Former Internal Security Organization (ISO) Director General Col Kaka Bagyenda warned Ugandan president Gen Yoweri Kaguta Tibuhaburwa Museveni that his son, now a full UPDF national army general, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, and his mother, first lady and Education Minister, Janet Kataaha Kainembabazi Museveni, were plotting to overthrow him.
News that Col Kaka Bagyenda had been fired became public on October 08, 2020. When the news broke, veteran journalist Andrew Mujuni Mwenda, a man said to have offered strategic advice to both Ugandan and Rwandan governments and their Presidents Gen Museveni and Kagame, respectively, made a shocking revelation about some of Kaka’s intelligence reports.
Mwenda claimed that Kaka’s had issued toxic intelligence reports on people plotting to remove Museveni from power as well as regarding the relations, then frosty, between Kampala and Kigali. To Mwenda, Kaka could have fabricated some of these reports, and such methods and actions could have significantly damaged ISO’s reputation and cast doubts on its subsequent briefings.
“Kaka’s intelligence reports to the present had become toxic, in one of them even alleging first son, mkainerugaba was plotting with the First Lady to overthrow govt! His reports on Rwanda went to similar extremes of fabrications that made peace impossible to craft!” wrote Mwenda in a Twitter thread sent out on October 08, 2020, from 6:47 PM through 6:56 PM via an iPhone.
“His worst contribution to our intelligence system was to destroy whatever good that had built in ISO, and then running torture chambers euphemistically called safe houses where he brutalized his victims with the barbarity of Idi Amin’s goons. But all is well that ends well. As I said on NBS TV last year [2019], we Ugandans did not need Western human rights pretenders to fight evil in our system. Kaka forgot that the ideological foundations of the NRM/UPDF/ISO stand in opposition to the thuggish methods he used. So his fall was inevitable and had to be domestic.
While, Mwenda dismissed Kaka’s intelligence reports that Muhoozi and Janet were plotting to overthrow Museveni, political analyst and veteran journalist Timothy Kalyegira now believes there was sense in the former ISO boss’ brief. Kalyegira suggests that the fact that Muhoozi has declared that he wants to become president in order to ‘re-pay’ his mother, two years since Col Bagyenda was fired points to ‘a ring of truth’ in his intelligence reports.
“Two years later, seems ISO Director-General’s reports had a ring of truth. Sunday Monitor, Oct. 23, hints at a split within First Family. Gen. Kainerugaba, Oct. 27, 2022: ‘The only way I can re-pay my great mother is by being President of Uganda! And I shall definitely do it!!” tweeted Kalyegira.
It should be remembered that in his ‘big announcement‘ on his presidential ambitions, Gen Muhoozi’s mother Janet featured prominently. (Read Details Here).
Meanwhile, Muhoozi and a senior Museveni minister have ‘disagreed’ on the year the president is supposed to peacefully hand over power. Museveni has also trashed Norbert Mao’s ‘peaceful power handover’ talk. (Read Stories Here and There).
