These are the times and seasons of Bobi Wine

Opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) leader Robert Kyagulanyi (more popularly Bobi Wine by his musician name) just came off a sold-out concert in London where he soaked in the adulation of fans, many of them Ugandans or with Ugandan roots.

On the back of the Oscar nomination and well-reviewed documentary about his political story, “Bobi Wine: The People’s President”, Bobi Wine has had a good global run, and a good domestic shake too, over the last year.

The idolisation of Bobi Wine by the “People Power” folks is striking, for the similarities and differences, between President Yoweri Museveni in his bush days and the first 10 years of his rule, and Dr Kizza Besigye when he was leader of the Forum for Democratic Change, enjoyed.

Decades of exile resulting from unrest and repression beginning from the mid-1960s, meant that Uganda – and Rwanda and apartheid South Africa - were among the first African countries to see its population establish, especially in the West, as a large diaspora community.

Unlike the South Africans and Rwandans, Ugandans have done something remarkable; multiplied in record numbers in captivity, as it were. Also, it has continued to see a wave of migration, economic flight, and political exile since Museveni and his ruling NRM came to power – although the number of political exiles has fallen in the last 15 years.

Museveni was the sweet pie of this vast diaspora when he was a rebel leader and in the honeymoon decade of his rule. All sorts of Ugandan associations formed abroad, some having been NRM branches, and they hailed King Museveni. In the early days of email many lists, the equivalent of WhatsApp groups today, formed. 

Many were rabidly pro-Museveni and pro-NRM, and you’d be eaten alive, much like People Power folks are won’t to do today over Bobi Wine, if you criticised them. It was understandable. He and the NRM had ended a long national nightmare and a period of shame in which some diaspora Ugandans took up names like Mensah or Kariuki so as not to be tarnished by association with the motherland.

And in many places, Museveni was a hero, the embodiment of what a future glorious Africa could look like. A Ugandan passport was a wonderful thing to have; you’d be waved through quickly at many an African airport. The lights dimmed on the party from 1996, and after 2001, the curtains came down and the bar closed.

The growing opposition to Museveni was groping, in terms of having a figure around whom it would organise its activism in an environment where multiparty politics was still outlawed.

Many came, but they didn’t capture the national imagination. There was Milton Obote in exile in Zambia, but though fiery and still great media, he was ailing, becoming a marginal figure and a distant memory.  

Democratic Party leader Dr Paul Ssemogerere was at home, but he was no longer the leader for the time.

First, he remained scholarly, and mild-mannered in a time when being forceful – and occasionally banging tables and threatening to take up arms – was valued. And Ssemogerere was the kind of politician who asked little of his supporters.

Then Besigye happened in 2000/2001, but he had to take off to exile in South Africa for four years. Obote died in October 2005, and then Besigye returned to face off with Museveni in 2006 and endure the kind of torment and punishment for his audacity the likes of which had never seen. But, he was prepared. He has never flinched since. Besigye became the new darling of the Uganda diaspora, but he never quite reached the levels Museveni enjoyed with them. For good reason.

One, many of them were disillusioned – DP, UPC, but mostly Museveni/NRM - political orphans. Many tended to be elite, intellectual types, who didn’t “feel” things and liked to reason. And when they reasoned and concluded that he was the real deal, they would follow him over the cliff.

Besigye left the leadership of FDC, and in came Gen. Mugisha Muntu. Muntu as leader was a mix of early Museveni, Ssemogerere, and Besigye. He was, really, an anti-politics politician, the kind of ideal clever gentleman who would be elected president of the Oxford University Debating Society with 99 per cent of the vote.

No one saw Bobi Wine coming. When he arrived, he turned the tables. There was also a new Diaspora; much younger, driven out as economic refugees, social media savvy, culturally militant, and fuelled by 25-plus years of grievances against a long-ruling Museveni, to levels never seen before. The passion for Bobi Wine exceeds that Museveni enjoyed.

With Museveni, they loved and followed him. With Besigye, they believed and fell behind him. With Bobi Wine, they adore him and be damned. The meaning of all this is a story we shall tell in the coming days.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. 
Twitter/X: @cobbo3