Can Bobi Wine sleep well in the DP Bloc?

Last Sunday, I drew attention to the divide between Opposition party bigwigs who cannot jump over election hurdles and the politicians who raid through the barriers and come out at the other end with huge bags of votes. I called the first set the ‘deserving’, and the second set the ‘electable’.
Across the divide, the conversation between these two sets is sometimes strident and even plainly uncivilised.

Now, there are two thick mats under President Museveni’s feet: the military mat under one foot, and the NRM-packed Parliament under the other foot.
If you rudely pull away these mats, Mr Museveni will be standing on very hard ground.

Grant him the military, or a big section of the military, since I assume the Opposition is not about to start street battles with the uniformed gangs deployed all over the country. But the people can deny the NRM the absurdly huge parliamentary majority, which the President uses to show just how stupid we Ugandan voters are.

When viable Opposition politicians are elected, they get frustrated because they find themselves working in numbers that do not reflect the generalised dissatisfaction with the status quo they sense in the populace.

Human nature being what it is, the deserving-but-unelectable Opposition politicians often fail to capture or articulate the urgency of correcting the imbalance, let alone work hard enough to find and bring to the fore politicians who are electable but are still obscure.

Ultimately, the elected politician shines more, earns more, and generally influences events more directly than the unelected party work horse. It, therefore, takes a special charity of heart, very strong party loyalty, and an enlightened sense of national good to help others succeed where you fail. A rare breed in Uganda.
I concluded the article with the question whether Bobi Wine would ‘mix’ with the recently launched DP Bloc.

Enemies of the Opposition, defenders of the ruling elite, have been jostling for media microphones to announce the political death of Bobi Wine because of his involvement with the DP Bloc.
Wishful thinking. They are praying for Bobi Wine to lose heart. They want to widen the divide between him and the Democratic Party’s deserving-but-unelectable lot. My interpretation is that Bobi Wine is right to watch and have links with the bloc, indeed with all Opposition groups, but the bloc would be mistaken to think that it can contain or control him.

The singer-cum-politician does not get his strength from the machine of a specific political party, but from his communication with ordinary people through the layers of pain in mass experience. He is a secular ‘spiritual’ figure. He is a leader in the sense that he urges any lagging citizen to feel this pain and find the motive for performing an act of resistance, instructing them that the vote can be an act of resistance.

He is a gregarious hunter foraging for new souls and redeemable souls; souls from all Opposition parties, souls that are nominally independent, and even souls from the ruling NRM.
He knows that because Parliament is now full of reactionaries driven by naked greed, used by the Executive to secure a blank cheque for all manner of bad governance and serial constitutional ridicule, it must be overhauled.

Such an overhaul would be little short of a revolution. It means a transformation of mass consciousness from discontent and raw anger to reasoned commitment; a movement from understanding to a collective belief that not to vote for change is to be a traitor.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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