Uganda’s youth, and the politics of roads, electricity in 2021 vote

Author, Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo. PHOTO/COURTESY. 

What you need to know:

  • Mr Onyango Obbo says: There are many things that are wrong in Uganda today; the corruption, tribalism, the authoritarianism, but an imaginative and less reflexively brutal leadership would also see the positive challenge; the biggest one is how to manage success. 

In a lot of reporting and commentary on next January’s Uganda election, the appeal of National Unity Party’s candidate MP Robert Kyagulanyi (more popularly Bobi Wine), and the seeming revulsion, especially among youth, toward President Yoweri Museveni, has been explained as a generational problem. 

Musician-turned-politician Bobi Wine is “cool”; the millennials in a country with the youngest population, relate to him. He has a beautiful youthful wife with a smooth skin, who looks exactly like their dream wife – if they could only rise above their humble and dire circumstances the way he did. They think he “gets them”, and will take care of them. And, to cap it, he isn’t the murderous fellow sending police and soldiers to kill them when they raise their heads.

However, none of those things translate into policy goods. You can’t eat coolness. Someone can “get you”, but that will not pay your bills. All things that Bobi Wine has going for him, and Museveni doesn’t, therefore have to be seen as proxies for something more concrete that young people want. How do they present themselves in a form that would allow a practical response? And could progress, actually lead to youth discontent? This last issue is important to understand, because it explains why new tarmac roads, for example, can be very complicated politics.

About a year ago, I travelled around northern Uganda. On the day I was returning to Tororo, I stopped somewhere between Lira and Soroti to buy succulent fruits from a group of girls selling them by the roadside. I wanted a few oranges and tangerines, but they mobbed me with everything; papaws, passion fruit, lemon. After frantic and noisy marketing from the young ladies, I settled on the few I wanted.

I had walked out with two Shs20,000 notes and one Shs10,00 clutched in my fist. When I asked about the cost of the fruits I had selected, they were less than Sh10,000. At that point, I inquired what price everyone was selling their fruit at. I bought all of the fruits, that I didn’t really need, told them they could keep the change, and I still had a Shs20,000 note left! If an election had been held there and then, I would have won with 98 per cent of the vote.

I calculated that if the girls came from six households, on average, each of them earned about Shs5,000 ($1.36), and it was possibly their biggest sale in a month. If each household had six people and divided the money equally, each would get 22 US cents.

That cannot get for any of the girls petroleum jelly to smear on their faces and legs so they can shine in the local town. So, they will be frustrated. Which raises the question, why are the fruits so cheap, in the first place? Among other reasons, it is because more fruit is being produced and cheaply.

Seeds are cheaper, and the cost of transporting inputs is lower because now there are tarmac or first grade earth roads where there were none or trekking trails years ago. That is why it doesn’t work to throw growth statistics and length of kilometres of roads at them. Precisely because the infrastructure worked exactly as they were meant to, they have unleashed new demands for a better life – which aren’t met.

Then Bobi Wine comes along and sings “Tuliyambala Engule”, painting a vision of farmers being paid richly for their labour…

When I crisscrossed the east and north, one obvious thing stands out when you look at young people. The ones who wear new clothes are school children in school uniform (even then a few of them). While women will have to sew new busuti/gomesi, many young men in the country can only wear mitumba (mitumba radicalises). 

And they are aware of both the necessity of and humiliation of it. They do so partly because both the country and the world is more open. They see people from the big city and town driving along the tarmac roads in fancy cars, in nice caps, and new T-shirts.

Because there is now electricity in the town, and TVs showing in shops and pubs, they see the glamorous world out there. They see glamorous and beautiful people, and they want to look and live the same way. They are responding to progress, and you miss the point totally if you are in the government or ruling party and argue that they are “misled” by unpatriotic Ugandans or enemies of the country in asking for more.  

There are many things that are wrong in Uganda today; the corruption, tribalism, the authoritarianism, but an imaginative and less reflexively brutal leadership would also see the positive challenge; the biggest one is how to manage success. 

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