Opinion: Why Gen. Muhoozi needs to fight like a man

By Steven Fredrick Magomu

Recently social media was buzzing with both positive and negative commentary when Lt. Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba tweeted, lamenting how some elders I suppose both in the UPDF and the NRM had been fighting him.

To many of Gen. Muhoozi’s friends and supporters, it was a sad revelation wondering why anyone would want to fight a young man who is down to earth and hard working. To them nobody should dare stand in the way of their hero, who should be given a fated excess to ascend to the highest office in the land.

Those with this mindset are right in their own thinking, but in political science power is never given on a silver platter. It doesn’t matter where you were born or raised, power is for wrestling, so if my elder brother Gen. Muhoozi has any thought of ever occupying the highest office in the land, he should gird his loins and fight like a man.

What Muhoozi should know is that all eyes both in opposition and within the ruling NRM, are fixed on him. It doesn’t matter if he has the ambition of ever ascending to the highest office or not, his position puts him on cross roads, he is like a beautiful girl on the village who attracts all sorts of young men.

If men without anything are being fought, what about you that is not only the first son but also a decorated General in the celebrated UPDF. Anyone with the ambition of ever ascending to the highest office, looks at Muhoozi as the first obstacle.

That’s why you will realize that NUP and FDC keyboard warriors have devoted their mighty, time and intellect in attacking Gen. Muhoozi, with the same viciousness they attack the NRM infrastructure and the personality of president Museveni.

I met Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba once, but that one time meeting aroused my curiosity to study and observe his life from a distance.

Firstly like I have said earlier, all eyes of the nation must be on him and rightly so, Muhoozi who has grown up in the hands and home of a very skilful military and political tactician of our modern history, cannot be taken for granted by any political and military actors in Uganda and the great lakes region.

I have seen some in the opposition dismissing Muhoozi, calling him names, branding him a drunkard and womaniser, they are very wrong.

Ask the people that worked with president Museveni for long, none expected him to rule this nation for all these years like he has done.

Museveni is a master in concealing his ambitions and interests, coupled with patience Museveni has managed to outsmart his contemporaries, to the extent that even when they overthrew the Okello Government in 1986, the NRA high command had to sit in Bombo military barracks to deliberate on who was going to lead the nation, yet all along Museveni was the leader of the struggle in the bush.

What made the NRA high command think Museveni was not able to lead government, yet he had led a successful liberation struggle in the hardest circumstance?

Even when he came to power, he told his comrades that all he wanted was to stabilise the country and go back to the barracks, to-date he is the President of Uganda.

In 2008 I met Gen. Muhoozi in Garamba national forest where he was the second in command to my beloved uncle the late Brigadier Patrick Kankiriho during operation lightening thunder. They had just flashed out the LRA, which was hiding in the thicket of Garamba forest between DR Congo and Central African Republic.

Out of the curiosity of a young journalist then, I asked uncle Kankiriho, but why did you come with this young man here? Is he really a fight?

A jolly Kankiriho looked at me with his signature smile, and answered me, that young man is a greater fight, and he loves his job, you can’t imagine ever since we landed here he has red three military literature books. How does he do that when you are in the middle of a war I asked?

Kankiriho went to describing to me who Lt Col. Muhoozi was militarily and how a great fighter he was. He intimated to me how Muhoozi espouses the virtues of his father which are majorly two, patience and concealment, and cautioned me saying Ugandans should watch out for him.

By then, Muhoozi was a young military officer, humble and normal like any other officer seeking instructions from his commanding officer, to-date the same demeanor hasn’t changed, save for his supporters who make a lot of noise for him on social media, and his periodical tweets that I find very calculated.

The author is an a communications specialist

fmagomu@gmail.com