A new five-parameter distribution is defined and studied. The new model is referred to as the Kumaraswamy exponentiated Burr XII distribution. The new distribution includes eleven special models, namely: the Kumaraswamy exponentiated log-logistic, Kumaraswamy exponentiated Lomax, Kumaraswamy Burr XII and Kumaraswamy log-logistic distributions among others. Various structural properties of this model including moments, moment generating function, incomplete oments, order statistics and Rényi entropy are derived. The maximum likelihoo method is used for estimating the model parameters. We illustrate the importance of the proposed distribution over other distributions available in the literature in modeling two real data sets