Lt. Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba is the son of Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, and Commander of Uganda Land Forces (UPDF), making him responsible for peacekeeping contingents, including AMISOM in Somalia.
[Image src: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_U… >> Uganda has contributed most troops.]
Five days before @mkainerugaba's strange trip to Egypt and associated twitter activity, his father President Museveni issued a statement "ON THE MILITARY COUPS THAT HAVE RECENTLY TAKEN PLACE IN SOME
AFRICAN COUNTRIES" >> yowerikmuseveni.com/sites/default/…
On the same day @mkainerugaba posted this tweet. Recalling what appear to be fond memories of his time in Egypt.
President @KagutaMuseveni's column is an interesting read. He recounts the history of freedom fighting in Africa and asks questions about the coups in Mali and Guinea, specifically, who are the coup makers to go against the AU, whose opposition to coup's is clear and unambiguous.
Ok so back to Lt. Gen @mkainerugaba. On the same day as his father publishes a column raising questions about coups he posts three pictures recalling his time in Egypt, presumably for military training.
And his tweet is promptly quoted by Egypt Asst. Deputy FMA @melhamzawi.
And four days later he posts what appears to be a picture of himself with Lt General @mkainerugaba, quoting the General's now famous image of a younger self holding hands with then General Al-Sisi.
The timestamps on the two tweets shows that the Egyptian Minister (6.17pm) and Ugandan General's (5.11pm) tweets are just over an hour apart and one.
From this it seems reasonable to surmise they may have been together when the tweets were sent.
Two hours earlier at 3.22pm @mkainerugaba had already tweeted the photo, albeit at that time with a different message.
The first one is possibly harmless. The second however is incendiary. " If anybody thinks of fighting Egypt, he should know he will be fighting Uganda as well."
To recap the story so far:
- President @KagutaMuseveni posts a column about neo-colonialism & coups.
- Lt Gen. @mkainerugaba tweets fondly about Egypt.
- Egyptian FM responds positively.
- They meet up and the Lt. Gen. effectively threatens Ethiopia.
But Lt. Gen. @mkainerugaba doesn't stop there and posts 24 quoted versions of the two tweets. 15 of the first one and 9 of the second one. Mostly tweeted by patriotic Egyptians, who take the tweets as evidence of Ugandan support for Egypt's grievance with Ethiopia.
This is also very apparent in the replies that @mkainerugaba gets to his tweets.
And then the following day he re-tweets two more politically charged tweets. This is the first.
Ok so this is a bit weird, but in a kinda chill way so do bare with me and and I will be happy to answer questions afterwards. It’s about a castle on a virtual island in a massive online role playing game called Evony and it involves a possible but speculative discussion about @elonmusk and @X.
All will be revealed but first a picture or four actually from the game. More will come.
Ok. So here’s what I think is going on in a nutshell. I think elonmusk has invested in a MMORPG: a “Massive Multimedia Online Role Playing Game” which is a bit of a mouthful, called EVONY.
I liked its Twitter ads and finally clicked. It’s huge. Someone else can do the business story here which I am sure is interesting too.
But the this bit is weird.
The mysterious knight on the red horse arrived this morning beside my castle and he had some treasure.
I hadn’t a clue who it was so I grabbed the treasure and tried to kill the horse and rider as that’s what you do. But we got smashed badly.
This interview with working class Uk financial markets savant Gary Stevenson - who has just published an autobiography - is seriously terrifying. He now has a @YouTube channel it seems and I’ll post a link shortly.
James O'Brien meets Gary Stevenson | LBC via @YouTube
His prognosis for the collapse of social democratic nation state finances due to the very sharp rise in income distribution inequality in the UK is horrific.
The consequences of unfettered transfers of money over decades due to neoliberal economics initially and more recently quantitative easing driven transfers of wealth from the middle class to the top 5% of the population is the cause of his concern.
It’s very hard to imagine what can be done politically to rebalance this.
Thomas Piketty’s thesis which among other things warned about all of this based on long term historical analysis of wealth inequality appears to be colliding with Western Civilisation in a manner that threatens the very foundations of that civilisation.
Gary’s YouTube channel which addresses all this is here.
Well this was actually pretty good… very little crazy right wing stuff - none in fact - some light criticism of wokeness and a consensus that Hitler was a socialist or communist dictator not a rightwing liberal fascist - mercifully no discussion of Greenland Panama or Canada
The bit at the end was actually quite nice and agreement about ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Importantly and probably deliberately there was very little to zero overt electioneering - a little bit of criticism of Weidel’s Spitzencandidat competition from Weidle but nothing extreme.
So nothing imo that could be seen as being election interference IMO - nor any reason for the DSA to be concerned or to get involved.
I didn’t even hear any particularly overt endorsement that went beyond that you might hear in passing in a podcast interview.
It ended with a discussion of mars - Elon’s favourite subject of conversation - which was quite interesting including a reference to the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy series and Douglas Adams.
From Weidel’s point of view though there was a lot of positive moderate exposure of her party and probably around 200k + listeners. Which may give her a bounce in the polls.
Also the final segment talking about space was quite delightful and genuine and portrayed the AFD Leader in a positive light.
And I’d say the two of them have both found a new friend.
This is an update thread on this OCCRP story on @StateDept and @USAID funding for several large investigative journalism projects which has had a lot of downstream impacts it seems. Especially in Europe,
The underlying original story about govt funding for investigative journalism projects was initially flagged by @ryangrim.
This organisation - OCCRP that not many people seemed to have been aware of - was responsible for a series of outstanding investigative journalism consortia projects including the Panama papers.
This is a leaked rough cut of the NDR (German public broadcaster north west Germany) investigation into what happened With the OCCRP story.
It was never officially published but was recently leaked publicly by Wikileaks.
With the benefit of hindsight arguably Wikileaks ought to be the international organisation that coordinates these large investigative consortia, though it’s not clear that they want to do so.
What is clear from the fallout from all of this is that the system that was in place for running these consortia is no longer fit for purpose.