06/24/2026
A Soldier Is Not a King, but a King in His Mind
There is an old rule in any serious army, the kind your grandfather understood and the kind that built every nation worth living in. The soldier serves the state. The state does not serve the soldier.
General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Chief of Defence Forces of Uganda, has spent the last several years tearing that rule to pieces in full public view, and a country that prizes order, family, and discipline ought to be the first to say so. Not the foreign embassies. Not the human rights NGOs. Us.
The people who actually believe a nation needs a strong army, precisely because we believe it, should be loudest in saying this man is wrecking the thing we love.
Let me be plain about where I stand before anyone tries to put words in my mouth. I am not writing as someone who wants Uganda's military weakened, soldiers disrespected, or our hard-won stability thrown away for some imported experiment in chaos. The opposite.
I want a disciplined army, a respected uniform, and a chain of command that a mother in Adjumani or a trader in Kikuubo can trust. That is a conservative instinct, and it is a good one. And it is exactly why the conduct of this particular general should worry the people who share it.
Consider the basic facts, because they are not in dispute. They come from his own mouth. After the 2026 election, Muhoozi said his forces had killed 22 members of the National Unity Platform and that he hoped Bobi Wine would be the 23rd. Sit with that. The commander of the entire national army, announcing a body count of citizens as if reading a football score, then naming the next man he wants dead.
A year before, he claimed a missing opposition activist, Eddie Mutwe, was "in my basement," posted a photo of the detained man, and threatened to castrate him, saying he would release him only on his father's orders. The Uganda Human Rights Commission, a state body, declared that detention unlawful and ordered the man freed. Not a foreign court. Our own commission.
A conservative reading of this is simple. The whole point of having a national army instead of a warlord's militia is that the army belongs to the nation, not to one family or one man's moods. When the commander says a man will be released "on Museveni's orders," he has told you plainly that the chain of command runs through a household, not a constitution. That is not strength. That is the oldest weakness in African politics dressed up in a new uniform: the confusion of the state with the family that happens to hold it.
Now, the strongest case his defenders make deserves an honest answer, not a cheap dismissal. They say: Muhoozi is a real soldier with a real record. And that is true. In 2007 he commanded the defeat of the ADF in Bundibugyo, and in 2008 he served in Operation Lightning Thunder against the Lord's Resistance Army in the Congo. Uganda has carried a heavy load in the region for twenty years, most of all in Somalia against Al-Shabaab, paid for in Ugandan blood.
His supporters say the man is a patriot who simply refuses to speak the soft, careful language of diplomats and NGOs, and that ordinary people are tired of that language anyway. There is something to this. When he demanded that Turkey pay Uganda a "security dividend," arguing that Uganda carries the cost of stabilising Mogadishu while others reap the business, the manner was ridiculous but the underlying complaint, that Uganda bleeds while others bank, is one many of us feel in our bones.
So let me answer that defence on its own ground, soldier to citizen, not with sentiment but with the soldier's own logic. A patriot who genuinely loves the army does not drag its name into a personal quarrel every week. Discipline is not the enemy of patriotism. It is patriotism.
The man who truly honours the uniform keeps his temper off the internet, because he knows that when he speaks, the whole army speaks through him whether he likes it or not. His own threats to capture Nairobi got him removed as land forces commander in 2022. He mocked the German ambassador's height and threatened to expel EU diplomats who met the opposition.
He demanded a billion dollars and "the most beautiful woman" from Turkey, threatening to shut their embassy. A serious patriot does not turn the defence ministry into a comedy act that allies and enemies alike now watch for entertainment. He has not made the army feared. He has made it a punchline, and a feared army that becomes a punchline is no longer feared.
Here is the part his own camp cannot wave away as foreign interference, because it comes from inside the house. A 2026 study found that Kainerugaba is deeply unpopular with the public, even in absolute terms in the family's home western region.
Think about what that means in a country where region and loyalty run deep. The man cannot even hold his own backyard. And his conduct does not just fail to win people, it actively revives the very enemies he wants to crush. When the state tried to serve him court summons and then arrested former Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago, the episode jolted a defeated, scattered opposition back into relevance overnight. A commander whose every move resurrects his rivals is not winning a war against the opposition. He is their best recruiter.
That is the heart of the conservative case against him, and it has nothing to do with being soft. It is this: he is bad at the very thing he claims to be good at. A conservative judges a leader by results and by order, not by noise.
By that standard he is a failure. He has weakened the institution he commands, embarrassed the country abroad, made enemies of allies like Germany and Turkey for no gain, alienated his own people, and handed the opposition a heartbeat it had lost at the ballot box. The ruling side won about 71.65 percent of the presidential vote and looked unbeatable; then one man's conduct reopened the door. No foreign agent did that. He did it to himself, and to the rest of us who have to live in the country he keeps setting on fire for sport.
A nation can survive a harsh general. It can even survive an ambitious one. What it cannot survive for long is a commander who believes the army, the courts, the diplomats, and the people all exist to absorb his moods. The uniform is a trust, not a throne. Strip away the swagger and the threats and you are left with a simple, old-fashioned truth that any disciplined soldier already knows. A man who cannot command himself has no business commanding an army.
Just my thoughts.
