Bobi Wine and his wife Barbie on the campaign trail. Ugandans feel the hope and energy–this is what the aged dictator Museveni fears.
In his book “The Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success”, the late publisher and editor in chief of New York-based The African Sun Times, Chika Onyeani argued that the African educated elite has been the biggest driver in entrenching dictatorship in Africa.
“The African elite has been a total failure; they want to continue to sit at the head of the totem pole, being spoon-fed, rather than at the head of the battle line leading the masses under political and economic enslavement,” Onyeani wrote. They have marketed themselves as the politically correct elites whose opinion must shape political debate in their county. These have been nothing more than pseudo intellects selling their souls to the highest bidder.
The writer Marcus Geduld explains that, “Pseudo-intellectualism is a social stance. A pseudo-intellectual wants other people to think he’s smart. He will work towards that goal in the most economically cunning way possible. They willfully misread and misrepresent of facts, adopting selective approaches in analyzing issues, disregarding facts that make the intellectual uncomfortable depending in his or her interests.”
History is awash with figures whose thrust into national prominence would not have been except for their rhetorical gifts, their penmanship and mesmeric speaking abilities. In Uganda, the renowned journalist Andrew Mwenda has been at the helm of taking Ugandans, and to an extent, the Great Lakes Region, for a ride for over three decades and counting. He continues to believe that he is the policy and opinion-shaper in the region—the great “intellect”.
In his article dated, Dec. 1, 2020, headlined “He’s young, a Muganda and Catholic!”, Andrew Mwenda continues to build on his quest to not only ridicule the member of Parliament and presidential candidate, Robert Kyagulanyi, a.k.a. Bobi Wine’s intelligence and to downplay his popularity. Ever since Bobi Wine declared his intention to rid Uganda of Yoweri Museveni’s dictatorship, nepotism, corruption and ethno-bigotry, Mwenda has been at helm of trying to discredit, the musician-turned-freedom fighter.
Mwenda’s recent pronouncements have clearly shown how irrelevant he has become to our current socio-economic and political dynamics. There is no doubt that Ugandans have attained a certain level of political consciousness and are united in the desire to see that “Museveni must go”.
After building a fortune on the ignorance of the masses, Mwenda is visibly scared of, and worried about the reality unfolding in this campaign. Gen. Museveni’s dictatorship is witnessing a real opposition for the first time in its history. Bobi Wine is not a bush war veteran, nor has he ever served in any political office in the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) dictatorship regime. He is Uganda’s embodiment of the David versus Goliath story. He grew up in the ghetto outside Kampala, the capital, worked hard in the music industry and earned his way out of poverty. He became educated and has been building a loving family. In his rise to fame, he has never forgotten the rock-solid ghetto root or the youth he left behind; he has become their divine voice.
Ugandans have continued to be fed on the propaganda by Museveni and his acolytes, including: “heroics of the Luwero war”; “we shed our blood for your freedom”; “I shot the first bullet in Kabamba and lost an eye for the freedom of Uganda”; “we are a people’s army and the people were part of our liberation struggle”; “we liberated you Ugandans from swines and killers”; and the list goes on.
The people of Luwero Triangle have waited for 35 years for what it was promised during the bush war. They now resonate with the people of the northern part of Uganda and Kasese, who have all suffered atrocities at the hands of Museveni’s so-called “NRM’s people’s army.”
Bobi Wine fought against the pseudo democracy brought about by the NRA/M and their amendment to the constitution to lift the 75-years age limit for presidential candidates. The amendment, which was eventually passed, effectively installed Yoweri Museveni Tibahurwa as president for life. Bobi Wine has already paid dearly for his popularity. He has been arrested, tortured, and beaten, numerous times. People close to him have been extrajudicially killed by security agents, including his driver. He has been blocked from accessing his campaign grounds. To survive, Bobi Wine learned that you have to hit the campaign trail wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet, something never before seen in Uganda’s election history.
Mwenda is blind to even the obvious facts before his eyes regarding the NRM/A 2021 political campaign which is being driven by a lone ranger, Gen. Museveni.
Why are Ugandans watching the painful and pathetic campaign by Gen. Museveni when the NRM/A regime wastes public funds on over 70 cabinet ministers, and hundreds of special presidential advisors? The key answer is obvious: because all these ministers fear to go out and say what Museveni may not like. They risk losing their jobs and the privileges they enjoy without merit. The NRM/A regime does not formally operate as a conventional government. Everything is controlled and instructed by Gen. Museveni. The ministers are mere rubber-stamp consumption figures. They, therefore, cannot freely roam the country during the ongoing campaigns because they cannot sincerely tell what their regime has been doing for 35 years.
Gen. Museveni himself is a tired moving blank space, at the official projected age of 76 years old. The actual natural age on display during the campaign is an older man perhaps in his 80s and thereabout. Desperate, Gen. Museveni and his goons have the shameless audacity to insult the unpretentious Bobi Wine as “a mere drug taker and an MDD Diploma holder,” who cannot remove NRM/A from power and lead Uganda. The person they are erroneously try to undercut as useless, has transformed his reach from a loyal nationalist following, to an internationally-recognized presidential flag-bearer. His ideological reach today is a mass movement of both the young and the old, united into a consolidated People’s Power movement for change. Ugandans can seen an end to 35 years of the NRM/A personalized absurdity, and sectarian rotten legacy.
Mwenda should know that the majority of Ugandans have been able to survive the NRM/A’s failed regime due to the financial remittances support of the huge Diaspora community. Most of them fled Gen. Museveni’s brutal dictatorship. Their financial support helped create a socio-economic lifeline back home. This started to give the majority of the population at home hope, and inspiration, to carve out their own private economy in order to sustain themselves, even as Museveni diverted national resources away. Ironically, without this safety-net from the Diaspora community, Gen. Museveni and his minority gangs could not have endured this long—the people would have rebelled earlier.
Now enter Hurricane Bobi Wine. The only thing that Mwenda is right about is that Bobi Wine is unstoppable. Period! He should not have said another word after that. Yes, Bobi Wine is unstoppable because he is an embodiment of a fresh humble beginning for a new Ugandan generation. A mass movement has emerged and grown from a population that has had very similar experience of violence experience and hardship deliberately dished out by the NRM/A sectarian domination. The Bobi Wine Mass Movement 2021 has over the years been shaped by the youth generation’s own experience of NRM/A’s failure to deliver on education.
Thus, they have developed their own beliefs about NRM/A’s segregated national worksheet. They are now acting to free themselves and many others from over 35 years of Gen. Museveni’s suffocation of the Ugandan population. Even Museveni’s own former accomplices have been thrown under the bus and many of the current wicked military operatives work under duress and blackmail.
Bobi Wine is unstoppable because of his simple clear vision of giving all Ugandans a true breathing space for equitable ground in politics and socio-economic undertaking. Bobi Wine has a clear vision to exploit positively the diversity of Uganda’s nationalities for the common good and excellence of all—one people, one nation.
Today’s Uganda of Gen. Museveni is an ethnic-apartheid system of many layers with distinctive disparities in all fields. Nepotism has destroyed all areas of government, including the civil service, turned into a sectarian project directed by Gen. Museveni himself and NRM/A cadres from the State House.
The Uganda Police Force’s and Prison Services’ top appointments and recruitments are conducted along a sectarian line dominated by one subregion. The Uganda Revenue Authority, State House, Ministry of Lands and Minerals, ISO, DISO, RDCs and many other ministries and parastatal bodies are all tailored along very strict NRM/A sectarian layers. The primary beneficiaries are a minority, one subregion, and all this ethno-bigotry is overseen directly by Gen. Museveni himself as the Godfather.
Bobi Wine is unstoppable because in just four years in parliament, he has stood decisively against the NRM/A gross financial abuse. He has denounced the extortionate and extravagant secret annual budget allocated for the State House, funds used by Gen. Museveni like his personal ATM. The Ministry of Defense also has huge secret allocation of funds. The masses of Ugandans showing up in their tens of thousands at Bobi Wine’s campaign events love him because he’s the true voice of the poor and voiceless who are rejecting the NRM/A’s regime of gross financial abuse.
Yet, Mwenda would rather trivialize the emergence of a true nationalist, and a gifted, brave, clear-headed son of the Pearl of Africa—as being purely driven by his being a Muganda, and a Catholic. Bobi Wine is a unique individual, thrust on the national stage to accomplish a mission that the country has been yearning for these past 35 years. He has national support, a repudiation of the NRM/A’s divide-and-rule barbarism. The country celebrates the rebirth of a national leader, while Gen. Museveni continues to use security forces to terrorize the population.
When Ugandan’s exercised their constitutionally guaranteed right to protest after the arrest of Bobi Wine on November 18, Gen. Museveni’s heartless goons summarily executed innocent civilians, and opposition supporters. Gen. Museveni then announced that he was going to financially compensate the families of all the victims of the insane killing spree.
By such actions Ugandans see that Museveni does not value human life. His own actions demonstrate to Ugandans why Bobi Wine is the winning candidate.
