The pop star vs the president: Uganda’s generational fight

The Independent | September 13, 2018

Kampala, Uganda | AFP | “We used to be scared,” said Josephine Katumba, a 30-year-old hairdresser in Kamwokya, a poor suburb of Uganda’s capital Kampala. “We don’t have fear anymore.”
President Yoweri Museveni has long had police beat the defiance out of his opponents, but a 36-year-old slumboy singer turned MP has energised and emboldened Uganda’s youth, worrying the government.

Black scorch marks on the potholed road outside Katumba’s tiny salon mark where residents have routinely burnt tyres to protest the arrest of Bobi Wine, a local boy done good, charismatic pop star and unlikely opposition firebrand.

There is “Free Bobi Wine” graffiti everywhere.

“People have wanted change for a long time,” said Katumba, nimbly braiding a customer’s hair. “The difference now is that Bobi is young and he speaks for the youth.”

‘Ghetto President’
As a pop star Bobi Wine blended lyrics on social justice and poverty with catchy Afrobeat rhythms, earning him committed fans among Uganda’s often poor urban youth.
He took on the nickname of “His Excellency the Ghetto President”.

Under his real name Robert Kyagulanyi he won a by-election in 2017 and entered parliament, where his popularity and outspoken opposition to Uganda’s long-time leader shook up the country’s “Groundhog Day” politics.

In power since 1986, the 74-year-old Museveni is the only president most Ugandans have known: the country’s median age is less than 16.

Museveni has had the constitution amended twice, to remove term and then age limits, clearing him to run for a sixth term in 2021.

The opposition has for two decades been similarly dominated by 62-year-old Kizza Besigye, Museveni’s former friend and personal physician, who has lost four successive elections.
Besigye “has become part of an entrenched political system in which change feels impossible without fresh leadership,” said Kampala-based independent analyst Anna Reuss.

Kyagulanyi has swiped the opposition mantel from Besigye and provided a voice for a youthful population fed up with old men telling them what to do.

“Besigye is there to help, but he’s not from the ghetto. Bobi can come and talk to us on the streets,” said Katumba.

Charged with treason
The combination of “his age, his background and his story” make Kyagulanyi a challenge unlike any Museveni has faced during his 32-year rule, said Ugandan writer and political analyst Rosebell Kagumire.

She described him as “an outsider who is trying to shake things up”.

But in Uganda, shaking things up is risky.