Every time Uganda is nearing the election period, Ugandans experience funny and cheap sympathy-seeking political stunts from the opposition.
In 2020, Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, the leader of the National Unity Platform party, NUP, claimed to have been castrated by security personnel.
His supporters mobilized funds for his treatment abroad, only for him to start traversing different countries and cities on boat cruises and feel-good parties when he reached.
Bobi Wine and other opposition leaders are known for defying lawful orders from police to cause altercations that his team films and puts together for documentaries to earn more dollars.
On Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024, Bobi Wine claimed he was shot and injured, yet in the real sense, he injured himself when he stumbled while rushing to enter his vehicle during a scuffle with the police.
The sad part is that his team films and other people involved are just used as pawns for Bobi to attain his selfish goals. They do not in any way benefit from what he earns.
“It wasn’t a bullet, a lie to incite their gangsters to kill people. They failed and will never succeed in their scheme. Occupants in all the other vehicles aren’t running. Why do Eddy Mutwe and Kyagulanyi run out of the vehicle instead of driving off? Mutwe threw the explosion,” said Charles Rwomushana, a notable City political commentator.
In developing democracies, many freedom fighters pass through a lot while fighting to liberate their countries.
The pre-1986 bush war that ushered in the National Resistance government saw many of the fighters lose their eyes and have their bodies maimed, but they did not blame it on the governments they were fighting, and neither did it happen to them as money-mining stunts. Bobi Wine and team are just crybabies playing on the minds of Ugandans.
Interestingly, our current opposition leaders think their supporters are gullible so they can use them as tools for self-enrichment.
If Bobi Wine were a law-abiding politician, all the scuffles he involves himself in with police would be avoidable, but he provokes security personnel to attract media attention to account for his diaspora and international funding.
The cheap populism and sympathy-seeking have failed Uganda and other developing democracies to have legitimate opposition politicians.
It would be foolhardy for any sensible Ugandan to consider Bobi Wine and their team of freedom fighters. These people are just playing to the gallery for political expediency, but usually, it is not sustainable because Ugandans will understand him soon.
Unlike Bobi and his team, legitimate freedom fighters usually have an ideology they follow, and that is what motivates them. Our opposition leaders in Uganda are purely motivated by positions and money, and that is the reason we have the cheapest opposition politics.
In the next few days or months, Bobi Wine will be flying abroad disguisedly for treatment, and later you will see him releasing a documentary that will make him and his family more money. Where it leaves the gullible supporters he uses as ladders to get funds is a question for another day.
The change-seeking Ugandans deserve better opposition leaders than what they have now. Bobi Wine is in his world of misleading and using his few supporters to enrich himself; he is a clueless political novice who just focused on attracting funding from gay-promoting countries and nothing more.
