Attorney General has advised President Yoweri Museveni that the disputed succession to the Tooro throne should ultimately be settled through the courts, with the late King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV’s 2022 will followed unless its validity is successfully challenged.
The legal opinion by Attorney General Sam Mayanja, dated September 12, 2026, came as Tooro buried Oyo at the Karambi Royal Tombs amid a dispute between the Babiito royal clan, which selected Prince Edward Rukidi Kijanangoma as successor, and members of Oyo’s immediate family, who maintain that the late king’s biological son was designated as heir in his will.
Mayanja said the dispute over the will had not been satisfactorily resolved through the traditional mechanism of the Council of Elders and recommended that the courts determine the matter.
The advice has elevated the succession dispute from an internal royal disagreement into a test of how Uganda’s constitutional and statutory framework accommodates traditional authority when customary processes fail to produce consensus.
It also places Parliament’s role in sharper focus. Uganda’s Constitution recognises traditional and cultural institutions but leaves their operation subject to legislation, while the Institution of Traditional or Cultural Leaders Act, 2011 expressly provides a pathway from customary dispute resolution to the courts.
Mayanja recommended that Oyo’s will should be followed unless its validity is successfully challenged in court.
According to the legal opinion as reported, he noted that there was disagreement over both the contents and validity of the document and that the dispute had not been resolved by the Council of Elders to the satisfaction of the community and all interested parties.
The recommendation is significant because it does not simply endorse one faction’s interpretation of Tooro custom. Instead, it proposes that a contested legal document be subjected to judicial scrutiny rather than settled through competing assertions about what the late king intended.
The Attorney General also advised that the traditional burial ritual associated with the installation of a successor should be suspended until the succession question is determined.
That recommendation, however, was overtaken by events. During Oyo’s burial on Saturday, Kijanangoma performed the traditional ritual of casting nine coffee berries into Oyo’s grave, an act reported by Reuters as marking the formal handover of power.
The development means that a ritual the Attorney General had recommended suspending pending resolution of the dispute was performed before the underlying succession question had been conclusively settled through the courts.
The dispute has implications beyond the Tooro royal family because Uganda’s constitutional settlement deliberately recognises traditional institutions while limiting their governmental authority.
Article 246 of the Constitution provides for traditional and cultural leaders in accordance with the culture, customs and traditions, or wishes and aspirations, of the people concerned. It also states that where the issue of a traditional or cultural leader has not been resolved, the community is to resolve it through a method prescribed by Parliament.
The legislation is particularly relevant to the current dispute because Section 15 establishes a two-stage approach to conflicts within a traditional or cultural institution.
First, a dispute is to be handled by a council of elders, clan leaders or another representative body chosen and approved by the community, using the community’s own traditions, customs and norms.
But where the community fails to resolve the dispute, the matter is to be referred to court. The law expressly includes disputes over who should be the traditional or cultural leader and whether the proper installation procedure has been followed.
That provision closely mirrors the circumstances now confronting Tooro: an internal traditional mechanism has produced a successor, but a rival claim remains unresolved.
The Attorney General’s recommendation therefore appears to rely on a statutory route already created by Parliament rather than replacing customary authority with an entirely new process.
The immediate source of the disagreement is Oyo’s Last Will and Testament dated September 14, 2022.
According to the legal opinion described by the Attorney General, the document provides that if Oyo died leaving a son capable of succeeding him, that son would be his heir to the Tooro throne.
The will also reportedly contains a fallback provision naming Prince Komwiswa Yoweri, son of Omusuuga Charles Kamurasi Akiiki, as the next heir if the son died before assuming the throne, became permanently incapacitated or otherwise became unable to perform the duties of the office.
The will’s alleged designation of a biological son became central to the succession dispute following Oyo’s death.
Members of Oyo’s immediate family, including Queen Mother Best Kemigisa and Princess Ruth Komuntale, have challenged the decision to install Kijanangoma, citing the late king’s testamentary wishes. International reporting has confirmed that the existence and status of the alleged son became the central point of disagreement after Oyo’s death.
The Babiito royal clan, however, proceeded with its own succession process and on September 9 announced Kijanangoma, Oyo’s cousin and a journalist with Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, as successor.
The competing positions therefore involve two distinct questions: what the royal clan’s customary succession process requires, and what legal effect should be given to the late king’s will if its contents and validity are disputed.
Those questions may ultimately require judicial determination. The succession dispute had threatened to complicate Oyo’s burial because the traditional ceremony includes participation by the successor.
Mayanja advised that the burial itself could proceed, while the contested succession ritual should be suspended until the dispute was resolved.
He reportedly pointed to precedent involving the burial of the late King Kaboyo, where the relevant ritual was conducted months after burial following confirmation of his successor. But the separation between burial and succession did not hold at Karambi.
Kijanangoma participated in the royal burial ceremony and cast the nine coffee berries into Oyo’s grave. Reuters reported the ritual as the formal handover of power, while other reports described it as part of the traditional installation process.
That development creates an important legal and constitutional question: does performance of the ritual settle the succession under Tooro custom, or can the succession still be challenged and determined through the statutory dispute-resolution process?
The Attorney General’s opinion suggests that the existence and validity of the will remain matters capable of judicial determination. The ritual, by contrast, is a manifestation of customary authority.
How those two sources of legitimacy interact is now at the heart of the dispute. Uganda’s constitutional framework does not treat traditional institutions as alternative governments.
The Act also requires traditional and cultural institutions to operate consistently with the Constitution and other laws.
That distinction matters in the Tooro case. The state recognises the cultural institution and its customs, but succession to a traditional throne exists within a constitutional order in which Parliament has prescribed mechanisms for resolving disputes.
The Attorney General’s recommendation therefore reflects a broader principle: customary processes remain important, but they operate within the legal framework established by the Constitution and legislation.
The government’s role in the dispute is particularly sensitive.
Traditional kings and cultural leaders in Uganda have no administrative, legislative or executive powers of government. Their principal significance is cultural and historical, and the Constitution protects the institutions while separating them from the exercise of state power.
That makes the Attorney General’s intervention consequential but also limited.
His opinion is legal advice to the President, not a court judgment establishing who is legally entitled to the Tooro throne.
The final determination of a disputed legal claim would depend on the appropriate judicial process and the evidence presented before the court.
This distinction will be important if the dispute proceeds to litigation. Neither the Attorney General’s opinion nor the performance of a traditional ritual should automatically be treated as equivalent to a judicial determination of the validity of the will.
The Tooro succession crisis illustrates why Parliament’s role in regulating traditional institutions remains significant more than three decades after Uganda restored its kingdoms.
The constitutional settlement restored traditional and cultural institutions while simultaneously defining their place within a modern republican state.
Article 246 places Parliament at the centre of unresolved questions concerning traditional leadership by requiring that the method for resolving such disputes be prescribed in law. Parliament subsequently enacted the 2011 legislation, including provisions for customary dispute resolution and referral to court when those mechanisms fail.
The Tooro dispute is therefore an unusually visible test of that framework.
If the royal clan’s decision and the family’s challenge remain irreconcilable, the case could provide an opportunity for the courts to clarify how customary succession, testamentary evidence, clan authority and statutory requirements interact.
It could also test the practical boundary between a traditional community’s authority to select its leader and the state’s responsibility to ensure that the process remains consistent with the Constitution and legislation.
Oyo’s death has generated considerable public attention because he became internationally known after ascending the Tooro throne at the age of three in 1995 and remained one of Uganda’s most recognisable traditional leaders. His death at 34, following cancer treatment in the United States, has now been followed by a succession crisis involving his closest family and the wider royal clan.
The dispute has also attracted international attention because it sits at the intersection of hereditary tradition, customary authority and modern constitutional governance.
Uganda’s Constitution and the 2011 Act provide an answer that begins with customary resolution and, if that fails, moves towards the courts. The Attorney General has now advised the President along substantially the same path.
Whether that path will be followed remains to be seen. Kijanangoma has already performed the key burial ritual, while Oyo’s family continues to rely on the alleged will and the claim that the late king designated his biological son as heir.
The next stage could therefore shift the contest from royal deliberations and burial rituals to documentary evidence, customary law and judicial interpretation.
For Parliament, the episode is a reminder that the constitutional recognition of traditional institutions requires more than protecting cultural identity. It also requires clear rules for resolving disputes when tradition, testamentary wishes and competing claims to hereditary authority collide.
The immediate priority will be to prevent the succession dispute from deepening divisions within Tooro while allowing any legal challenge to be determined through the institutions Uganda’s Constitution and Parliament have established.
The credibility of the eventual succession may depend less on which faction prevails than on whether the process produces a result that is lawful, culturally legitimate, evidence-based and capable of commanding broad acceptance among the Batooro-Ug. Parliament Watch.
