Has Museveni finally found his match in Bobi Wine?

A couple of days ago, I had the occasion to interact with Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, better known to his rapidly growing, increasingly politically inclined fan base as Bobi Wine.

Today, Kyagulanyi is a political star, seriously recognised beyond Uganda and East Africa. He is the most recognisable political brand in Dar es Salaam, Kampala and Nairobi. He is no longer a Ugandan MP, but an ''East African MP'', so to speak.

I was informed that his political magnetism and phenomenon was quickly spreading south of the Sahara, mainly in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Little wonder that he should be seen as a person who can influence the politics of both South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Is Kyagulanyi being transformed into a progressive Pan-Africanist?

TRANSFORMATION

Barely a year and a half ago, he was just a musical star, mostly confined to Uganda, yet with strings of musical lovers spread across Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania. Is it possible to be both a musical and political celebrity in a politically tumultuous region like East Africa?

Bobi, in a candid chat with some of us, said art and politics are not mutually exclusive.

When I met him last week, we shook hands and looked into each other’s eyeballs. It was a handshake of a young man with a soft palm and gentle grip.

Later, I listened to him keenly as he talked to us – his pulsating, rhapsodic and staccato voice (that has made many an East African girl go silly in the head) – and realised that the man was on the cusp of being the first musical artist who, depending on how he played the coming politics in Uganda, was on his way to becoming a political maelstrom, just like he has been a musical maelstrom in the last dozen years or so.

BOBI'S INFLUENCE

Why is Bobi Wine so magnetic? Why is it that he might just be what the East African region is looking for, to ignite and resuscitate its ''dead'' politics?

Kyagulanyi is a ghetto boy, born in a Kampala slum, but with a great sense of urgency to want to succeed and lead a different life – away from the excruciating poverty of ghetto life. He is imbued with a huge and great talent. A talent many people would pay an arm and a leg to have. A talent he never wasted, but used to improve his social well-being and entertain humanity.

But just like Bobi had a great sense of conquering the Kampala ghetto poverty, so does he have an urgent sense of social justice, which is possibly driven by his impoverished past and success in music, that brought with it good money and a good name.

Now, as a politician representing a constituency that reminds him daily of his growing up at Kamocha slum, with little but a self-driven knack to beat the odds, he is in a special place to inspire and lead his generation out of the searing poverty, largely caused by the bad politics of a dying political elite subsumed by politics of self-aggrandizement.

I observed him carefully and realised why any African despot, dinosaur or pretenders to youthfulness, would spend sleepless nights plotting to pull him down. Bobi does not only look fresh and youthful, but he is a young man who has shown he can take political risks.

In short, Bobi has youth on his side – he can afford to gamble with politics and wait out, while his political nemesis, Museveni, is an aging cockerel, that can no longer crow, and has neither the creativity to frighten nor surprise its peers by dancing around in circles any more.

Invariably, over and above Bobi’s foregoing credentials, fundamentally, he has been propelled to prominence by one man: President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, the septuagenarian, former guerrilla leader, who has upturned the Ugandan presidency into a personal precinct.

YOWERI MUSEVENI

Sometime in 1983, Museveni smuggled himself into a Nairobi suburb – Ngei estate to be precise – to canvass for the case of the National Resistance Army and Movement NRA/M, as he begged for cash to sustain his insurgency against President Milton Obote (II).

Those of you who have seen Bobi recently, I can tell you Museveni was leaner than him in 1983, and although that was 35 years ago, Museveni spoke the same language Bobi is speaking now: liberating the Ugandan people from the dictatorial politics of retrogression and subterfuge.

Museveni would hobnob the East African region, and indeed the world, without really being harassed by anyone; selling his idealism to all and sundry. At Ngei, Museveni would speak for seven hours, building, in the minds of his listeners, a vista of how he envisioned post-Obote (II) Uganda.

As he built this vista, presumably for the then existing generation and the generations to come, so that they can find and inherit a Uganda free of kleptocracy and political cabal that has come to personalise Uganda as its property, Bobi was just one year old, having been born in February 1982.

What a great shame that today Museveni is fighting Bobi, a young man who would easily pass for his last-born child. What an ignominy that Museveni would visit such unmitigated violence on the young MP, because he has challenged his old and barren ideas on how to govern Uganda?

Today Museveni feels entitled, because he assumes he has delivered Ugandans from the power of hell.

Recently, Museveni was viewed wiping his sweaty brow and spitting on a handkerchief in front of the cameras. It was a ghastly sight, yet isn’t it true that the grandfatherly President Museveni is struggling to hold onto presidential powers, as the youthful Bobi Wines of Ugandan hope to wrest that power from him?

A Ugandan accompanying Bobi told me that Uganda under Museveni has been like a vehicle spinning its wheels in the mud – it makes two steps forward and three backwards. Uganda is stuck, its leadership is stuck and it is in dire need of a leader who will get it out of its spinning mud.

But I am not suggesting that that leader is Robert Kyaluganyi Ssentamu.

Mr Kahura is a senior writer for 'The Elephant', a Nairobi-based publication. Twitter: @KahuraDauti