Muhoozi’s Uganda by Eze Ogbu

Something almost medieval about the political future being proposed for Uganda, the father has occupied the presidential throne for four decades, the son commands the army, and now the son announces that he intends to inherit the presidency. Only the medieval kings had the decency to call it hereditary.

General Muhoozi Kainerugaba’s declaration that he will run for president in 2031 is therefore more than another African election announcement. It is a glimpse of what happens when a republic slowly becomes a family enterprise. Kainerugaba is not merely the son of Yoweri Museveni. He is the son who has risen through the military hierarchy while his father remains president, acquiring precisely the kind of institutional power that makes succession look less like an election and more like an arranged transfer of property.

Kainerugaba has already supplied the public with an extraordinary preview of his political temperament. His social-media career has sometimes resembled the diary of a particularly excitable general who discovered the internet and forgot that national borders are not metaphors. In 2022, he caused a diplomatic uproar by suggesting that Uganda could invade Kenya. Museveni apologised for the remarks and removed his son from his military position at the time. Yet the political rehabilitation was remarkably swift. The general eventually returned to the top of the armed forces.

That is the curious thing about dynastic authoritarianism: consequences become temporary inconveniences when the family is sufficiently important.

Kainerugaba now commands Uganda's military while openly discussing his presidential ambitions. He has even spoken of his father campaigning for him and predicted an enormous electoral victory. Such confidence would be amusing if Uganda were an ordinary democracy. It is less amusing when the aspiring president is simultaneously the country's military chief and the heir apparent of a ruler who has been in power since 1986.

Elections, in such circumstances, risk becoming elaborate ceremonies performed after the important decisions have already been made.

The problem is not simply that Museveni wants his son to succeed him. Political dynasties exist everywhere, including in democracies. The problem is the machinery surrounding the inheritance: the army, the ruling party, patronage networks and a political culture in which opposition can become dangerous and institutions increasingly appear subordinate to executive power.

This is how authoritarianism modernises itself. It does not always arrive wearing a military uniform and announcing a coup. Sometimes it arrives in a tailored suit, carrying a family name and promising continuity.

And Muhoozi is an especially revealing successor because his public persona seems to embody something more volatile than his father's old-fashioned authoritarianism. Museveni represents the veteran strongman: disciplined, patient, calculating, endlessly capable of surviving political weather. His son has cultivated a reputation for impulsiveness, theatricality and provocative declarations.

That combination should concern Ugandans. A dictatorship inherited by a son is not necessarily a dictatorship made gentler by youth. It can become a dictatorship with fewer restraints and more confidence.

Uganda deserves something rather less dynastic: a political system in which the presidency is not a family heirloom, the army does not become a ladder to State House, and citizens are not expected to applaud the inevitable. A republic should produce presidents. It should not produce successors.