Ruhamya Kainerugaba completes 44-week commissioning course at the British military academy, 26 years after his father graduated from the same institution
Ruhamya Kainerugaba, the son of Uganda’s chief of defence forces, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has graduated from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, completing the same officer training course his father finished more than two decades ago.
Ruhamya was commissioned alongside fellow Ugandan officer cadet Andrew Bakira during the academy’s Sovereign’s Parade on Friday. The ceremony at Sandhurst’s historic campus in Surrey brought together newly commissioned British and international officers, military officials, dignitaries and relatives.
Gen Muhoozi attended the ceremony to watch his son receive his commission. Before the parade, he was received by Sandhurst’s commandant, Maj Gen Nick Cowley OBE, who presented him with a Sandhurst alumni medal.
The presentation had a personal significance for the Ugandan military chief. The tradition of issuing the alumni badge was introduced after Muhoozi’s own time at the academy.
Muhoozi graduated from Sandhurst in 2000. In the days before his son’s commissioning, he shared photographs from his own officer training alongside images of Ruhamya at the academy, reflecting on the experience of a father and son undertaking the same demanding training 27 years apart.
The 44-week commissioning course is intended to prepare cadets for the responsibilities of military command. Training covers tactics, weapons systems, fieldcraft, operational planning, leadership and military ethics, with cadets tested in demanding physical and operational exercises.
Ruhamya and Bakira will return to the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces after their commissioning, joining the ranks of officers responsible for leading soldiers in the Ugandan military.
But the graduation came against a backdrop of growing concern within western military establishments about the changing nature of global security.
Addressing the graduating cadets, Gen Sir Roly Walker, the British army’s chief of the general staff, said the assumption that western militaries would maintain overwhelming military superiority was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
“We had every confidence that it was a world in which we dominated militarily,” Walker said, adding that the era was “fading fast”.
He warned that the prospect of major war could no longer be treated as distant and said national defence would increasingly depend on wider society rather than the armed forces alone.
For the new officers, he said, that uncertainty made their responsibility more important rather than less.
“There is an absolute clarity to your purpose, which is to be ready to fight and win your nation’s battles,” Walker said.
He told the graduates that soldiers would depend on them for leadership and that their first responsibility would be to earn the trust of those under their command.
“Our nations will need their soldiers. Those soldiers will need to be led,” he said. “They deserve the best leaders.”
The message reflected the principle at the centre of Sandhurst’s training: “Serve to Lead.”
For Uganda, Ruhamya’s commissioning marks the entry of another Sandhurst-trained officer into the UPDF. For Gen Muhoozi, it also closes a generational circle that began with his own graduation from the British academy in 2000.
