The Chief of Defence Forces, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has removed businessman and self-styled “envoy” Michael Katungi from his position as Commissioner for External Affairs of the shadowy Patriotic League of Uganda (PLU).
The decision follows a damning US indictment linking Katungi to an alleged $58 million (about Shs200 billion) illegal arms deal with a notorious Mexican drug cartel.
In a late-night post on X, Muhoozi announced: “I have decided to remove Michael Katungi as Commissioner External Affairs of PLU. He is also removed as a member of our Central Committee. From now on only the Chairman will appoint the foreign committees of our movement.”
The PLU, a loose grouping Muhoozi formed as an offshoot of his father’s ruling NRM party, has been positioned by its backers as a civic organisation.
But the general himself has made little secret of using it as a political springboard while he still openly flirted with a 2026 presidential run.
Katungi’s fall comes just days after US prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia unsealed charges accusing him of conspiring with Bulgarian national Peter Dimitrov Mirchev, Kenyan Elisha Odhiambo Asumo, and Tanzanian Subiro Osmund Mwapinga to supply the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) with an arsenal including machine guns, rocket launchers, grenades, sniper rifles, mines, and anti-aircraft weapons. CJNG is officially designated by Washington as a foreign terrorist organisation.
According to court filings, the group allegedly worked to obtain falsified arms control documents to mask the weapons’ true destination and even carried out a test shipment of 50 AK-47 rifles using an End-User Certificate from Tanzania.
The conspiracy, prosecutors say, extended to plans for surface-to-air missiles, drones, and ZU-23 anti-aircraft systems, valued at over €53 million.
Mirchev has a prior record of supplying arms to infamous dealer Viktor Bout. Arrests in the case have been made in Spain, Morocco, and Ghana, but Katungi remains at large.
Katungi’s removal from PLU is the most dramatic public rupture in the organisation since June 2024, when Michael Mawanda, the group’s head of mobilisation and disciplinary committee, was arrested and remanded over allegations of diverting more than Shs1 billion from war-loss compensation funds and conspiring to defraud Shs3.4 billion.
The Igara County East MP remains on bail but still holds his PLU role.
In political terms, Muhoozi’s move to cut Katungi loose - though symbolic - is a calculated act of damage control—one that echoes the cold detachment of authoritarian politics where loyalty is conditional and expendable.
For Katungi, a man once moving confidently in Uganda’s top security circles, the dismissal is not merely a loss of title but a public exile.
In Arthur Koestler's prophetic political work, Darkness at Noon, Richard, pleading with his Rubashov and other Party leaders, stammers: “Comrade, don’t throw me out to the wolves.”
The wolves, in Katungi’s case, may not only be the Americans waiting with an arrest warrant, but also the unforgiving void of political irrelevance at home, where allies vanish overnight and the party line hardens into silence.
For Muhoozi, the gamble is clear: preserve the PLU’s image by casting out the tainted, even if it means letting the wolves have their meal.