There is currently a traffic jam on all roads leading out of Uganda’s capital Kampala. Police officers stop every vehicle, every truck, every motorcycle. They are looking for opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi, known by his stage name Bobi Wine.
The 43-year-old presidential candidate of the NUP (National Unity Platform) party last Thursday lost the presidential election to incumbent Yoweri Museveniaccording to the electoral commission with 25 percent against 72 percent. He called the results “fake.”
Uganda’s army chief and eldest son of the president, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, opened the day after the election for X the hunt for his father’s rival: “I’m giving him exactly 48 hours to turn himself in to the police. If he doesn’t do this, we will treat him as an outlaw/rebel and take appropriate action against him.” That same day, police and soldiers surrounded Wine’s home in Kampala. “Helicopters were circling above us,” Wine reported on Platform X, saying he had managed to escape. Initially, rumors had circulated that the opposition leader had been deported or ended up in one of the secret torture prisons in which members of his NUP party had been ill-treated in the recent past.
But this time Bobi Wine was apparently prepared. On Saturday morning he spoke out via social media from an unknown location: “You ordered the attack on my house to harm me!” The 43-year-old addressed Uganda’s 51-year-old army chief directly: “I beat you with your own weapons and escaped. And there you stand now, gripped by fear and panic, confirming your dark plan against me!”
In the sights of the Twitter general
Kainerugaba, who has been considered his father’s most promising successor to the presidency for years, is notorious across Africa his provocative X-posts. In Uganda he is teasingly called the “Twitter General”. With well over a million followers on X, he has caused diplomatic turmoil several times in recent years. Among other things, he threatened that his army would conquer Sudan or Kenya.
Even now he takes his displeasure out on X. The internet in Uganda is largely paralyzed. Two days before the elections, the government had everything turned off. It was only on Sunday, after the results were announced, that the internet was partially restarted. However, social networks such as X, Tiktok or Whatsapp are still blocked. The security organs apparently fear that Wine would call for mass protests online, as happened in Kenya and Tanzania.
In one of his fiery posts, Kainerugaba even confirmed the opposition’s allegations. In his first video message from his hiding place, Wine reported that 22 of his supporters had been killed by the police and military on election day – a number that had not yet been confirmed by anyone.
Prompt tweeted the army chief on Monday evening: “We have killed 22 NUP terrorists since last week.” And a clear threat followed: “I pray that number 23 is Kabobi.” In the Luganda language, the prefix “ka” is a diminutive – Kabobi is therefore “little Bobi”.
Kainerugaba’s anger over Wine’s disappearance also has personal reasons. As a young freedom fighter in the 1980s, his father Museveni set up an underground guerrilla army to sweep away Uganda’s dictators at the time. Now he has to track down an opposition leader himself who is challenging his possible future job. Kainerugaba had already agreed to close collaboration with Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda in the run-up to the elections in order to arrest opposition figures who had fled to neighboring countries.
“Anyway, I’ll show up again whenever I want,” Wine replies. “Then you and your father can do whatever you want with me,” he writes and emphasizes: “This is our country!”