Musaazi NAMITI
America’s leading and most influential newspaper has published startling allegations about army chief Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, saying that he once ordered exiled writer and lawyer Kakwenza Rukirabashaija to expose his penis while he filmed him.
In a hard-hitting article of more than 4,000 words titled “The authoritarian future is already here”, the New York Times also said Uganda was in the “grip of a reign of terror”.
“Mr. Rukirabashaija was repeatedly detained and tortured. He was viciously flogged and beaten so badly that his ankle bones were fractured, his kidneys damaged and his back laced with scars from being whipped,” the Times reported.
“Mr. Rukirabashaija said that General Kainerugaba, the president’s son, twice visited him in detention. During the first visit, he said, the general ordered the author—the taller of the two men—to bend over to make himself shorter and to remove his pants to reveal the size of his penis. Then, as the general recorded the exchange on his phone, he told Mr. Rukirabashaija to kneel on the floor and apologize, the author said.”
The Times added: “On the second visit, he said, General Kainerugaba offered him a bribe to keep quiet about the abuse he had suffered. Mr. Rukirabashaija was stunned.”
The article also mentioned Gen Kainerugaba’s “basement”, or “torture chambers he brags about on social media” and President Yoweri Museveni, Gen Kainerugaba’s father, whom it called “an octogenarian autocrat”.
“Ugandans have discovered that, increasingly, there is nowhere to hide. Civic life here is defined by thickening webs of state surveillance built with foreign help,” the paper reported.
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It said the government was using Chinese cameras and facial-recognition software to monitor the streets and Russian radio frequency chips implanted in license plates to track cars in real time.
“Israeli software plunders the private contents of phones. Technology has created an intrusive eye that never blinks—a stealthy weapon for dictators keen to stifle speech and thought,” the Times reported.
The article comes a month after the Economist, another influential Western news outlet, published a scathing editorial about Mr Museveni and Gen Kainerugaba’s bid for the presidency in 2031.
“The general could take over from his father and impose a capricious, vengeful and ethnically charged despotism on Uganda,” wrote the Economist.
The UPDF had not responded to the article by press time, and OJ-UGANDA could not reach out to Gen Kainerugaba for comment.
But Mr Rukirabashaija, who fled the country in February 2022, has previously said many times that he was tortured on the orders of Gen Kainerugaba.
When OJ-UGANDA asked Mr Rukirabashaija, via email, to respond to the Times claim that Gen Kainerugaba filmed his penis, he said: “Yes, I confirm.”
A UPDF lieutenant, Herbert Mabonga, who quit the army claiming he had witnessed enough torture meted out to abducted Ugandans, alleged that Gen Kainerugaba and President Museveni were responsible for safe houses where abductees are tortured.
“I have been in one safe house. I have witnessed what people go through. I have recorded videos of victims in the safe houses,” Lt Mabonga says in a video, using the euphemism for torture houses.
“Very young men are held captive for many years in safe houses on [the] orders of the CDF [Chief of Defence Forces]. The CDF is directly answerable to the safe house where these political prisoners are held.”
Lt Mabonga says President Yoweri Museveni—”the one you have glorified for many years”—is aware of the atrocities being committed against Ugandans.
In a statement posted on X, the UPDF said Lt Mabonga had left his duty station without permission and that his absence was upgraded to desertion. The statement did not address allegations of torture in safe houses.
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