Bobi Wine visits Kenya, gets star treatment: We’ve been there before
What you need to know:
In the past five or so years there has been cross-border political inspiration taking place in the region, especially between Kenya and Uganda.
But we have been there before in the 1950s when Tanzanians joined the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.
- And in the late 1960s and 1970s, with Dar es Salaam the liberation capital of Africa, Dar es Salaam University incubated Uganda and Kenya’s future progressive class.
Youthful Ugandan MP Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known by his musician name Bobi Wine, was in Kenya last week. From arrival at JKIA, Nairobi, through a series of rallies, media events and the high and mighty of the Kenyan activist world, he received a hero’s reception and celebrity treatment.
With his Embakasi East counterpart, Babu Owino (real name Paul Ongili Owino), he addressed an enthusiastic rally at Jacaranda Grounds and together they launched a “Youth for Africa” movement.
Even hard-nosed veterans of Kenya’s activism and democracy movement told me they were impressed by Kyagulanyi, although they considered him to be a work in progress and still far from being fully-baked.
BROKEN BODY
Kyagulanyi has ridden an incredible wave ever since he was bludgeoned by President Yoweri Museveni’s guards, then jailed, in August in the aftermath of a contentious by-election in the northwestern Arua won by an independent candidate whom he backed.
First charged in a military court with treason, the case was dropped but later picked up by a regular Magistrate’s Court. Bruised and limping, Kyagulanyi was granted bail and eventually allowed to travel to the US to mend his broken body parts.
UP TO SOMETHING
A stream of international news and media appearances cast him as the face of a new politics bubbling around Africa in which youth are rejecting septuagenarian and octogenarian strongmen. Museveni, officially 74, will soon clock 33 years in power.
Are Kyagulanyi and Babu Owino up to something new?
While clearly in the past five or so years there has been cross-border political inspiration taking place in the region, especially between Kenya and Uganda (in 2013 after Kenyan activists released pigs and piglets upon Parliament to protest corruption in the Legislature, their Ugandan counterparts followed suit), we have been there before.
MAKERERE UNIVERSITY
In the 1950s, Tanzanians joined the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Uganda’s independence Prime Minister, Dr Milton Obote, cut his radical teeth in the early labour movement in Kenya.
In the 1960s, many of Kenya’s future radical politicians and intellectuals got their baptism at Makerere University in Kampala. And in the late 1960s and 1970s, with Dar es Salaam the liberation capital of Africa, Dar es Salaam University incubated Uganda and Kenya’s future progressive class.
STAGING POINT
In the 1970s, dictator Idi Amin was wreaking havoc in Uganda and a record number of political exiles scattered to Kenya and Tanzania. Eventually, several Ugandan dissident groups formed in Kenya and Tanzania. In late 1978, they rallied around Tanzania as it struck back against Amin and ejected him from power in April 1979.
Kenya was again an important staging point for Museveni’s National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/NRA) in the war they won in January 1986. NRA was heavily staffed by Rwandan refugees, who would defect en masse in October 1990 to launch their fight to return home. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame was one of the founders of the NRA and was a senior intelligence officer when the October war started.
UGANDAN BOOTS
Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania supported various groups in the long Burundi civil war and, though they have since fallen out, President Pierre Nkurunziza was what Kenyans would call a “Kagame project”.
Kenya and Uganda backed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army of Dr John Garang — Kenya did so diplomatically and financially, but Uganda brought the sharp edge, deploying its forces to fight Khartoum. Between 1990 and the Sudan Peace Talks in Kenya in 2002, most of the major offensives against the SPLA by Khartoum were repulsed, or made possible, by extensive Ugandan boots.
MILTARY FATIGUES
Though it’s still outside the East African Community, the war that ousted DR Congo’s corrupt and enduring dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 was largely undertaken by a military consortium led by Rwanda with Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia ranged against the man who called himself “Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga”.
During Kenya’s democracy struggle in the 1990s against Daniel arap Moi, many activists fled through Uganda or were openly active there. The most prominent was Koigi wa Wamwere, who was unmistakable in his military fatigues when he was in town.
PEOPLE POWER
There has been no major ouster of an entrenched ruler or regime, which has not been possible, because a neighbour was heavily vested in backing it. The difference with Kyagulanyi’s “People Power” is that regional support for it so far is from the people, down up, not from governments. But, I guess, the Tanzanians who supported Mau Mau and the Kenyan labour leaders who supported Ugandan pro-independence politicians would say they did that, too, over 60 years ago — and won something.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africapedia.com and explainer Roguechiefs.com. Twitter: @cobbo3
