1, men who had known each other during boyhood and whose sense of brotherhood would be cemented in their joint exiles as well as in the bush war that followed. Even after they were firmly in power, their bond continued to grow for some years. There is evidence of Museveni consulting his most trusted colleagues on the appointments of ministers and other officials, so that someone like Kategaya actually had more influence than his office suggested. Museveni has negotiated with rebel leaders such as Ali Bamuze and Moses Ali, and he has co-opted opposition figures as substantial as Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere2. From the beginning the NRA’s philosophy was to rule as a “broad-based” government with community roots, enabling Museveni to tap into what the Ugandan scholar Gerald Bareebe has called a “residue” of goodwill in the social structure of post-war Uganda.
3 was an assistant to Amama Mbabazi when he contested the presidency in 2016. Julius Aine was among the 27 NRA combatants who attacked the military barracks at Kabamba in February 1981, launching Museveni’s war on Milton Obote’s second administration.
These disgruntled NRA sons have refused to join such associations of NRA children as Mbegu wa Mapinduzi and Mtoto wa Jeshi. Instead, they have formed their own Youth for National Salvation, or YONASA, a very political group that has accused Museveni of deviating from the ideals that took him and their parents to the bush. They charge that the NRM government is characterized by injustices such as corruption and unfair distribution of resources. Unlike YONASA, Mtoto wa Jeshi and Mbegu wa Mapinduzi are less vocal but mobilize for Museveni during presidential campaigns.
Although Museveni’s call for these children to advance the agenda of their retiring parents is supported by many, it also faces resistance from some who see it as a premeditated move by those in power to entrench state control through their offspring. This resentment and hateful political environment is already forcing some of these NRA children to ‘lie low’ and even drop the names of their famous parents, such action being necessary to avoid unwanted attention when pursuing business deals or looking for jobs. This is because many Ugandans associate them with much of whatever has not gone well in the country. And there is fear of reprisal in the event the NRM leaves power in a bad way.
But others, including Kainerugaba, are moving to show the public they can develop their own worldviews and perhaps even build capacity to take over from their parents. This group includes Mwine Mpaka, the lawmaker whose father is Col. Bright Rwamirama, and others thriving in the private sector.
Kainerugaba, widely perceived as the president’s self-entitled and privileged son, finds himself under pressure to prove he is serious and can make decisions of his own. In December he tweeted that members of his MK Movement were old enough to take over national leadership, vowed early in 2023 to succeed his father, and in May led a team of his politburo to meet Museveni at State House. Kainerugaba is, for all intents and purposes, going on a full-throttle campaign to take the presidency. Whether one likes him or not, however one regards him, he cannot be ignored.
But there are strong signs Museveni will be on the ballot in 2026, raising questions about how those close to the seat of power are plotting the transition. It is also possible that, like the rest of us, they don’t know what is going to happen. Kainerugaba’s demagoguery of the NRM will likely win him supporters among people who want the system exorcised. And yet he cannot go further without exploiting the system in place, as corrupt as he says it is, and without articulating a broad consensus for a new Uganda.
Because of the NRM’s longevity in power, Kainerugaba and other NRA children who want to lead the country have to convince Ugandans that they can correct the mistakes of their fathers as well as build upon the foundation already in place. They will have to promise Ugandans that they are for an inclusive government. For, despite being a mass party with structures even at village level, the NRM has been marked by scandal after scandal, land grabbing, and inequality before justice.
Unlike the Uganda People’s Congress and the Democratic Party, which both had an effective system to recruit and retain talent, the NRM has been mostly cavalier and its youth league quiet. While most of the NRA children support Museveni, they are suspicious of the NRM as a political platform. Museveni is certainly more powerful than his party, but his successor will inherit little of his kingly status, or perhaps none. If the NRM is to survive beyond Museveni, the likes of Kainerugaba — and therefore others with eyes on the presidency —must find a way to maneuvre the reigning political system out of the intrigue and dishonesty alienating many Ugandans. They must create light, not darkness. They may not, in the short term, be their fathers’ political heirs, but they can be influential in what happens next.
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Cover image: Muhoozi Kainerugaba; Illustration by Farouq Ssebaggala
- 1vw - 3.2px) * 0.391), 19px);">The children of the National Resistance Army can be put into three age groups. The group of those born in the 70s during the struggle against Idi Amin, those born in the 80s before and right after the NRA captured Kampala, and those born in the 90s as their parents consolidated power and started to enjoy, personally and collectively, the benefits of their bush struggle. Today, without exception, all of them are grown men and women, with some of them approaching middle age.
Yet, in the eyes of the public, the NRA heirs are still seen as ‘kids of big men,’ a badge they are old enough to no longer want to wear. They want to be their own men. This state of being speaks to the NRA’s long stay in power, extraordinary privilege that also has had the effect of denying the children the opportunity to grow and fly on their own. Many have grown up in a highly protected environment, with limited scope to learn, develop their own identities, and disagree respectfully with their elders.
Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of the president, four-star general of the Ugandan army, and latterly a radical critic of the ruling National Resistance Movement party, is the most prominent of these children. His early, and much criticised, campaigns to lay the groundwork for a possible presidency while his father Yoweri Museveni remains in charge, have divided opinion across the political landscape, even within the NRM itself. While Kainerugaba is not attacking his father, he has described the NRM as a “reactionary” entity, a sharp insult given this is what Museveni often calls those he disagrees with. How can Kainerugaba be his father’s son and not a child of the NRM? Can he, in his pursuit of the presidency, find his range without the help of the ruling party? For Kainerugaba, as for anyone wishing to replace Museveni, nothing is guaranteed, and the first son, despite his obvious advantages, may face an even steeper climb in attempting to reach his goal.
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To understand the challenge Kainerugaba faces, it is important to briefly recall the history of NRA generally and Museveni in particular, loaded as they are with moments of consensus-building and teamwork. Although Museveni was the intellectual leader of his Front for National Salvation, or FRONASA, in reality he was first among equals in that swaggering group of former Ntare boys. Thus, as personal histories go, there can be no Museveni without Amama Mbabazi or Eriya Kategaya ((Kategaya, who held the honorary military rank of brigadier-general and was widely seen as the NRA’s No.2 after Museveni, died in March 2013. He fell out with Museveni after opposing the removal of presidential term limits, was dropped from Cabinet, and briefly flirted with the opposition before making a return to government service. He was first deputy prime minister and minister for East African Community affairs at the time of his death. [↩]
- Ssemogerere is widely acknowledged as the winner of Uganda’s disputed presidential election of December 1980. He later served as a minister in Museveni’s government before resigning ahead of an unsuccessful presidential bid in 1996. At the time of his death, in November 2022, he had long retired from politics. [↩]
- 1vw - 3.2px) * 0.391), 19px);">Kainerugaba, the author of an interesting book theorizing the NRA’s “tradition of maneuvre,” is no doubt aware of all this but perhaps finds it hard to apply his theory to a charged political scene and, even more urgently, marry it to his own personal ambitions. After all, the Uganda People’s Defence Forces is not the NRA of 1987, and as the most prominent son of the resistance Kainerugaba finds himself needing to articulate a clear vision of what they can do not just for themselves but also for the country. After four decades of his father’s rule, can Kainerugaba become president of Uganda without broad support? Can he fashion a consensus not just among his generation of NRA children but across the wider political spectrum?
Kainerugaba himself believes he stands a chance, most recently raising the stakes in his public engagements despite still being an active military officer. He has tried to cultivate the friendship of Democratic Party leader Norbert Mao, for example, and he’s holding rallies in different corners of Uganda. He’s voiced his criticism of the NRM and its culture of corruption, presenting himself as a heroic figure for the future.
In his tweets Kainerugaba sounds like a man running out of time. At 49 he’s now seven years older than Museveni was when he became president, eighteen years older than Mugisha Muntu when he became army commander, and twenty years older than Kizza Besigye when he was appointed state minister for internal affairs. Most NRA fighters were similarly young when they took Kampala in 1986, and they went straight from the bush into villas in Kololo and other nice suburbs where their children have lived comfortably ever after. Their social status has helped them enter good schools and then get desirable jobs in the public and private sectors.
But no matter where they go, their badge as children of the NRA is always visible, forcing them to be defensive as they explain how they got their jobs at the expense of others. They can seem marked, and the parents as much as the children realize this veneer of protection will not last forever. Now in their sixties and seventies, the parents are aging and retiring from public service. Some want their children and grandchildren after them to follow in their footsteps, an existential crisis that is not in itself odd. Parents everywhere wish their children well, want them to succeed even more splendidly than they themselves have managed.
Museveni has tried to initiate a conversation about the future of NRA children. During his State of the Nation address last year he revealed that he had been discussing with his own children about timelines to create what he called “Descendants of Resistance Army, or DRA, as part of efforts “to take forward the work of the original NRA.” Museveni said of this group, “These are people who work for passion, not money.” He cited an unlikely name, Irene Kaggwa, whom he had appointed to lead the Uganda Communications Commission. Museveni pointed out at the time that this group would help the NRM “defeat corruption.”
Kainerugaba sits squarely among this group in the view of Museveni. Although there are no public displays of affection between father and son, it is clear, from his comments over the years, that Museveni is proud of Kainerugaba’s military career. As Museveni has grown older, Kainerugaba has become one of the pillars of his security, just as the son surely finds protection in the presence of his father. In all likelihood they will continue to need each other. In all likelihood Kainerugaba will continue to try to prove that he is more than a soldier.
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Kainerugaba was born in 1974 in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam, where his father was active in the underground struggle against Amin. Museveni has speculated that if the Amin and Obote regimes had not interfered with his life, he would have lived as an intellectual. If one struggles to visualize Museveni not as an apex politician but as an academic powered and then fatigued by Marxism, it is because fate has put him where he is today, made him what he is. But decades ago, as a student at the University of Dar es Salaam, he wrote a remarkable paper on Frantz Fanon’s theory of political violence. This paper, which can be read online, shows a young Museveni as an ideas man as much as a field operator, having spent time in Mozambiquan rebel camps to disprove assumptions in Europe that the Makonde people of Cabo Delgado were opposing the white man more strongly because of their physical looks. Museveni argued instead that the Makonde were not resisting “because they are Makonde,” but rather because they faced the white man’s violence more severely than the other tribes, becoming more emboldened after seeing colonizers bleed to death at the hands of Black people. Years later, in the Luweero bush, Museveni told an interviewer years later that the alternative to fighting Milton Obote’s troops was slavery.
Museveni’s unforgettable college manifesto is important for two reasons when it comes to Kainerugaba. One, that his father was and remains sui generis, one of a kind. Secondly, that Kainerugaba is putting himself under so much pressure by coveting his father’s seat. Despite their genetic kinship, they are not similar. Where Kainerugaba is quiet and brooding, Museveni can be charming and folksy. Where Museveni is calculative, Kainerugaba can be rash. And while Museveni has had so much luck going on for him, Kainerugaba may have to create his own luck. His Twitter outbursts have raised concern about his temperament, confusing the memory of him as a thoughtful young man in interviews and public talks. He once argued, for example, that the propertied class should have a bigger say in how Uganda is governed because, for them, there is a lot at stake. This was in the late 90s, when Kainerugaba still had options. He could have gone into business, as his uncle Salim Saleh had advised, and from there chart a path not unlike the one taken by Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s fourth president. But he chose a military life, attending Sandhurst and other military schools abroad before eventually becoming a mainstay of his father’s security apparatus. He is acknowledged as the architect of Uganda’s special forces. If Kainerugaba does nothing else with his life, he’s already enjoyed a notable military career.
But if Kainerugaba is going to rise higher than he already has, as a budding politician he may have to practice the ‘maneuverist’ approach presented in Battles of the Ugandan Resistance: A Tradition of Maneuvre. In the book, published in 2010, Kainerugaba analyses some NRA battles on his way to arguing that military operations should find ways around hard objects, not smash through them. This maneuvre is a hallmark of the NRA, according to Kainerugaba. But from this bit of history can he draw lessons for his political project? Is he willing to make the necessary sacrifices as he and the rest of us stare into an unpredictable post-Museveni future? Can he, as the most public son of the resistance, marshal a consensus deal that doesn’t necessarily privilege him immediately but which guarantees that, two decades from now, Uganda is still a safe and productive republic?
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Even among NRA sons, there’s quiet debate about the political future of Uganda. Not all of them have lived affluent lives. There is a category of those who are bitter from facing adversity. Most of these children lost their parents when they were still young and have struggled to make ends meet. Some have even declared support for opposition candidates in previous elections. Notably, Chris Aine, son of Lt. Col. Julius Aine ((Facts about Aine are elusive. He is believed to have died in the early 90s. [↩]