MARTIN KHARUMWAThe Mix
30 | Rolling Stone | April 2020
Museveni remains popular with rural
voters, who make up a majority of the
population. All these projections are
little better than guesswork.
The election won’t be free or fair.
There have been consistent charges of
ballot-stuffing, bribery, and voter in-
timidation in the past, and few I spoke
to expect anything different in 2021.
Museveni seems intent on counter-
ing the threat Wine and his fellow art-
ists pose. This past fall, he appointed
several prominent musicians as new
presidential advisers. Buchaman, a
dreadlocked Rastafarian who’d once
been vice president of Wine’s Fire
Base Crew, became Museveni’s Spe-
cial Envoy for Ghetto Affairs.
One sunny afternoon, I trail Bucha-
man in a two-car convoy to Kasokoso,
a Kampala slum that sits alongside a
landfill. His musical association with
Wine makes him a celebrity in places
like this, and when he gets out of the
car, he’s swarmed. We arrive at the
grassy front yard of a house, where
several chairs and a bench have been
arranged beneath two trees. For the
next hour, Buchaman and his team
sit there, holding court. One by one,
local residents parade before him,
asking for help to build a local health
center, to send money for schools, for
job training, to fix the roads, to com-
bat crime.
Buchaman is here representing the
government, but when I ask about it,
he doesn’t exactly embrace Museve-
ni and the NRM. “I’ve not been a sup-
porter,” he says. “Even now, why I am
behind Museveni is to help the ghet-
to people. I’m not part of any political
party.” He repeats something I heard
when I met with Catherine Kusasira,
another singer-turned-government-
envoy: The problem isn’t that Museve-
ni is corrupt or incompetent, but that
the local politicians he’s worked with
are. “He has been giving money to the
wrong people, to ministers and MPs,
and they do nothing for the ghetto,”
Buchaman says. “They’ve been eat-
ing the money.” He believes he can do
better: “I know what pains the ghetto
people.”
The whole afternoon feels perfor-
mative, but people here seem genuine-
ly happy that someone at least both-
ered to come listen to them. And this
is the point. Museveni doesn’t nec-
essarily need them to vote for him.
He doesn’t even need them not to
vote for Wine. He just needs to give
them something to think about. He
may even address some of their com-
plaints. “There’s going to be lots of
money poured into the ghetto,” says
Kalinaki. “The intention isn’t to cure
the long-standing problems but to cre-
ate lag time between the election out-
come and people going back to their
miserable lives.”
The goal is to avoid the one thing
that can actually force Museveni from
office: a full-scale, Arab Spring-style
uprising by the country’s young and
impoverished. “That’s the only threat
Bobi Wine presents Museveni,” says Se-
runkuma. “It’s not an electoral threat.
It’s a threat to mobilize bodies onto the
streets of Kampala.”
Indeed, in the past decade, street
protests have ousted a series of en-
trenched African dictators, first in Tu-
nisia and Egypt, then in Burkina Faso,
the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Zimbabwe, Algeria, and Sudan. This
is essentially what Wine’s campaign is
about: creating momentum and settingthe conditions to spark a
revolution. But it’s a seri-
ous gamble. “We’re in the
middle of a fight,” Wine
says. “Museveni believes
in violent fight. We believe
in logic, and psychological and demo-
cratic fight. We know he won’t go with-
out a fight. But we’re over 40 million
people. We know Gaddafi, Bouteflika,
and Omar al-Bashir wouldn’t go with-
out a fight. But they went.”
He and his backers are counting
on protesters not just going into the
streets, but also staying there once bul-
lets start flying. Not everyone thinks
they will. Several people I spoke to
who are broadly supportive of demo-
cratic change just don’t think Uganda’s
impoverished youth have the stom-
ach for the fight. “People like Bobi un-
derestimate what the sound of gunfire
does to people who in many cases have
never seen war,” says Kalinaki. “That
generation doesn’t know what a Katyu-
sha [rocket launcher] sounds like.”
Wine himself has plenty to lose.
Music has made him wealthy, though
his inability to play shows here for the
past two years has taken a bite from
that wealth. “I can no longer enjoy thethings I used to enjoy,” he says. “Ordi-
narily, every weekend, I’d have con-
certs and be making a lot of money.
I’d be driving the latest cars. I’d have
spending cash of maybe 100 million
[Ugandan shillings],” or about $27,000.
He’s still doing OK. On my final full
day in Uganda, I meet him at One Love
Beach, a six-acre plot of rolling green
lawns, palm trees, and beachfront on
the shore of Lake Victoria, south of
Kampala’s city center. He bought the
property 15 years ago with the inten-
tion of building a house and retiring
to it when he turned 35. Instead, he
opened the beach — and himself — to
the public. For less than a dollar you
can spend the day here, swimming,
barbecuing, playing soccer and vol-leyball, or dancing to the
throb of Afro beat pouring
from the sound system.
Today is Sunday, and
Wine looks dressed for
retirement: blue, floral-
print, short-sleeve button-down and
matching shorts, with dark leggings
underneath, along with blue high-
tops. “Man, I miss this place,” he tells
me, waving a hand toward the beach.
He used to come every week, but this
is his first visit in nearly three months.
He’s invited friends, and has goat,
chicken, and fish sizzling on a grill
within a grove of trees.
His manner today is more subdued
than the day before. There’s no sense
he regrets the mantle he’s taken up,
but he clearly misses some of what he
left behind. “Every once in a while, I’d
love to drink, be tipsy and happy, and
dance with my friends,” he says. “But
I can’t because I represent something
greater than me.” I tell him he sounds
like someone reconsidering that retire-
ment. He laughs. “The question is, ‘Do
I ever think I should just retire?’ ” He
smiles. “All the time.”
Wine still records when he can, but
even his music now must fit within nar-rower parameters. Anything breezy
and carefree is unlikely to see the light
of day. “People expect more revolu-
tionary music from me,” he says.
The next year is going to be a tumul-
tuous one — for him, for People Power,
for Uganda itself. In a few weeks, he’ll
be arrested as he tries to meet with
supporters. Police will fire tear gas and
bullets to disperse the crowds. (The
police claimed Wine had been permit-
ted to have an assembly indoors but
not outdoors.) He and other People
Power leaders will be held in a crowd-
ed cell for most of a day. The govern-
ment will continue to block his efforts
to meet with voters.
He knows he has worse in store.
Multiple criminal charges hang over
his head, including the treason charge
and another for inciting violence.
When I ask what he’ll do if the gov-
ernment convicts him, locks him up,
and declares him ineligible to run for
president, he stares at me grim-faced
for a long beat. “We shall cross that
bridge when we get to it,” he says,
then smiles widely. “I mean, what can
I say?”
Throwing Wine in prison forev-
er, killing him, or unleashing a vio-
lent crackdown against his support-
ers, would engender criticism from
the international community, but
that’s probably not what’s stopping
Museveni and his regime from doing
those things. What is keeping them
in check is the fear of triggering the
exact sort of revolutionary spark that
Wine is hoping to generate. What ex-
actly might trigger that neither side
knows. So they grope in the dark to-
ward a line in the sand that may or
may not even exist.
Success for Wine may involve re-
orienting his goals. “The best thing
Bobi can do is to make a better con-
nection between people’s welfare and
the political choices they make,” says
Kalinaki. “If he can build that among
young people, then even if he doesn’t
dislodge Museveni in 2021, or even in
2026, he’ll have brought some politi-
cal consciousness to a generation that,
when it’s in its thirties or forties, will
make the painful decisions necessary
not just to get rid of Museveni but to
get rid of Musevenism.”
That’s not the end Wine wants, but
even if his mission fails, if he ends up
in prison or dead and Museveni’s still
in power, he’s comfortable with his
decisions. “Everything is worth it,” he
says. “Already, the awakening people
have received is worth it.” He’s look-
ing out past his beach at the late-after-
noon sun reflecting off Lake Victoria.
His voice gets quiet. “There are some
causes so noble that even a mere at-
tempt is noble enough.”THE FIGHTER Wine in
December. “This isn’t
about me,” he says.
“If it’s all about me,
when I’m arrested, it
all stops.”