Ugandan opposition politician Bobi Wine is nothing if not brave.
He campaigns for president wearing a bulletproof vest and a ballistic helmet. The security forces block him from using major roads and holding rallies in some cities. Over 400 of his party members have been arrested. And he doesn’t expect to win in a system that’s been rigged from the start.
“It’s neither free nor fair at all,” he told me in a Zoom call. “This was supposed to be a campaign. But in many ways, it is a war. It is as if I am running against the military and against the police.”
It’s a conflict he’s sadly familiar with. Wine — a 43-year-old former singer whose legal name is Robert Kyagulanyi — tried five years ago to unseat incumbent President Yoweri Museveni, in an election marred by violence and counting irregularities. Wine was detained several timescampaigning. Museveni was declared the winner with nearly 59 percentof the vote.
With elections set to take place Thursday, Wine hopes this time will be different.
Museveni, now 81 years old, is vying for a seventh consecutive term. He came to power 40 years ago, in January 1986. That’s when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the Soviet Union was still a threat and the world had more telephone booths than cellphones.
It’s a story that continues to play out all too often across Africa, where entrenched “Big Men” cling to power for decades, stifling the continent’s progress and democratic aspirations. Museveni is the prototypical African autocrat who came to power as a military man, saw political opponents as enemies to be vanquished, and ruled over a country beset by corruption and misrule.
I first started covering Uganda in the early 1990s, when Museveni was considered one of the “new breed”of African leaders replacing the old postcolonial dictators. I interviewed a few of these new generation leaders, including Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea, and Paul Kagame in Rwanda, after they came into office following periods of turmoil. They promised stability and offered just enough platitudes about democracy and pluralism to keep the international community happy. Like Museveni, Afwerki and Kagame are still in power. New breed, same greed.
Coming to Africa as a correspondent after four years covering Southeast Asia, I often compared Uganda to Cambodia, led then and now by strongman Hun Sen.
Museveni seized power in 1986 as the head of a guerrilla army, after the massacres of the Idi Amin and Milton Obote dictatorships. Hun Sen came to power in Cambodia in 1985, after Vietnam toppled the Khmer Rouge dictatorship that left more than a million people dead. Museveni and Hun Sen maintained power through repression and fraudulent elections with the acquiescence of the international donor community that was happy to back a dictator who brought “stability” after genocide.
And the aid money continues to flow. Uganda and Cambodia are both heavily dependent on foreign aid. They are also among the poorest countries in their respective regions and most corrupt, according to Transparency International.
Another similarity may yet emerge. In Cambodia in 2023, Hun Sen nominally stepped away from day-to-day executive authority, handing over the prime minister’s job to his son, Hun Manet. Born in 1977, Hun Manet had been a general and head of the Cambodian military, after studying at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Museveni appears to be readying to hand over power to his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is 51 and a general in charge of the Ugandan military. Kainerugabastudied at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
Kainerugaba is widely seen as erratic and potentially dangerous — and prone to bizarre outbursts on social media. In one posting on X, Kainerugaba boasted of keeping an opposition activist detained in his basement and threatened to castrate him. In another, he said he wanted to behead Bobi Wine. He once offered to purchase Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for a “bride price” of 100 prized Ugandan cows. His father was forced to rein him in for threatening to invade neighboring Kenya.
Kainerugaba is effectively in charge of securing Uganda’s elections. That has Bobi Wine worried. “Many of my friends have been killed,” Wine told me. “I fear for my life, too.”
Wine is hoping that Ugandans — especially young Gen Zers — show up in large numbers to assert themselves against the odds. And he wants the international community, including the U.S., to speak out if the election is stolen.
“Museveni has been hoodwinking the international community for a long time that he is a democratic leader and democratically elected,” he told me. “All we’re asking is for the international community to stop being the wind beneath the wing of a dictator.”
After another sham election last October in Tanzania saw President Samia Suluhu Hassan reelected with an eye-rolling 97.66 percent of the vote, widespread protests were met with ruthless force. The United Nations and human rights groups reported hundreds were killed. Wine sees a similar scenario potentially unfolding in Uganda.
“It will definitely be violent until the international community calls out this dictator,” he said. “Dictators in Africa,” he said, “survive on handouts from the international community.” He added, “We do what we can do.”
I really wish him well. But the scale of the violence so far, past experience and Washington’s disengagement from Africa under this administration, leave me more than a little pessimistic. For Uganda, and for the continent.
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