This is the bitter truth Bobi Wine’s supporters won’t easily accept. In the year 2021, it was easier for him to sell his agenda and get a lot of people to believe in it. Being a new kid on the block, there was a lot of believability and good will, which explains why many gullible Ugandans, especially the youths, easily believed his promises.
He dissed his predecessors in opposition like PK Semogerere, Kizza Besigye, Amama Mbabazi and others with ‘bano babadde bakyali be [these have been Museveni’s allies]’ and ‘bino byaddala [this is the real opposition]. A lot of young people naively believed Bobi’s claim that Semogerere, Besigye and others in the old opposition were deliberately not pushing hard enough to get Museveni out because they were his proxies and actually had no interest in forcing him out.
He inappropriately called the President ‘Bosco’ and assured supporters he was an opponent he could manage to overcome without requiring help from Besigye, Semogerere and others since these had all along been proxies merely playing games with Museveni. This deceit morale-boosted a lot of young people who genuinely believed Museveni was done.
Thousands of these energetic youths reciprocated by working very hard and giving their all, including engaging in reckless provocation towards security, resulting into severe sanctioning for a lot of them. And Bobi Wine, who many of them believed was invincible, was nowhere to be seen or be of help to prevent danger from befalling them.
He promised he would remove Museveni in a matter of days even before reaching swearing-in date. Many young people naively believed this too. Days grew into weeks, months and now years with Museveni only growing stronger. Naturally, failure to deliver and justify all this deceptive euphoria he deliberately created, demystifies Bobi Wine and diminishes chances of similar political messaging delivering the desired political outcomes going into 2026.
Bobi Wine promised to ‘remove the dictator’ and in the end only ended up removing his Deputy Mathias Mpuuga and a few NUP MPs. The ‘dictator’ he promised to remove is still here and going strong. All this demystification weakens, as opposed to strengthening, Bobi Wine. It diminishes the believability of his message going into 2021.
As of 2021, his political momentum (amasanyalaze) was at its highest and everybody in opposition feared to publicly contradict him, save for a few bold ones like Stella Nyanzi. The English call what Stella Nyanzi attempted to do ‘belling the cat’ but today Bobi is no longer feared as was the case five years ago. Mathias Mpuuga, Abed Bwanika, MP Juliet Kakande, Moses Kasibante etal have all attacked him publicly and nothing happened to them. The likes of Frank Gashumba have relentlessly attacked him and still the sun rose from the east.
As of 2019/2020, going into 2021, even fellow musicians feared antagonizing Bobi or exhibiting any disloyalty towards him. Time came when musicians couldn’t resist giving in to blackmail to do solidarity songs for him (whenever he got arrested) fearing to lose their fans who politically had blindly bought Bobi’s People Power messaging. Whoever wanted to organize a successful concert had to pay pilgrimage to Magere, get to be photographed with Bobi Wine and have the photos/videos vastly publicized by bloggers. This had become the only way to be assured of filled up concerts. Some musicians had even to pay Bobi’s handlers to get the principal put out a solidarity post on his socials urging crowds to go for the concert.
You had to go beg for that endorsement and use the photos/videos taken from Magere to mobilize for the turn up at your concert. But that joogo/maltreatment was all demystified with the advent of Alien Skin. Hitherto unknown, Alien defied odds and had a filled up concert at Freedom City without any endorsement from Bobi Wine. He resisted the Kyagulanyi chauvinism, contradicted the Principal publicly, but still went on to have his concert sell out. This was a turning point and it emboldened other musicians to begin ignoring Kyagulanyi and still had large concerts.
Then came the two prominent deaths of Kato Lubwama and Isma Olaxes. Especially Olaxes’ was a big event because of the circumstances of his death namely being murdered, as opposed to natural death. It attracted a lot of media attention and blogger Ichuli, who had fearlessly been bashing Bobi Wine single-handedly, even at the time the Kasibantes and Stella Nyanzi still feared him, dominated media headlines for weeks as police and other investigators kept updating the country about the new leads.
The endorsement that came with huge crowds that mourned Ichuli was clearly a slap in Bobi Wine’s face. He expected Ugandans to show hostility to Ichuli and take to social media to celebrate his death which never happened. Instead, they mourned him. His story dominated TV and newspaper headlines as investigators updated the country on latest leads. For weeks, Ichuli dominated media headlines which Bobi Wine all along thought only him could do.
The involvement of Mohammed Nsereko, the man Bobi Wine greatly hates, in coordinating the Ichuli events was an additional slap in Kyagulanyi’s face. He was demystified and clearly got to see that he wasn’t going to be the one to determine for Ugandans who to love or to loathe. The message became clear that Ugandans would have their heroes regardless of where one stood in the Museveni vs. Bobi Wine political duel. In his death, Ichuli made it clear that you didn’t have to be pro-Bobi Wine to be loved and mourned or celebrated by Ugandans.
Then there was Kato Lubwama who turned out to be bigger in death than Bobi Wine could have wished him to be. Thousands thronged Kato Lubwama’s home at Mutundwe and registered their love and appreciation for him. And this went on for two full weeks and was all being coordinated by Mohammed Nsereko, which naturally must have displeased Bobi Wine once again.
Bobi Wine had expected Ugandans to use social media to celebrate Kato Lubwama’s death but instead they mourned and made it clear that Uganda had lost a great man. There was a lot of media publicity for Kato, which must have hurt Kyagulanyi more than anyone else. For he believes that all the publicity has to be about him or else its diversion. Kato Lubwama achieved that, to the chagrin of Kyagulanyi and his inner circle. Lubwama had been defeated by Bobi Wine-backed Aloysius Mukasa for the Rubaga South MP Seat in 2021.
Yet even after losing his MP Seat in 2021 to little known Mukasa, because of the Kyagulanyi wave, Kato Lubwama remained unbowed in the months that followed. He increasingly grew more and more radicalized with passage of time. He was unrepentant, very belligerent and fought Kyagulanyi even on his death bed as he breathed his last (never surrendered) and Ugandans reciprocated or paid him back by massively celebrating his legacy in death. Large crowds turned up for vigil at his Mutundwe and publicly wailed, crying for him and making it clear that Rubaga, Kampala and Uganda had lost a hero.
This naturally hurt and bruised the self-esteem of Kyagulanyi, who having seen the love Ugandans showed and the generous media publicity the Kato Lubwama story attracted for an entire two weeks, in the end had no option but to humble himself, summon his guts and turn up for the burial in Mpigi where he made a tensed up speech in which he attacked fellow musicians for not being hard enough on President Museveni and other ruling party officials. Now emboldened, the musicians responded by calling him out while demanding to know why he treats and lectures them like little kids.
All along, Bobi Wine, because of the bloggers’ propaganda, had been accepted as someone who was clean and in this whole struggle to fight for the cause of the ordinary man. But the Mpuuga fallout exposed a lot of rot inside NUP especially regarding sex and financial scandals.
The moment Mpuuga belled the cat, it became like a license for others to put off the gloves and openly go after Bobi Wine. He is going into 2026 on the defensive as he no longer enjoys that moral high ground similar to what he had as of 2021 regarding corruption in the sitting government. A lot of people now see his demystified People Power Movement as an extortionist outfit whose leaders are about nothing but self-aggrandizement.
He had also been accepted as the man with all the relevant connections in the Western capitals to the extent that supporters believed that the famous Meeri/war ship had been stationed on the Indian Ocean Port of Mombasa by Western powers to help him have the final push and finally remove ‘the dictator’ who was supposed to be punished for having stolen his election victory. In the end, all this amounted to nothing, it was a mirage and Bobi Wine was left totally exposed.
When he was thoroughly defeated by President Museveni in 2021 and he had nothing more to tell millions of his gullible supporters, regarding what should be expected next, the increasingly vulnerable and less believable Bobi Wine created false hope among his followers (calling it raba-daba style) by petitioning the Supreme Court to challenge the election results.
Because they had been told that Museveni had all along been prevailing against Besigye and Amama Mbabazi at the previous similar petitions because the duo were his agents and actually had no interest in taking power, millions of foot soldiers genuinely got excited with conviction that Kyagulanyi’s petition was a real one and would be used to overcome Museveni.
In the end, they all got to know how poorly packaged and argued that petition was. In the end, it was thrown out, prompting a tearful and clearly vulnerable powerless Bobi Wine to announce that he had taken his case to the public court!
What all this demystification leads to is the fact that there won’t be many people who will believe that on losing in the ballot box in 2026, as is surely going to be the case, Kyagulanyi will have any plausible plan B which essentially would imply petitioning the Supreme Court. That myth (of he can use the courts since for him is a serious fellow unlike Besigye & Mbabazi of 2016) is long gone and it’s something Kyagulanyi can’t use anymore.
Yet that isn’t all. The ease with which assertives like Erias Lukwago, Semujju Nganda and Kalangala Kyamuswa’s Moses Kabuusu were able to win their races in 2021, directly defeating Kyagulanyi-sponsored candidates, also greatly demystified the so-called Kyagulanyi wave (even though the trio never went anywhere chest-thumping and bragging to have demystified Bobi).
Their victories in Buganda, a region in which Kyagulanyi is supposed to be king, indicated that having the NUP card or ticket can’t be sufficient to deliver a win. The same can be said about the circumstances under which Bobi’s brother Fred Nyanzi was defeated by Mohammed Nsereko in Kampala Central.
All this emboldens those disgruntled NUPians who might have feared to run as independents after card deprivation in 2021, to consider trying so in 2026. And what all that will do is to advantage the NRM as having several NUP-friendly independent candidates for one MP or Lord Councilor seat will split up the opposition vote and thereby increasing chances for NRM flag bearers.
Multiple candidates, all of them professing NUP loyalty, is something Bobi Wine must be very much worried about because it will make him face exactly Dr Kizza Besigye and his man Erias Lukwago faced in 2011. In that year, Besigye was very strong in especially Kampala where you had as many as 5 or more competitors run for especially one KCCA Lord Councilor position.
Each one of them claimed Besigye was their Presidential Candidate, Erias Lukwago their choice for Lord Mayor and that they were loyal to the agenda of Ssuubi/IPC. This greatly confused voters and you had fist fights and real bloodshed on the day Besigye campaigned in Kampala because every candidate wanted to show closeness to him.
Voters got confused and voted on them the way they felt (because candidate Besigye couldn’t rebuke any of them, for he needed each one of them) and in the end, NRM delivered more Lord Councillors at City Hall than the opposition and that’s how Lord Mayor Lukwago was impeached.
In the case of Bobi Wine of 2026, such confusion could mean delivering fewer NUP MPs, Councillors, Division Mayors and other local government leaders even in the Kampala Metropolitan Area districts of Kampala, Mukono, Wakiso and partly Mpigi, Luwero and Mityana where his NUP wave is supposed to be strongest.
The author, Brian K Tindyebwa, is a senior grass root mobilizer for the ruling NRM party based in Kampala’s Rubaga North. He is also an Advocate of the High Court. He can directly be reached for feedback via briantindyebwa0@gmail.com.
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