If anyone was going to challenge Yoweri Museveni, the 74-year-old wouldn’t have expected it to be a reggae star who wasn’t even born when he married Janet in 1973. But Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu has constantly being a thorn in Museveni’s flesh and for once, many consider him as the beginning of the end of Museveni’s 32-year rule.

Born in Mpigi district, central Uganda, Kyagulanyi, popularly known as Bobi Wine, grew up in Kamwookya, one of the poorest suburbs of Kampala where he launched his music career in the early 2000s after graduating from Makerere University, Uganda’s oldest, with a degree in Music, Dance and Drama. He became famously known as the “Ghetto President” for persistently speaking out about the struggles of the Ugandan lower classes and the urban poor.

Releasing songs that hit directly at government failures and excesses made Kyagulanyi popular among Ugandan youth.

Some of his spectacular lines include “Why would you wash white clothes only to hang them on a dirty log to dry?” “Why don’t you look up to Mandela as an example? He ran for one term and released the flag”. “We know you fought a Bush war, but imagine a child who was unborn when you came has long become a parent… They request that you don’t touch their constitution because it’s their only remaining hope.”

In 2017, Kyagulanyi won a parliamentary seat for Kyaddondo East in Uganda, taking the ghetto to the parliament as he didn’t stop being Bobi Wine.

All by himself, Bobi Wine has galvanized support for a new line of thinking that is beyond Museveni. He has helped unseat three incumbent ruling party MPs. He was an outsider and nobody invited him but he brought his own chair and sat at the table. The rural votes Museveni once relied on to win elections is now being split with Bobi Wine, whose cult-like following is growing in rural Uganda and among the lower and middle classes, especially young Ugandans.

As things stand, if there is anyone who can end Museveni’s reign through a free and fair election, it is Bobi Wine. He is only 36.

 

Source: https://thenerveafrica.com/25349/the-africa-yellow-wall-the-africans-that-should-inspire-you-in-2019/