Briefing: Contextualizing the Bobi Wine factor in Uganda’s 2021 elections

Extract

A year out from the 2021 ugandan election, opposition supporters had a lot to worry about. After four straight presidential elections in which the non-incumbent vote was remarkably concentrated in the candidacy of Kizza Besigye of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), political developments were suggesting that this coalescence would not survive into the upcoming campaign season. At the centre of the FDC, Besigye’s long-time rival for the party nomination, Mugisha Muntu, finally concluded that his differences in approach with Besigye’s faction were too significant to be housed in one party, breaking off to form the Alliance for National Transformation with a few of his factional allies from the FDC.¹ More significantly, however, the youthful and confrontational crowd that had been Besigye’s political base for years seemed to have a new champion: musician Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, better known by his stage name Bobi Wine, who entered Parliament in a by-election in 2017. In the subsequent years, Bobi Wine’s political profile rose via several high-profile confrontations with the authorities, and, as the election approached, his brand clearly rivalled Besigye’s to a greater degree than any opposition figure to date.