The Empty Throne of Tooro: A Succession In Chaos, And What Busoga’s Long Ordeal Should Have Taught

By Joseph Kafuko                                                    

On 27 August 2026, Omukama Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV of Tooro died in the United States at the age of 34, after a battle with cancer. He was the boy-king crowned at three years old in 1995, certified by Guinness World Records as the youngest reigning monarch in history, and he died unmarried, with no publicly acknowledged child.

In the two weeks since, the kingdom has announced a successor and seen him rejected by the late king’s own family: on 9 September the Babiito royal clan named a television news anchor as the next Omukama, while Oyo’s sister and mother insist that his will, dated 2022, names a son no one has ever seen as the true heir. With the burial set for 12 September, the crown is in dispute and no faction has conceded.

The fissures open before the funeral

The crisis began with an extraordinary claim. Tooro’s Prime Minister, Calvin Armstrong Rwomiire, declared in the official obituary that “the crown’s continuity is assured”, the late king had left a prince whose identity would be announced “in accordance with tradition.” President Yoweri Museveni repeated the claim, saying the Queen Mother, Best Kemigisa, had told him Oyo left a young son. But the head of the Babiito royal clan, the Omusuuga Charles Akiiki Kamurasi, who had known the king since childhood, publicly doubted the story and demanded that any alleged heir be produced and verified before the clan. His spokesman, Moses Musinguzi, was blunt: “A king is put on the throne; he is not elected through voting.”

That warning was aimed at what happened next. On 4 September, veteran journalist Andrew Mwenda announced that the 21-member Royal Succession Committee formed after Oyo’s death had selected George Desmond Kamurasi, a 36-year-old English citizen, captain and goalkeeper of the London ninth-tier club SE Dons, by 15 votes out of 18 members present, with President Museveni and army chief General Muhoozi Kainerugaba reportedly endorsing the choice.

Kamurasi’s lineage runs through his father, Prince George Desmond “Jimmy” Mugenyi, a younger brother of Oyo’s father, making him a grandson of King George Rukidi III, the fallback line named in Rukidi’s will should the main branch die out. The Omusuuga, the very man reported to chair the committee, disowned the announcement, saying he had no knowledge of any such decision. Within days the reported choice collapsed: Kamurasi reportedly declined the throne, amid loyalists’ criticism that he was too detached from the kingdom to rule it.

The awkwardness had never been merely legal. Kamurasi reportedly did not want the job, he has a life in London, a wife and son, and his club was due to play a cup tie on the very day of Oyo’s funeral. Refusing a royal summons is considered sacrilege in Tooro tradition, yet accepting it would have meant abandoning everything he has built. His reported refusal closed the committee’s first option and sent the search elsewhere, into a royal branch with a long history of challenging the throne.

A successor is announced, and rejected

On the evening of Wednesday 9 September, the Babiito royal clan announced a new king. A 21-member succession committee, acting under the authority of the Musuuga, the head of the clan, named Prince Edward Rukidi Kijanangoma as the next Omukama in a resolution read at Karuziika Palace by Monsignor Isaiah Mayombo and signed by 19 members. Kijanangoma is a cousin of the late king and a familiar face across Uganda: a news anchor and editor at the state broadcaster Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC).

He is the son of the late Prince Christopher Paul Kijanangoma and the grandson of former King George David Rukidi III, the same branch whose members openly challenged Oyo’s leadership in 2015. The clan said the choice followed consultations and would proceed through Tooro’s traditional rites; reports also indicated the committee turned to the Kijanangoma line only after Kamurasi’s refusal.

The announcement was rejected within hours, and by the people the clan needed most. Princess Ruth Komuntale, Oyo’s only sister, told a press conference that her brother had left a will, dated 14 September 2022, which named his son as heir: “I hereby declare and direct that if, at the date of my death, I am survived by a Son lawfully recognized as my biological Son, I appoint him as my heir to the Throne of the Kingdom of Tooro.”

Queen Mother Best Kemigisa went further, denouncing a “self-appointed group of clan members” and saying the will had been read at the palace on Wednesday at 4pm in the presence of the royal family and government representatives, including Gender Minister Henry Tumukunde, sent by President Museveni, only for the group to announce its own choice hours later.

She said security forces had removed the royal guards and placed the mourning family under what she called “house arrest,” and appealed to the army and the President to let the family bury Oyo in peace: “They could have done this anywhere else. Instead, they chose to jubilate while my son was still lying in his casket next to them.”

The rift has even split the clan’s own leadership. The sons of Musuuga Charles Kamurasi, Yoweri Komwiswa Nyaika and Solomon Mpuuga, publicly rejected Kijanangoma’s selection, accusing clan members of disregarding the late king’s wishes. They claimed Oyo had relieved their father of his duties as Musuuga after his 30th coronation anniversary last year and had appointed Mpuuga in his place. According to the family, the will not only names Oyo’s son as heir but lists Nyaika and Mpuuga as possible successors should the boy be unable to assume the crown.

The Babiito clan has shown no sign of retreating. Spokesman Moses Musinguzi said the traditional process to install Kijanangoma would proceed, guided by Tooro’s customs and the clan’s established procedures. Sceptics on the other side note that the purported son remains unseen: the journalist Andrew Mwenda, himself a royal relative, wrote that the family had produced no photograph of the boy and no details of his mother, and that under Tooro custom a king’s son can only succeed if born to a queen officially married to the king.

Prime Minister Rwomiire, who set off the controversy by announcing the heir’s existence, has now called for calm: “There will be time to examine the Will, to hear those advancing a different position, and to consider our customs, the applicable law and the proper institutions through which succession should be determined… not through competing announcements, confrontation, or attempts to establish facts on the ground while our King still awaits burial.”

The precedent: Busoga’s two kings

Tooro’s crisis is not the first of its kind in Uganda’s cultural kingdoms, and the closest precedent is Busoga, where the machinery of succession collapsed for the better part of a generation. When Kyabazinga Henry Wako Muloki died in 2008, Busoga split down the middle.

One camp enthroned his son, Prince Edward Columbus Wambuzi, on 31 October 2008, after he polled seven of the eleven hereditary chiefs who elect the Kyabazinga, short of the eight-vote quorum required by the kingdom’s written constitution. A rival camp, loyal to the family of the former Kyabazinga Wilberforce

Nadiope, insisted the throne was not hereditary and held its own election the following year, installing William Gabula Nadiope IV with just five chiefs.

For six years, Busoga had two kings. Court injunctions were obtained and defied; supporters of the two factions clashed; the kingdom’s prime minister took one side. Neither claimant could command enough legitimacy to govern, and neither side would accept the other’s process.

The deadlock was only broken in 2014, when President Museveni and the then Speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, summoned the eleven royal chiefs to a fresh election. Nadiope won with the constitutionally required quorum; Wambuzi boycotted and went to court.

The case dragged for nearly eight more years, until February 2022, when the High Court delivered its verdict: both the 2008 and 2009 elections were null and void for lack of quorum, but the 2014 election was valid, confirming Nadiope as the substantive Kyabazinga.

Even then, the peace was not immediate. Nadiope spent the next two years consolidating: an inclusive cabinet drawing ministers from every chiefdom, including from his rival’s camp; a new 12-billion-shilling palace; a state-backed royal wedding. By 2024, most observers agreed the kingdom had largely reunited, though dethroned chiefs still nursed grievances, and one former chief warned the unity had been “achieved illegally.” From Muloki’s death to broad harmony: roughly sixteen years.

The two crises at a glance

The timelines below summarise how the two succession crises unfolded, from the death of each king to the present day.

Table 1. Tooro succession timeline (2026)

Table 2. Busoga succession timeline (2008–2024)

Table 3. Comparison at a glance

Same engine, different fuel: both crises run on contested legitimacy, but Busoga’s was arbitrable (a written quorum a judge could apply), while Tooro’s now pits a dead king’s written will against a living clan’s sacred ritual, and neither can be cleanly decided by a court. That is the core reason Tooro’s path looks much longer.

Why Tooro’s road may be measured in decades

The two crises rhyme more than they differ: a contested claim, a legitimacy dispute dressed as a procedural one, presidential intervention, courts (or their absence) as arbiters, and years of factional resentment. But the differences are decisive, and they are why the instinct that Tooro’s healing may take decades is not pessimism but arithmetic.

First, Tooro’s legitimacy is ritual, not arbitrable, and the contest is now between two irreconcilable sources of authority. Busoga had a written constitution a judge could apply: eleven chiefs, an eight-vote quorum, an election record. When the High Court finally ruled in 2022, it could decide who was king, and that decision stuck. Tooro’s throne is hereditary and sacred: the successor is made king by crossing the Omusanga and receiving the royal regalia from the ritualists, not by a ballot. The clan now insists

the installation of Kijanangoma will proceed by ritual regardless of the will; the family counters with a private legal document. One side says the dead king’s word is law; the other says the clan’s living ritual outranks any document. No court can authenticate a ritual, and no ritual can invalidate a signed will, both claims may be true within their own systems, which is precisely why the conflict cannot be cleanly resolved.

Second, Tooro now has more fronts, not fewer. Busoga’s conflict was binary, two princes, two dates, one quorum. Tooro’s is at least four-way: the will-named son (whose identity nobody has verified), Kijanangoma (formally announced but rejected by the immediate family), the Musuuga’s sons (who claim Oyo himself nominated them as fallbacks), and a fourth dispute over who legitimately holds the Musuuga office at all. The clan’s first pick, Kamurasi, has already withdrawn. Every one of these fronts is capable of generating its own litigation, ritual standoff or counter-announcement.

Third, the “secret son” remains a poison pill with no exit, and it now has the force of a public document. The family has released the relevant clause of the will, dated 14 September 2022, naming a son as heir. If the boy is produced and verified, every other candidacy collapses, but the clan, which publicly demanded proof, is humiliated, and Tooro tradition grants the clan the last word.

If he is never produced, the credibility of the family, the Prime Minister and the Presidency is wounded, and the clan’s authority is vindicated at their expense. The clan, for its part, insists that a king’s son must be born to an officially married queen, a rule that, if applied, may disqualify the very child the will names. Either way, one of the kingdom’s two pillars, the palace family or the royal clan, emerges scarred. Busoga never had this landmine: there, both candidates were adult princes known to everyone.

Fourth, the state is now inside the palace. The Queen Mother alleges that royal guards were removed and the mourning family placed under effective house arrest by security forces, while a government minister sat in the room when the will was read.

In Busoga, presidential intervention eventually brokered a settlement, but only after six years of conflict, and only because the state’s mediation was broadly accepted. Where the state’s security apparatus is perceived to have taken sides in a cultural succession, it does not settle the dispute; it becomes a third faction in it.

Fifth, the clan’s choice is a bet on optics that has cost it consensus. Kijanangoma is a mature, publicly recognisable figure, an adult broadcaster, deliberately picked over an unseen child heir who would require a long regency. That is a reasonable calculation for stability.

But it is also a direct repudiation of the late king’s family and of the principle of direct primogeniture, and it hands the family a ready-made grievance: that the throne was decided by a self-selected group while their son still lay in a casket. A king installed without the acceptance of the family he replaces does not unite a kingdom; he inherits its divisions.

Finally, consider what “resolution” actually meant in Busoga. The legal fight ended in 2022, fourteen years after Muloki’s death, and even then, dethroned chiefs described the kingdom as still waging a “cold war” over legitimacy. Broad harmony came only around 2024, after an inclusive cabinet, a palace, and a royal wedding had been used as instruments of reconciliation.

Tooro is now entering the phase Busoga reached in 2008–09: a named king whom the other camp refuses to accept, a disputed document, and a funeral that may itself become the flashpoint. By that measure, decades is not hyperbole; it is the realistic baseline.

None of this means paralysis is inevitable. Tooro’s rituals have a singular power: once a prince crosses the Omusanga and the royal regalia are restored, the throne is, in the clan’s eyes, filled, and the burden shifts to whoever refuses to accept it. Government also has the muscle and the Busoga precedent to push a settlement. But a quick fix imposed by announcement or by presidential endorsement, without the family’s consent and the clan’s ritual, would purchase a crown at the price of exactly the legitimacy gap that keeps factions fighting for a generation.

The dispute has moved beyond the question of who should be king; it is now a contest over what makes a king, a dead monarch’s written will or a living clan’s sacred ritual. For the two million Batooro who buried their king at thirty-four, the crown is not vacant, it is in dispute. And as Busoga learned the hard way, a disputed crown does not heal quickly, even when everyone eventually agrees on who wears it.

The writer is a seasoned professional journalist, holding a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication and a master’s degree in Business Management.