a time-tested formula—discourage the negative and encourage the positive,” Museveni explained in his written apology to the Kenyans.

In an interview with the Journal around that time, Museveni said he had encouraged his son to edit his thoughts more carefully. “He has got passion for this one, for that one—O.K., that’s good,” Museveni said.

“The negative point is you should not always externalize your passion,” Museveni said. “You have passions but keep them inside yourself.”

Muhoozi did no such thing. “I will capture Nairobi for sure!” he wrote a few months later. “If ANY  Kenyan tries to prevent me. He’ll be soup! We will drink him for dinner. My father can sack me again if he wants.”

Museveni didn’t respond to requests for comments for this article.

Even Museveni’s halfhearted parental discipline didn’t last long. Last year, the president elevated Muhoozi to chief of defense forces, making him Uganda’s top military officer.

And his son’s erratic messaging continued.

He threatened “strong actions” against any police commander who failed to shut down public meetings where any member of the Museveni family is “being abused.”

He vowed to arrest “all the fools in Parliament,” apparently for failing to fund the military to his liking. “If anyone even coughs in a wrong way I will ARREST him or her on the spot!” he wrote.

He ordered his office to audit media outlets.

When a detained Ugandan politician—abducted in Kenya and secreted back into Uganda—went on a hunger strike, Muhoozi gleefully urged him on toward starvation: “Can he hurry up?”

Muhoozi celebrated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He rejoiced when Trump cut arms shipment to Kyiv. “IT’S OVER, ZELENSKY,” he wrote. “Your gravy train has come to a screeching halt.”

In particular, Muhoozi appears obsessed with Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, a musician-turned-opposition-politician who goes by the stage name Bobi Wine. Wine officially captured 35% of the presidential vote in 2021, although he mounted a failed court challenge to what he described as an election tainted by ballot-stuffing and government intimidation.

Wine’s popularity with young Ugandans makes him a potential threat to Museveni, and also to Muhoozi, whose public rebelliousness appears aimed at appealing to the same demographic. Muhoozi offers cash prizes for Ugandans who take his online quizzes, including one for successfully completing a line from the Fargo TV series.

Muhoozi refers to Wine as “that baboon” or as “kabobi”—Little Bobi. He challenged Wine to a boxing match. He promised any soldier who castrates Wine would be “paid handsomely.”

 

Wine, who has been arrested more times than he can recall and, he says, was himself tortured in custody, used to cross paths with Muhoozi at Kampala clubs.

“Muhoozi is a spoiled son of a dictator that has grown up seeing absolute power and watching absolute power being abused,” said Wine. “He has been able to do anything and get away with it.”

Uniformed and plainclothes agents grabbed Wine’s chief of security, Ssebuufu, on April 27, threw him in a van, blindfolded him and spirited him to a house in a high-end neighborhood, where they abused him in the basement, according to his lawyer, George Musisi.

The same day Muhoozi took credit for the beating of Ssebuufu, he ordered all female soldiers to march in skirts instead of trousers, and promised a “very bad day” to anyone who orders women to parade in trousers.

The Uganda Human Rights Commission wrote Muhoozi demanding Ssebuufu’s release.

Muhoozi responded: “If these people value the lives we gave them they MUST NEVER even think of sending me such a STUPID letter again! This is their last warning.”

After eight days, security agents dumped Ssebuufu at a civilian court. Police charged him with various counts of assault and robbery for alleged crimes a year earlier including stealing a green sweater and a purple mobile phone.

Musisi, who met with Ssebuufu in jail, said his client is innocent of the charges.

Ssebuufu remains in custody.

Under Ugandan law, military personnel cannot participate in politics. Muhoozi, however, has his own political entity, the Patriotic League of Uganda, which champions his possible candidacy.

In the meantime, Mwenda said, Muhoozi is waiting for his shot at the top job. “He won’t run against his father,” Mwenda said, “and he won’t stage a military coup.”

But, Mwenda added, “it may be an incentive for [Museveni] to retire knowing he can leave the country in safe hands.”

Write to Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com