After a brief period of moveabouts after leaving Rwanda, the titular King lived in exile during the final part of his life in the town of Oakton, Virginia, United States.

[16][17] Though married, Kigeli's late half-brother had had no children; the abrupt, shocking nature of the death prompted widespread talk of some kind of assassination having occurred.

[7] Kigeli's appointment was a surprise to the Belgian administration, who were not involved in his selection, and who described the event as a coup d'état,[6][18] a view shared by the newly politically empowered Hutu elite.

[11] However, the manner of his appointment led to a loss of prestige for the Belgian authorities, and gave both Hutu and Tutsi revolutionaries the impression that violence might further their goals.

The fact that the Tutsi establishment had engineered the rise to power also compromised Kigeli's ability to act in the traditional role as a neutral arbiter of differing factions.

[7] In 1961, Kigeli was in Kinshasa to meet Secretary General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld when Dominique Mbonyumutwa, with the support of the Belgian government, led a coup d'état that took control of the Rwandan state.

Kigeli was a friend of former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela and the Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Patrice Lumumba.

[citation needed] In 1995, while in Southern California, Kigeli met author and historian Charles A. Coulombe, an American representative of the International Monarchist League, a London-based organization that attempts to reinstate deposed royalty in various parts of the world.

[24] In an August 2007 BBC interview, Kigeli expressed an interest in returning to Rwanda if the Rwandan people were prepared to accept him as their constitutional monarch.

[citation needed] Kigeli died of a heart ailment at the age of eighty on the morning of 16 October 2016 in a hospital in Washington, D.C.[1] His private secretary, Guye Pennington, said that an heir had been chosen and would be announced shortly.

[27] Although Kigeli never married, on 9 January 2017, the Royal House announced that his nephew, Prince Emmanuel Bushayija (to reign as Yuhi VI of Rwanda), would succeed him as pretender to the Rwandan throne.

[29] As titular King in exile, as part of maintaining his royal family's cultural heritage, Kigeli V issued chivalric orders and titles of nobility with himself as fount of honour, in accordance with traditional customs.