The dictator's son livetweeting torture from his basement

Yahoo

14-05-2025

The man's eyes are filled with terror, his shoulders bare, his once prominent beard has gone. Reduced to a state of desperation, he seems to be imploring a tormentor for mercy.
In some dictatorships, torture occurs furtively in underground cells, but the ordeal of Edward Ssebuufu, a prominent opposition activist, shows that Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni is brazenly different.
Ssebuufu's suffering was not just displayed to the world but posted live on X (formerly Twitter), proudly and boisterously, in all its stages of sadism. This was done not by an over-zealous secret policeman but by the social media account of the dictator's Sandhurst-educated son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba.
And the son is not some marginalised embarrassment but the Commander of Uganda's Armed Forces and the man most likely to succeed his 80-year-old father as President.
The sons of despots have often been accused of brutish behaviour – Col Muammar Gaddafi's one-time heir, Saif al-Islam, carries an indictment for alleged crimes against humanity – yet only Kainerugaba has apparently chosen to live-post his cruelty to 1.1 million social media followers.
In those posts, Kainerugaba's X account revels in Ssebuufu's agony and degradation, describing how the prisoner was supposedly 'crying' and 'urinating', before adding: 'I still have to castrate him.'
Kainerugaba, who graduated in political science from Nottingham University in 1997 and passed out of Sandhurst in 2000, proclaims his ambition to ascend to the pinnacle of power.
That prospect might chill many Ugandans who remember the blood-soaked reign of another soldier, Idi Amin, yet the reality is that Kainerugaba has every chance of achieving his goal.
When old age eventually strikes down Museveni, who seized the presidency nearly 40 years ago, the son's command of the army would place him in pole position to ensure a hereditary succession in a country that calls itself a Republic.
'I would really worry about the prospect of him becoming President,' says one Ugandan journalist with calculated understatement. 'But when I set aside my personal feelings and analyse it objectively, I find that there's a real possibility of this happening.'
Kainerugaba's previous outbursts have already earned him notoriety. He has variously praised Vladimir Putin as a 'hero'; offered to send Ugandan troops to fight for Russia; threatened to invade neighbouring Kenya ('two weeks to capture Nairobi'); and announced his desire to marry Giorgia Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister.
His profile page on X carries an image of Robert Powell playing Jesus Christ in the 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth.
If Kainerugaba, 51, represents the future of Uganda, his latest excess may be the most instructive.
Ssebuufu, Head of Security for Uganda's opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi (better known by his stage name Bobi Wine), disappeared after being arrested near the capital, Kampala, on April 27.
Four days later, Kainerugaba's X account announced that Ssebuufu was 'in my basement'.
Then came a stream of tweets glorying in the torment of the prisoner. 'The beards were the first thing the boys removed. After he finished crying and urinating,' reads one post.
'If you see Eddie's head now he looks like an egg. Totally clean,' says the next.
Then: 'Eddie started crying as soon as the boys grabbed him.'
Kainerugaba's account describes how the prisoner was being forced to defer to an image of the President. 'Eddie is looking very smart these days. The boys have tuned him well. He salutes Mzee's [Museveni's] picture every day before breakfast.'
Over and again, the posts under Kainerugaba's name threaten to inflict the same ordeal on Wine, derisively referred to as 'Kabobi'.
'Next is Kabobi!' says one post. 'I have never joked in my life. I don't know why people think my tweets are jokes.'
Whether Ssebuufu's torture was taking place in the basement of Kainerugaba's own house in Kampala is unclear, though one post says as much. The regime has a network of locations, known without irony as 'safe houses', where opposition activists are regularly detained and abused. Ssebuufu may have been held in one of them.
On May 5, eight days after his arrest, he appeared in court in the town of Masaka, 80 miles south-west of Kampala, unable to stand without help.
Ssebuufu, also known as Eddie Mutwe, was charged with robbery and remanded in custody in Masaka prison, where over 1,000 inmates occupy a jail designed for half that number.
Two days later, Wine was allowed to visit Ssebuufu. Afterwards the opposition leader, visibly shaken, described exactly what he had learnt of his friend's suffering.
'We saw him and he was tortured very badly,' said Wine. 'He was tortured for three days and on the third day Muhoozi Kainerugaba came himself personally and beat him, tortured him, and his men tortured Eddie Mutwe in the presence of Muhoozi. He was electrocuted, he was waterboarded and so many terrible things happened to him.'
Wine's description of Ssebuufu's ordeal tallied with Kainerugaba's social media posts. 'He was forced to salute Museveni's picture every day,' said the opposition leader. 'He was stripped naked and, later on, when he was given a piece of cloth, he was only given a Museveni T-shirt.'
Lawyers representing Ssebuufu were allowed to visit him and confirmed his torture, though without mentioning Kainerugaba's personal involvement.
'He has been over-tortured for all the days he has been in detention, in irregular detention,' said Magellan Kazibwe, one of Ssebuufu's lawyers.
'He has told me and my colleague that he was tortured every day, five times, and they were beating him using these wires of electricity. They were electrocuting him. They were squeezing him, including his private parts. He is in great pain. He has not accessed any doctor up to now. He is in a very appalling and bad health state.'
Ssebuufu was later reported to have received treatment at Masaka prison's medical facility.
The fate of his security chief will be bitterly familiar to Wine, who endured 10 days of beatings and torture in military barracks in 2018. His injuries were so severe that he had to leave Uganda for medical care in the United States.
When he ran against Museveni in the last presidential election, Wine was arrested in the middle of the campaign. As supporters mounted street protests demanding his release, the security forces opened fire with live rounds, killing at least 54 people in Kampala in November 2020 and arresting thousands more.
On polling day, January 15 2021, Wine was placed under house arrest while the regime disconnected Uganda from the internet and announced a rigged result, giving him 34 per cent of the vote and handing Museveni victory with 58 per cent.
Now, Wine is preparing to run against Museveni once again in the election due in January next year, which will also mark the 40th anniversary of the President capturing Kampala as a rebel leader and taking power in January 1986.
In the first decade of his rule, Museveni managed to stabilise Uganda after years of ruinous civil war and the dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. At that time, Britain and America regarded him as a reformer who deserved their support.
They continued to indulge Museveni even as he twice rewrote the constitution to prolong his grip on power, first by abolishing term limits and then removing the age limit. Even now, as Museveni resorts to torture and repression against his opponents – and Kainerugaba waits in the wings – Uganda still receives £31.6 million of British aid.
Wine, a musician and actor raised in one of Kampala's poorest areas, has built an opposition movement, the National Unity Platform, that carries the hopes of Ugandans who strive to escape their dictatorship.
The agony of Edward Ssebuufu reminds them of the risks of defying Museveni. The dictator's son, who appeared to glory in the suffering of a human being, reminds Ugandans of the rule that may await them.
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