Bobi Wine has a chance of leading Uganda if he fixes these 3 hurdles

The leader of the National Unity Platform (NUP), Bobi Wine, aka Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, is doing something even veteran politicians would struggle to achieve: drawing mammoth crowds wherever he goes in Uganda.

The mammoth crowds do not necessarily mean that every single person who turns up to listen to Bobi Wine can/will vote for him. But we have to look at them in a different way.

Bobi Wine and Dr Kizza Besigye, after all, are the only politicians who have managed to give President Museveni a run for his money in a presidential race.

If the elections the two politicians have contested were organised by an independent Electoral Commission and were free of rigging and interference by security forces, Mr Museveni would probably be out of the State House.

Bobi Wine’s mammoth crowds may bear comparison with those of Paul Ssemogerere (1996) and Amama Mbabazi (2015 before the polls in 2016), but the proportion of the vote these two politicians won suggested they were not highly electable.

For example, Ssemogerere got 23.6 percent while Amama Mbabazi managed 1.39 percent.

Without doubt, the leading Opposition light at the moment is Bobi Wine, and it is understandable why all eyes are on him.

The youth, who form a disproportionately large proportion of his crowds, view him as a political messiah. However, Bobi Wine has three major hurdles to overcome in order to become president.

The first hurdle is the drivers of the dynasty in the making. It is not clear at this stage whether this project (aka the Muhoozi Project) will materialise, but the dynasty-in-the-making drivers are busy marketing, so to speak, Mr Museveni’s son, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, as the future president. They seem to have everything.

Gen Muhoozi has toured different parts of the country and attended events, attracting equally large crowds. The problem with his crowds, just like the crowds drawn by his father, is that they are not organic — to borrow the term used in social media reach. Someone somewhere has to spend money to get them.

The dynasty-in-the-making drivers are going to work tremendously hard to ensure their project succeeds. If it succeeds, Bobi Wine cannot become president. The backers of the dynasty-in-the-making project have amassed wealth during Mr Museveni’s 37-year rule and feel that they can only protect their wealth when someone close to the president is in power. That is how they can relax and enjoy their wealth.

The second hurdle is closely related to the first and is the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF). Although Mr Museveni boasts that he has professionalised the army and it is supposed to be subordinate to civilian authority, not everyone agrees. If the army was truly professional, Gen Muhoozi would not be going around making political statements and acting remarkably like a politician when he is still a serving officer — without anyone calling him to account. 

It is, therefore, not inconceivable that our army can interfere with how the country is governed. 

The third hurdle is the kind of language Bobi Wine used in Kasana, Luweero District. Critics say he sounded tribalistic and cares more about Baganda, not Ugandans in general. Of course this depends on who you talk to. More worryingly, he lied that some prominent Baganda had been murdered, yet there is evidence they died from natural causes.  Maybe this does not matter much because sometimes politics, like religion, relies on lies.

Mr Musaazi Namiti is a journalist and former
Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected] , @kazbuk