Gen Muhoozi went ballistic on his X account, accusing Winnie of disrespect and threatened to take action against Besigye’s wife. “You found a happy home and tried to wreck it. You’re a disaster of a woman,” he charged.
Undeterred, Winnie hit back, cautioning Gen Muhoozi to go slow least he gets entangled into matters beyond his comprehension.
“There is a more complex history between your father and I, and we have both chosen to move past with mutual respect. However, if you continue to present a false narrative, I may need to provide hard evidence of the facts. I prefer to maintain our dignified approach, but that choice remains yours. I consider this matter closed,” posted Winnie.
The online quarrel between a president’s son and former partner left Netizens wondering whether the constant harassment of Besigye was really about political differences. To some, it had all the ingredients of a love-triangle.
Besigye is currently detained by the Museveni regime that accuses the opposition leader of holding meetings in Switzerland, Greece and Kenya in an attempt to overturn the government.
He was seized on November 16, 2024 when he visited the Kenyan Capital to attend the launch of a book by Kenyan opposition politician Martha Karua. Besigye was driven back to Uganda where he is being held in a military facility.
The rivalry between President Museveni and his erstwhile acolyte Besigye, reads like Machiavellian intrigue—a metaphor in the world of realpolitik and dark arts.
How did two young men who deeply admired each other and whose characters were formed in the crucible of trench warfare turn into mortal enemies?
Besigye is facing treason charges in civil courts after his trial in the General Court Martial was recently struck down in the highest appellate court. Upon conviction, the offence of treason carries the death penalty as the maximum sentence.
This is after he was arrested in Nairobi on November 16, 2024 by intelligence operatives and illegally renditioned to Uganda where he was detained incommunicado.
On February 1, 2025, a visibly frail Besigye was sneaked in a wheelchair before the Nakawa magistrate court in Kampala alongside his aide and co-accused Obeid Lutale, and Capt. Denis Oola.
The trio are accused of soliciting military, financial, and other logistical support to assassinate Museveni and topple his government.
The Makerere University Medical School graduate in 1980, Besigye and his peers were confronted by a violent state suffering from the residual effects of Idi Amin’s reign of terror.
The defeat of Amin created a power vacuum after the short-lived Prof Yusuf Lule and Godfrey Binaisa governments. The state was now in the hands of praetorian guards who paid allegiance to centrifugal personalities.
Museveni on February 6, 1981 alongside 41 others including Rwanda President, Paul Kagame, launched a rebellion against the Milton Obote II government, which had won the election in December 1980 amidst allegations of rigging.
A year later in February 1982, Besigye abandoned a well-paying job as a medical doctor in Nairobi. He took a perilous journey through the deeper recesses of the jungle to join Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA), which was a guerilla army and the military wing of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in the garrison Luweero triangle.
Museveni had graduated with a Bachelors in Political Science at Dar es Salaam University in 1970—a bastion for African liberation struggles, radical leftist teachings, and cold-war diplomacy.
Museveni’s thesis dripping with a sting was titled Fanon’s Theory of Violence: Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique, gleaned from the script of Frantz Fanon’s Magnus Opus, Wretched of the Earth.
After graduating in 1970, Museveni joined the General Service department, an intelligence gathering outfit headed by President Milton Obote’s first cousin, the bookish Naphlin Akena Adoko who also served as the President of the Uganda Law Society (ULS).
In his book titled From Obote to Obote, published in 1983, Akena wrote: “Museveni’s ambition was so intense that it became a substitute for talents. His whole heart seemed to have been devoted to the attainment of the goal of his ambition. In the case of Museveni, the passion developed to a morbid degree is one for political power. The monomania to rule over others.”
Museveni later established underground cells across Uganda to fight the Amin government, which ousted Obote in 1971. The Front for National Salvation (FRONASA)— a militant group operated clandestinely.
But the price was too high to pay. Museveni’s disciples including Martin Mwesiga, Valerio Rwaheru, and Mpiza Kazimimoto were killed including Malibo Abwooli who was executed alongside nine others in blood-curling firing squads across the country.
Besigye was impressed by the lofty ideas of revolution, which he believed would usher in a peaceful period and create an egalitarian state where citizens would be equal before the law.
Upon the defeat of Idi Amin in April 1979, Besigye joined Museveni’s party, Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM), which contested in the December 1980 presidential election.
The election mimicked the British Westminster model, where the President was elected by the party that won the majority seats. Museveni then a run-of-the-mill candidate, contested for the Mbarara North Constituency seat.
Museveni was defeated by Sam Kutesa, the Democratic Party (DP) candidate who later on became his-in-law after his daughter, Charlotte Nankunda Kainerugaba, married the President’s son, who is currently the Chief of Defence Forces, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba.
The election, which was marred by ethnic undertones, placed Boniface Byanyima, a man who had provided a home to Museveni in secondary school— in the crosshairs.
Byanyima, a DP politician in the cattle-keeping sub-region of Ankole is the father to Kizza Besigye’s wife, Winnie Byanyima, an aeronautical engineer by profession who is the head of UN Aids.
Elder Byanyima supported Kutesa in the 1980 election. In a 2005 interview published by the Uganda Observer newspaper, Byanyima revealed: “He (Museveni) was a young man of ambition, always trying to show that he was better than other students. And he appeared to be ambitious in small things. Whenever he got a chance, he wanted to show that he was an important person. He wanted to be respected.”
Byanyima recalled how Museveni romanticised leftist ideology.
“When he was in Dar es Salaam University, he started coming to my home with communism literature. He was talking of Russian-type communism. He was praising Lenin and other communist leaders. He was talking about communist slogans and phrases like proletariat, common man…He never told me of his political ambitions.
“He only told me that he was fighting for the common man. He was praising people like Che Guevara, a South American revolutionary. He was praising the Julius Nyerere leadership and talking of crushing capitalists. That kind of language.”
The UPM came second-last in the 1980 presidential election with 4 per cent of the vote and only won one seat in Kasese North after the popular DP candidate, Victor Muhindo, who was expected to win the election, was kidnapped and killed by UPC agents.
In a protest vote, the constituents elected UPM’s Chrispus Kiyonga. Obote’s UPC was declared the victor in the election where the DP party under Paul Kawanga Ssemogererere came second and believed that he was rigged after the results were announced by the powerful Obote ally, Paulo Muwanga who was later appointed as Prime Minister in the Obote II government.
The results of the 1980 election created the perfect storm.
Museveni embraced guerilla warfare in Luweero resulting in the death of thousands of civilians and hundreds of soldiers and rebels at the treacherous frontline. Besigye who was Museveni’s doctor, used his finesse to perform surgery on the heavily-wounded soldiers.
“Let me use this rare opportunity to thank you Dr Warren Kizza-Besigye. I have never said it but let me say it now, thank you so much for saving my leg. If it wasn’t you, I wouldn’t be having a leg,” said the former Internal Security Organisation spy chief and Security minister, Lt Gen Henry Tumukunde at a burial ceremony in Rukungiri, South Western Uganda, 2018.
The NRA bands captured power on January 25, 1986 after ousting the short-lived military junta led by Brig Bazillio-Okello and Lt Gen Tito-Okello Lutwa.
Besigye at the age of 29 was appointed as the Minister of State for Internal Affairs in the Museveni-led NRM government.
He later held the positions of Minister of State in the President's office and National Political Commissar (NPC). In 1991, he became the commanding officer of the mechanised regiment in Masaka district— one of the most sensitive units of the army, and in 1993, he was appointed the army's chief of logistics and engineering.
Besigye wielded immense power in these roles that could only be compared to the former Premier, Amama Mbabazi, the former spy Tsar, the late Brig Noble Mayombo, and the former Inspector General of Police, Gen Kale Kayihura.
“There has never been a person in Uganda with power than Col. Kizza Besigye. Even when he was still in NRM government, if he summoned you, you would see a young man with power under 30 years. But he never abused his power,” Tumukunde revealed in 2018.
Besigye later on joined the Constituency Assembly, which was charged with debating the draft of the Constitution, which was promulgated in October 1995. Though he was representing the army alongside other officers, Besigye openly defied officialdom positions alongside other officers including the late NRA Chief Political Commissar, Col. Sserwanga Lwanga, former coordinator of intelligence Services, Gen David Sejusa and former Army Commander, Maj Gen Gregory Mugisha Muntu.
In 1996, Museveni alleged that Besigye was meeting Gen Sejusa at his home and was plotting to overthrow him, allegations he refuted.
Three years later, Besigye wrote a document critical of the government titled An Insider's View of How the NRM Lost the Broad Base. The missive accused the NRM of becoming a sectarian kleptocracy and a one-man dictatorship. Besigye was charged before the military court-martial for airing his views at the wrong forum.
In 1999, Besigye married Winnie who was previously courted by President Museveni for marriage and had also participated in the bush-war.
During an interview with the Observer newspaper, Winnie’s father Byanyima in 2005 stated: “I can’t remember when or how she joined them, but she became one of the NRA guerrillas, and then she was in their government. When they came from the bush, she came here and I warned her. I told her not to join the Museveni government. I told her that Museveni was not a reliable character. But she wouldn’t listen to me.
“Then Museveni came here proposing marriage. He wanted to marry her, which I opposed. I told my daughter Museveni was not a reliable character. I think it was in 1987. By then he was married to Janet Kataha. I knew that. First, came his father Amos Kaguta to propose. I said no. Then Museveni came here when he was president. I said I can’t agree. I said if you are marrying her if she wants, it will be her responsibility. Me I don’t want that.”
According to Byanyima, Museveni and Winnie stayed together for a while at Entebbe.
“Then Karagwa (Winnies) realised that Museveni was not a good person to stay with. I think she discovered what I had told her about the character of Museveni; so, she left Museveni and his government,” recalled elder Byanyima.
In October 2000, Besigye announced that he would run against Museveni in the 2001 elections after he had retired from the army. The announcement rattled the NRM party and was deemed an attempt to defy the unwritten credo.
Amama Mbabazi, the former premier and close confidant of Museveni, accused Besigye of ‘jumping the queue’. This was a reference to a perceived historical ranking of the NRA/NRM politburo, which placed Besigye below cadres such as the late first deputy premier Eriya Kategaya, and the late Speaker of Parliament, James Wapakhabulo who were close confidants of the President in their heydays at Dar es Salaam University.
During the 2001 campaigns, Besigye accused the government of widespread corruption and pushed for an end to Museveni's "Movement" system, which he said had served its purpose as an instrument in Uganda's political transition to multiparty democracy.
He lost the election, which was marred by claims of widespread vote rigging and violence. In March 2001, Besigye petitioned the Supreme Court to nullify the election results. A panel of five judges voted 5:0 that there had been cheating but decided 3:2 not to annul the elections based on the substantiality test.
In June 2001, Besigye was briefly arrested and questioned by the police over allegations of treason. The government accused him of being behind a rebel group, the People's Redemption Army (PRA), which was based in the volatile eastern, DRC.
In November 2005, William Lacy Swing, the United Nations special envoy to the Great Lakes region, confirmed the existence of the PRA, naming it as one of the foreign, armed groups operating in the eastern DRC.
Besigye's supporters said the government had fabricated the existence of the insurgents to taint his image.
In August 2001, Besigye fled the country, citing persecution by the state. He said he was afraid for his life. He lived in South Africa for four years, where he continued to criticise Museveni's government.
Besigye returned to Uganda on 26 October 2005, just in time to register as a voter in the 2006 elections. He was greeted by legions of his supporters and addressed a rally at Kololo Independence grounds in Kampala, adjacent to State House, Nakasero.
In a fiery speech, Besigye said that Museveni was a scarecrow who could only intimidate cowards.
On November 14, 2005 Besigye was arrested on charges of treason and rape. The treason charges pertained to his alleged links to the PRA and the 20-year-old northern Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army rebellion and rape charges.
His arrest coincided with the NRM delegates conference attended by Museveni, which was being held at the Mandela National Stadium in Namboole on the outskirts of Kampala. It sparked protests in Kampala and around the country.
Museveni was accused of trumping up charges against Besigye in an attempt to discredit him or prevent him from standing in the election. He was later acquitted of all the charges by the High Court judge, John Bosco Katutsi.
“The evidence before this court is inadequate even to prove a debt; impotent to deprive of a civil right; ridiculous for convicting of the pettiest offence; scandalous if brought forward to support a charge of any grave character; monstrous if to ruin the honour of a man who offered himself as a candidate for the highest office of this country,” argued Judge Katutsi.
Besigye again stood against Museveni who was re-elected for another five-year term, having won 59 per cent of the vote to Besigye's 37 per cent. Besigye, alleged fraud and rejected the result.
The Supreme Court of Uganda later ruled that the election was marred by intimidation, violence, voter disenfranchisement, and other irregularities, but voted 4:3 to uphold the results of the elections claiming that the irregularities were not substantial enough to overturn the election.
In the 2011 elections, Besigye for the third time in a row lost to Museveni, with a sharp decline from previous polls, failing to win in a single region.
In the 2016 elections, Besigye again stood as the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) presidential candidate, against Museveni and former premier Amama Mbabazi. Besigye again lost to Museveni, receiving only 34 per cent of the vote to Museveni's 62 percent.
In the aftermath of the election, Besigye urged his supporters to protest the results peacefully, claiming that the electoral process had been rigged through intimidation of voters, imprisonment of opponents, sabotage of rallies, late delivery of election materials, delayed opening of election centers, vote falsification at undisclosed tally centers, and bribery, among other malpractices.
On May 11, 2016, Besigye attempted to swear himself in as president of Uganda, a day before the official swearing-in ceremony of President Museveni and was arrested.
Besigye opted not to run for president in the 2021 elections, saying it would be an exercise in futility to contest in a sham election whose winner was pre-determined. He promised a plan B to confront the dictatorship.
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