Understanding Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba from a mental health perspective

Muhoozi ought not to exhibit these challenges besides he is the president’s son.


By James William Mugeni

USA, October 13, 2022: Everyone needs help at times. It is okay to ask for help but conditions might make asking for help difficult. When we fail to get help our actions may be an indicator.

This belief is purely medical, not political and if I can save Muhoozi and Uganda, I will take pride in having contributed.

Mental illness is real, but I should be quick to say in Muhoozi’s case, he is likely to get a false diagnosis like the false promotions he has got. No medic will dare to give Muhoozi a definite diagnosis.

All of Muhoozi’s actions that get negative community ratings and uproar are characteristics of the negative reactions communities give a supposedly an adult facing mental health challenges.

Muhoozi ought not to exhibit these challenges besides he is the president’s son.

He’s like a boy who grows and cannot meet his parent’s expectations. A boy who grows up with a forced stepmother.

A boy who knows It is wrong to kill Ugandans, but the father is asking him to kill his peers. He is surrounded by killing machines that do what he has no control over.

A boy who knows he has unfairly been promoted. From an LDU to a General in a short time, we see the effects on his character. Local Defense Units are the crudest of militias which the president’s son ought not to have started from.

It is not until recently that the president decided to sanitize being an LDU by associating it with professional academic qualifications.

Living a life of an LDU covered in a general itself is nerve-wracking. What are we seeing? This is purely mental health science.

Muhoozi is seeking acceptance. This boy has all the reasons to be a zombie now that even “social media hooligans are not accepting him.”

Muhoozi knows it is only the bullet that can make him a president. From his body posture, he is not a soldier.

Now the target of the presidency is a tall order, but the father wants him to be.

Muhoozi scarcely travelled, haphazardly educated, and advised and surrounded by sycophants: the young man is in trouble. He joins the 14 million Ugandans with behavioural health problems that lack attention.

He is living a life of self-indulgence and perhaps finds alcohol numbing his misery.

If statistics do not lie, for the 14 million Ugandans with mental health challenges Muhoozi becomes a (their) general. Muhoozi is cold, his emotions are flat, exaggerated, or improper. His emotions seem completely disconnected from situations or are expressed at the wrong times or in the wrong circumstances.

Why the embarrassing behaviour? Clinical medicine cannot fail to describe what we have at hand, acting impulsively without considering how others perceive his behaviour is social disinhibition.

You can read that Muhoozi doesn’t want to be associated with killings, but it is a family menu. He has been fed on since childhood and eventually conscripted into the army without choices.

The father in trying to make him has instead produced a broken man. A sad man trying to keep up appearances in which he has written scripts.

Given the inhumanity of the father’s crimes, Muhoozi was early on linked with “psychopathy” a severe personality disorder whose main symptoms are a great or complete lack of empathy, social responsibility, and conscience. Shuttered innocence is the language here.

Worst is the coming-on scene of one Robert Kyagulanyi whose stories from the ghetto are a miracle and this sets the bar even higher for a child who had nothing.

Kyagulanyi whom he tries to compare with is now globe-trotting with impact. Muhoozi is locked up in Kampala between the state house and perhaps bottles of drinks.

The tweets are self-telling “THEY ARE UNPROFESSIONAL, ARE ERATTIC”. Jumping on Bobi Wine is suicidal on a self-made Ghetto president.

The father says despite his notoriety he has achieved so much within a short time hence the promotion. Achievements speak for themselves; they do not need a marketing manager.

The medics around the family face real ethical dilemmas.

Writing for Harvard Business Review, executive coach, Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries claims a surprising percentage of leaders have some sort of personality disorder.

The author adds that a leader’s mental health has a direct and major impact on the morale and structure of the working environment. “Toxic leaders” create unhappy workplaces. Further, a warped personality can put business plans, systems, and even, entire organizations at risk.

Most leaders would benefit from the kind of self-reflection facilitated by an executive coach, insists Kets de Vries. Even the mentally healthy can display some of the traits associated with a personality disorder.

The author explains how executive coaches – combining psychotherapy with management theory – can help leaders recognize the pitfalls in their personalities and develop more useful behavioural patterns.

The further author describes four of the most common personality disorders among executives and advises how best to deal with them.

Imagine in a matter of seconds Muhoozi almost brought the East African region into chaos. Kenya won the social media altercations.

The Narcissist

According to Kets de Vries, pathological narcissism is the most common dysfunction to be found among senior executives.

He explains that everyone displays some degree of narcissism (we all need a little of it to survive), but too much is dangerous, often leading to the pursuit of power at any cost.


The writer is a medical Clinical Officer/Certified Public Manager.

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