Uganda's Bobi Wine: Fighting for Democracy

I meet Bobi Wine as he visits London. He’s seeking support for his campaign to rid Uganda of what he calls the ‘ brutal rulership’ of President Yoweri Museveni who will have led the country for 40 years in 2026. That’s when Uganda is scheduled to hold its next presidential election. Will Bobi run again? ‘Here I am,’ he says, ‘Not that I’m the Alpha and Omega, not that I’m the ultimate. But I’ve said I’m available if I’m required to lead …’ We look back at what happened at the last general election in 2021 which Bobi and his supporters say they won. ‘We defeated them, but the entire world watched as many of our campaign team was massacred….’ I ask him how does he keep going after all the beatings, the torture, the house arrest? He replies: ‘I’m in a better state than so many of my comrades in the struggle. They get locked up, they get beaten and nobody knows. When I get arrested the whole world knows….So I keep going by looking behind me. I get the least of the oppression and the most of the attention. But my friends that suffer in the dark are not complaining. They keep going” What about your wife and 4 kids? Bobi says the whole family has agreed that although their activism is dangerous, it would be even more dangerous to give up. What did the recent by-election in Kawempe North, which Bobi’s NUP won, tell him about how the general election is likely to be fought? There was well-publicised violence and claims of rigging.2026 will be a protest vote, Bobi says: ‘We know that we will win the vote. But I’m not sure if we will win the count.’ Bobi reveals that he’s in talks with Dr Kizza Besigye’s Forum for Democratic Change about the possibility of collaborating as well as with other political parties. Dr Besigye’s continued imprisonment, Bobi says, ‘is meant to intimidate all of us’. I suggest to Bobi that his popular support could be limited to his own tribe, the Baganda. The majority, if not all, of the Buganda constituencies vote for Bobi. He disagrees ‘ we won in the far west and in parts of the north…my wife comes from Museveni’s tribe…my colleagues come from tribes scattered all over Uganda.’ Looking ahead to next year’s election, I ask Bobi what’s in his manifesto? What are the issues he’s running on? ‘Corruption is the cancer that’s eating us’ he replies. We touch on one of the most controversial issues in Uganda today: human rights particularly as experienced by the LGBQT+ community. A much younger Bobi Wine as a musician had been associated with homophobic lyrics. Today, he has a more nuanced approach to the matter: ‘The west should stop looking at the LGBT rights as the only human rights, otherwise they will provoke Africans and people of the world to start imagining that there’s a hidden agenda. People get killed every day in Uganda and they should all have rights.” We end our chat on a rather optimistic note. “The future doesn’t have to hold anything for me as an individual. I look at this as all of us. The future is robust. The future is hopeful.’ #uganda#HEBobiWine#democracy#corruption#humanrights#africa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.