King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Laid to Rest as Tooro Kingdom’s Succession War Erupts

Fort Portal, a quiet city tucked near Uganda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, has rarely seen a crowd like the one that gathered on Saturday, September 12. Mourners lined the roads leading to the Karambi Royal Tombs to watch the body of King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV make its final journey home. He was 34. For a kingdom that has followed him since he was a toddler in royal robes, his death still feels difficult to process.

King Oyo died on August 27 in the United States, where he had been undergoing cancer treatment away from public view. President Yoweri Museveni later confirmed that the illness was aggressive and that the government had funded his care, first in Germany, then in America, after his mother, Queen Mother Best Kemigisa, quietly appealed to the president months earlier. Most Ugandans had no idea their king was that sick. Tooro officials had spent weeks insisting he was alive, if critical, which made the eventual announcement land even harder.

A King Since He Was Three

Oyo’s story has always carried an unusual weight of “youngest” attached to it. He became Omukama of Tooro in 1995 after his father, King Olimi III, died suddenly of a heart attack. Oyo was three years old. He spent his childhood being led through the ceremonial and administrative duties of kingship by a panel of regents, only formally taking over at 18 during a coronation ceremony in Fort Portal in 2010.

For a while, that made him something of a global curiosity. Foreign leaders wanted to meet the boy king. Moammar Gadhafi treated the Tooro royal family almost like extended relatives, visiting Uganda more than once during Oyo’s youth. He was introduced to Nelson Mandela. None of that fame ever quite matched the more grounded work he did later as an adult, advocating for HIV/AIDS awareness, serving as a United Nations goodwill ambassador, and, just months before his death, donating 50 acres of his own land to the government so it could build a modern stadium for Tooro’s youth.

Nine Days of Mourning, Then a Burial Under Tension

Tooro custom calls for nine days of mourning before a king is buried, and the kingdom observed that in full. The funeral service itself took place at an Anglican cathedral in Fort Portal, by most accounts an emotional one, before the procession moved to Karambi, where generations of Tooro kings, including Oyo’s father, are buried.

But the burial did not settle the one question everyone actually wanted answered: who takes the throne next?

Weeks earlier, Tooro’s Prime Minister, Calvin Armstrong Rwomiire Akiiki, had announced the king’s death with a statement meant to reassure the public. “The continuity of the Crown is assured,” he said, adding that Oyo had left behind a prince as heir, whose identity would be revealed “at the appropriate time” according to Tooro tradition. That promise of clarity never really arrived. Instead, the kingdom entered its funeral period with two competing claims to the throne circulating, and neither side has backed down.

Two Claims, One Crown

The Babiito royal clan, which holds authority over succession matters in Tooro, convened its own committee and settled on Prince Edward Rukidi Kijanangoma, a 56-year-old news anchor and editor at Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, as the next Omukama. During the burial itself, Kijanangoma performed the traditional handover ritual, casting nine coffee berries into the king’s grave to formally take up power.

That should have been the end of it. It isn’t.

Queen Mother Best Kemigisa and Oyo’s sister, Princess Ruth Komuntale, have publicly rejected Kijanangoma’s selection. Their argument centers on a will they say Oyo wrote in 2022, one that names his own son as the rightful heir. Oyo never married and was not known publicly to have any children, which is part of what makes this claim so combustible, the identity of this alleged son has never been confirmed, and speculation on social media has ballooned into rumors of not one but possibly two children claiming to be his.

Babiito clan elders aren’t buying it. Their position is that a will doesn’t override tradition, no matter what it says. “The will is not a determinant of who is supposed to be a king; it is a document that expresses one’s wish,” Reverend Father Charles Oyo, a clan elder, told reporters, adding that the clan’s own leadership authority sits above any personal document. In their telling, Oyo never formally introduced a son through the kingdom’s customary process, and without that step, no child can simply inherit the throne by paperwork.

It’s a genuinely messy situation, a mother and sister on one side insisting a father’s dying wish be honored, a council of elders on the other insisting that custom, not sentiment, decides who wears the crown. Both sides have a point, and that’s exactly why this isn’t going away quietly.

Where This Goes From Here

Family members close to Oyo have suggested the dispute could end up in Ugandan courts if the clan doesn’t reconsider its position. Tooro is a cultural kingdom without formal political power under Uganda’s constitution, so a court wouldn’t be ruling on a head of state in the conventional sense, but the Omukama role carries enormous symbolic and social weight for the Tooro people, which is precisely why both camps are digging in rather than compromising.

For now, Kijanangoma has performed the ritual that traditionally marks a new king’s ascension, and the clan considers the matter settled on its end. The queen mother’s camp clearly disagrees, and until the alleged son is either produced, confirmed, or dropped from the conversation altogether, Tooro is left with a kind of dual reality: a new king by ritual, and an unresolved question about who the late king actually wanted.

What’s clear is that Uganda lost a genuinely well-liked public figure. Timothy Kalyegira, a Tooro-born analyst, put it starkly in a widely shared tribute, comparing the shock of Oyo’s death to losing Bob Marley, a loss made harder by how young Oyo was and how much affection he’d built over three decades in public life. Whatever the courts or the clan eventually decide about the throne, that part of the story isn’t in dispute.

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