Pop star Bobi Wine aims for the Ugandan presidency amid campaign violence

Bobi Wine, a Ugandan pop star and opposition candidate, says he was struck with tear gas and pepper spray while running against President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power for a long time.

His unwavering opposition to Museveni’s “dictatorship” has made him what he is today—43 years old and almost a decade into his political career. Violence on the campaign road doesn’t come as a surprise to him.

Most people don’t think Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, has a chance of beating a president who has been in office since 1986, when Wine was only three years old.

In his second run for president, Wine has rallied millions of disappointed young Ugandans, making him Museveni’s most dangerous opponent in years. This comes at a time when the 81-year-old Museveni is likely planning his successor.

“Every time we go through this treacherous atmosphere and we get to the people, it’s like a breath of fresh air,” Wine said to Reuters. “The knowledge that the regime is actually doing this to ‘break my back’, that they’re doing this to demoralize us – we choose to deliberately not stop, just to show them that we can keep going.”

Police were only called in when Wine supporters broke campaign rules by blocking traffic or having events outside of set times, according to the government.

GOAL TO BRING UGANDANS TOGETHER

Museveni has often said that Wine was working for foreigners, even those who wanted to support homosexuality.

The charge is meant to hurt Wine’s support in the country, which is mostly Christian and conservative and has some of the strictest anti-gay laws in the world.

In the 2021 election, Wine ran against Museveni. The election was tainted by claims of widespread fraud and the deaths of more than 50 opposition backers by security forces while they were campaigning. During the campaign, Wine was arrested several times and decided to wear a bullet-proof jacket and helmet.

Later, he dropped his court case against the outcome, which said that Museveni had won 58% of the votes, and he said that the judges who were hearing the case were biased. The U.S. government said the election wasn’t free or fair, but Museveni’s government denied those claims.

While Wine was running for office, security guards have regularly used live bullets and tear gas at his events, killing at least one person and arresting hundreds of his supporters.

Now that Museveni is almost certainly going to win the race, everyone is talking about what it means for the president’s eventual replacement.

Many people think that Museveni wants to finally give power to his son and military chief, Muhoozi Kainerugaba. He also wants to win by a large margin to show that he is in charge. He will also want to avoid large-scale protests that could hurt his situation and make the ruling party more divided.

Museveni has denied that he is training Kainerugaba to be his successor.

Opposition still has disagreements.

He is the 20th child in a family of 33 children by multiple wives. Wine has said that the problems his mother went through while selling food on the streets of Kampala’s Kamwokya slum influenced his music and politics.

In the early 2000s, he became one of East Africa’s most popular artists with songs that were about racism and urban poverty set to catchy, feel-good beats. In a 2016 song called “Situka,” which means “Rise Up” in the local Luganda language, he sang, “When the going gets tough, the tough must get going especially when leaders become misleaders and mentors become tormentors.”

He was elected to parliament in 2017 after surprising everyone with a huge win in an election for a seat near Kampala. He gained political power by using the anger of young people in constructive ways.

A government census from 2024 shows that more than 42% of Uganda’s 46 million people are not working, learning, or training. This means that over 73% of the country’s people are under 30 years old.

Wine says that he would focus on restoring the rule of law, creating more jobs, and getting rid of crime if he were elected.

Others in Uganda, including people who don’t like the government, have complained that Wine’s plans aren’t very specific. LGBTQ rights activists have criticized him for not fighting a law from 2023 that would have put the death sentence for some same-sex acts with more force.

Wine called the law a political stunt and promised not to hurt LGBTQ people, but he didn’t say anything bad about what it said.

He also hasn’t been able to get the resistance in Uganda to support him, so six other people are also running against Museveni.

In 2024, Wine wrote on social media that Museveni had been able to control the resistance, which was why they weren’t working together.

He wrote that some people don’t care about getting rid of Museveni as long as they’re happy being in the resistance.