The fall of Bobi Wine

What you need to know:

  • Wait for the horse trading, backroom deals and unholy alliances along with already existential reports of NUP faithful worshipping Bobi the way NRM politicos do President Museveni.
  • Thereby dousing the flames of People Power. And reducing them to the light that burned twice as bright, but only half as long.

Under the banner headline “Reggae star Bobi Wine launches new political party in Uganda,” international newspapers sang hosannas for the musician-turned-politician.

“Bobi Wine, a popular reggae star and prominent Opposition MP in Uganda, has launched a new political party before presidential polls scheduled for early next year. Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, described the move as ‘yet another important step in our liberation struggle,” a story read.

Bobi Wine’s party is National Unity Platform (NUP), with an umbrella as its emblem. This emblem is not new. Godfrey Binaisa, who “ruled” Uganda from June 20, 1979, to May 12, 1980, used the umbrella as a symbol of unity to draw all Ugandans together.

Bobi Wine hopes to be twirling his umbrella longer than Binaisa did when warming State House furniture and calling for “ekigaali.”
This way he, Bobi, may actually rule like musician Rihanna’s pop anthem Umbrella did while at number one in the UK charts for 10 weeks in 2007.

As Bobi Wine forms a party, he reverses Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad album, which featured the song Umbrella, by becoming a ‘bad man (from Kamwokya) gone good’.
With hair trimmed to make an official portrait look presidential, Bobi looks the part. He sometimes even uses a walking stick, like Milton Obote once did. He looks gentlemanly and statesmanlike. And herein lies the problem.

Uganda is a country rife with inequalities arising out of tribe, gender, class, social status, geography, and age. These inequalities are so entrenched that many Ugandans are convinced that civil disobedience and not civility will deliver much-needed equity.
Because, they believe, the rich have swallowed the national cake and left only crumbs along a breadline of unemployment for the poor.

When Bobi looked ghetto and behaved ghetto, he brought every weapon to a street fight on behalf of the wretched of the earth.
The seeds of his struggle situated Uganda’s identity in the revolutionary flowering of national survival, beyond a collective death.

Such death is characterised by a vacuum at its middle, forcing most of its citizenry to the bottom. This while few sit at the top. As the bottom festers with hordes of youth whose finances have bottomed-out. They feel abandoned by a political class growing fat on government patronage.

When Bobi first came on the scene, we identified with his tragic sense of ghetto life: an existence looked down upon by the rich and ignored by the powerful.
While Bobi glamorised and gave it a redemptive power by actually being able to rise above it.
His was a post-modern conception of leadership: subversive of yesteryear yet subservient to a brighter day.

Through Bobi, many felt they could address the specific conditions of their existence while escaping the predatory clutches of the powerful.
Bobi was daring enough to ensure that the president’s convoy was drunk-driving when it was left stoned (pun intended).

He thus turned Arua into a dirty four letter word which left our politics pregnant with possibilities. Alas, these possibilities seem to be stillborn.
As a party man, he shall find that party procedure will formalise party fervour. Even FDC found itself more effective during the extra-party activity of “walk-to-work” than during a party procession to the ballot box.
Bobi’s activism, like FDC’s, will be left hamstrung by formalism.

Wait for the horse trading, backroom deals and unholy alliances along with already existential reports of NUP faithful worshipping Bobi the way NRM politicos do President Museveni.

Thereby dousing the flames of People Power. And reducing them to the light that burned twice as bright, but only half as long.

Mr Matogo is the managing editor Fasihi Magazine.
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