Title: Bobi Wine: The People's President

Micah Loewinger: Hey, you're listening to the On The Media midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger.

[MUSIC - Bobi Wine: Not Your Enemy]

Micah Loewinger: This week in Uganda, the pop star turned politician, Bobi Wine, released his manifesto for the 2026 presidential election. The current leader, Yoweri Museveni, has held power in Uganda since 1986 and is seeking his seventh term. Last year, Brooke spoke with Bobi Wine and Moses Bwayo, a co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Bobi Wine the People's President. They discussed Bobi's first bid for the presidency, the violent backlash he's faced, and why it's important for the world to pay attention to what's happening in Uganda. I'll let Brooke take things from here.

Brooke Gladstone: The Oscar-nominated documentary Bobi Wine: The People's President follows Wine on his political and personal journey, from his election to parliament in 2017 through his presidential run in 2021, as he used his music to reach Uganda's population of disenfranchised youth to explain what their rights were under the nation's battered constitution, in a country where political critiques can literally kill you. Heads up, there's a brief description of torture about nine minutes from now.

Bobi Wine: One day, everything is going to be fine.

Moses Bwayo: Everything's going to be fine.

Bobi Wine: One day, everything will be all right. Oh, yes. Let's go, Moses.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Bobi Wine and Moses Bwayo, one of the doc's two directors, testing the levels on their mics. Welcome to the show.

Bobi Wine: Thank you very much for having us.

Moses Bwayo: Thank you for having us.

Brooke Gladstone: Bobi, you grew up in the slums of Kampala. In the film, you refer to yourself as a ghetto child.

Bobi Wine: [Ugandan language]

Brooke Gladstone: What is a ghetto child?

Bobi Wine: In Uganda, a ghetto child looks at themselves as only worthy to live to the next day. Our dreams are as limited as wanting to make sure that mama gets three meals a day, that there's a guarantee of a shelter over our heads. Those are the dreams, and in most cases, they're not achieved.

Brooke Gladstone: You told Barbie, your wife, who's a crucial part of your story about having grown up in the slum without a mother or a father.

Bobi Wine: When I met Barbie, she impacted my life, and she challenged me to believe that I can impact other lives. That's when I started thinking big. That's when I started thinking changing lives and ultimately started thinking of challenging for the highest office in the land.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me, Moses, growing up in Uganda, when did you become aware of Bobi's music and give us a sense of how young people were experiencing his music?

Moses Bwayo: In Uganda, Bobi is that figure who has pulled himself up by the bootstraps. He had built a great life as an artist. His music resonates with the whole population. He has always responded to misrule with a song. Consistently, we've listened to him and he's inspired the generation and Uganda at large. When he decided to become a politician, we trusted him. Every five years in Uganda, when there's an election, the dictatorship, the Museveni dictatorship, pays artists a big sum of money, and they bring together 10 main big artists in the country. As long as I can remember, he never joined that group.

Brooke Gladstone: From the beginning, before Barbie, was your music like that from the start?

Bobi Wine: No. I started out as any other young and excited artist, singing about the girls and the rides and the money and the bling bling. That went on for quite some years until this one day at the height of my success, when I was beaten by a security agent, and the only reason was that I was showing off in a brand new Cadillac Escalade with 24-inch spinning wheels. That offended the security officer, who actually slapped me and asked me why I was showing off. For me, that was a wake-up call.

It reminded me of how so many other citizens had been violated and humiliated, many of them in my sight. I didn't do anything or say anything about it because it had not happened to me. I was a superstar who thought nothing like that would happen to me. It was happening to me now, and that is 2005 or thereabout. Since then, I even changed my music from entertainment to edutainment.

Brooke Gladstone: I know edutainment.

Bobi Wine: Oh, yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me about the lyrics of some of your songs. You sing about the importance of education.

Bobi Wine: Oh, yes. That's when I started addressing those injustices. I started singing about the corruption, the discrimination, the dictatorships, and all that. It went on like that until eventually, which is after about 10 years of revolutionary music, what I thought was life-changing music, and also using my music to call out the government on its heels, but it was not changing. In 2017, I said, "Okay, now since the parliament has refused to come to the ghetto, the ghetto will come to the parliament.

Brooke Gladstone: Your song Freedom became a real anthem.

[MUSIC - Bobi Wine: Freedom]

This is a message to the government

Expressing exactly what is on the people's minds

Brooke Gladstone: What is the purpose of liberation?

Bobi Wine: Oh, yes.

[MUSIC - Bobi Wine: Freedom]

We're living in a world similar to the one of slave trade

This oppression is worse than apartheid

The gun is the master

Citizen slave

The pearl of Africa is bleeding

Question

What was the purpose of the liberation?

When we can't have a peaceful transition?

What is the purpose of the constitution?

When the government disrespects the constitution?

Where is my freedom of expression?

When you charge me because of my expression?

Look what you doing to this nation

What are you teaching the future generation?

See our leaders become misleaders

And see our mentors become tormentors

Freedom fighters become dictators

Bobi Wine: You see that?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. You've mentioned one of your songs. Uganda, I think, says this very clearly. Three-fourths of the population is under 35, but the political leaders are notably old, including President Museveni. In the film, you say.

Bobi Wine: Museveni used to be my favorite revolutionary, and it's very, very disturbing that I'm at war with my once-favorite.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me what the president represents today.

Bobi Wine: He used to represent revolutionary ideas, transformational ideas. Today, he represents a breed of African tyrants that are so out of touch with reality, that are corrupt and are trading Africa to either the West or China or whoever is ready to agree with his continued stay in power at the cost of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.

Brooke Gladstone: Your view about him evolved. Did it change at that moment when you got smacked, or did it happen before then?

Bobi Wine: I was slapped to sobriety, and I woke up to the realities of what my fellow citizens were going through. That's when I started seeing that there are more churches in the ghetto than schools. That's when I started realizing that, indeed, it was deliberate to ban political education, to ban sensitizing and empowering and awakening programs on radio, and indeed, eventually my own music was banned, and my name was also banned on radio.

Brooke Gladstone: Bobi, in 2017, you ran for a seat in parliament. You won handily. You fought against Museveni's effort to amend the constitution, but the bill to remove the age limit passed, and that was so evident in the film, a huge disappointment, even though you saw it coming.

Bobi Wine: Yes, we saw it coming, but we did not just want to sit back and watch it happen. When he removed the age limit to stand for the election, I decided to challenge him, and we were massively supported. I was supported by the young people, the old people, all Ugandans from all walks of life.

Brooke Gladstone: We see you traveling, standing on the back of trucks, saying, "Keep your hands off the constitution."

Bobi Wine: Oh, yes. We had to, first, resist that abrogation of the Constitution. If we succeeded, we probably would have a different Uganda.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, soon after the vote, you were arrested by the military. What happened in your detention?

Bobi Wine: The government conceded to having me tortured, very, very bad. I having tweeted that I was in detention, there was international outcry. I was eventually charged with illegal possession of firearms, charged with treason, and I was charged with annoying the president. Today I am out on bail. I'm having a treason charge hanging around my neck, and that attracts the death sentence. My possession of illegal firearms charge was dropped out of extreme shame.

Brooke Gladstone: There's Barbie's description in the film of the torture.

Barbie Kyagulanyi: He has a swollen head. He has red eyes, and they're swollen. His ears are swollen. The whole face is swollen.

Brooke Gladstone: It was a kind of relentless beating.

Bobi Wine: Everything nasty happened to me, from beating to having testicles squeezed, to having ears pulled with pliers, to having needles injected in my nails. I don't want to talk about it.

Brooke Gladstone: That's fine. I just wonder, your determination didn't flag, but it seemed like you were in some ways a different person. Like it was something impossible to entirely recover from.

Bobi Wine: Yes. Nelson Mandela said it always seems impossible until it's done.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you feel you've recovered?

Bobi Wine: I don't know. Some things, honestly, we'll never recover from them. The only way I can recover is knowing that it can never happen to me again, but now I'm not sure that it's not going to happen to me when I go back to Uganda, and I am going back to Uganda. I'm not very sure if it will not happen to me or any other Ugandan.

Brooke Gladstone: The torture you experienced didn't deter you from running for president against Museveni in 2021. The crackdown on your campaign was brutal. You were arrested twice. Your campaign headquarters was raided. All of those signatures that you'd assiduously collected had to be collected again. The money that was necessary in order to register to be on the ballot was stolen by military. Dozens and dozens of your campaign staff were abducted and detained.

People who showed up at your rallies were subjected to horrifying brutality. Watching it all unfold in the documentary gave a real sense of the chaotic nature of the repression, and yet you feel that perhaps there wasn't enough violence in the film.

Bobi Wine: That's true. I must say I'm thankful that our film is seen by the world, and I'm thankful that the world appreciates our pain, but honestly, what you see in the film is just a scratch on the surface. It is a brutal, violent regime.

Brooke Gladstone: Moses, you were there filming profound moments.

Moses Bwayo: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Intimate moments.

Moses Bwayo: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: You were in the hotel when he was surrounded by the military.

Moses Bwayo: Right.

Brooke Gladstone: How many years were you filming?

Moses Bwayo: We followed Bobi for five years.

Brooke Gladstone: What was the most difficult scene to film?

Moses Bwayo: There was a few of those very tense moments. So many, but one very particular one. We spent days in house arrest after the election. Bobi, his wife, and myself.

Bobi Wine: In fact, right from the day of the election, as soon as I cast my ballot, I was locked up.

Moses Bwayo: Yes, in his house, and thought that they would break into the house any moment, because a lot of his election committees had been arrested. His election aides were kidnapped, actually.

Bobi Wine: Around 60 of them are still in prison.

Moses Bwayo: Today, as we speak. This is a current story. It's not over yet. In fact, before him and his wife traveled here, they were under house arrest for a week or something.

Bobi Wine: The day we received the news of the nomination of this film, we were under military detention. We were under house arrest. Right now, as we speak, three of our colleagues are missing. They were abducted two weeks ago. They've not been seen. It is constant. It is ongoing.

Brooke Gladstone: There is a scene between Bobi and Barbie, and Barbie says, "We're going to have to send the kids away."

Bobi Wine: We will never be safe here until Museveni is gone, but never--

Barbie Kyagulanyi: The children can't stay. If the children got to stay, one of us would have to stay with them. That means you'd have to stay here alone.

Bobi Wine: What does one do? There were those difficult moments, hard decisions.

Brooke Gladstone: Did they ever tell you to get lost?

Moses Bwayo: No, not actually. How did we get access? In the beginning, we were focusing on the political journey of Bobi Wine, but then, increasingly, we saw the danger. We saw how the camera had become a protective tool around him and his family. More and more, the access grew, and actually, my absence was noticed, but my presence was never noticed. When I wasn't around, I would pick up the phone, "Moses, where are you? What happened?"

Bobi Wine: "Are you alive?"

Moses Bwayo: Exactly.

Brooke Gladstone: Moses, what's been the response to the documentary in Uganda? Has anybody seen it?

Moses Bwayo: Just recently, NUP, the political party that Bobi leads, they did this big screening and invited so many Ugandans and supporters to see the film, but also, National Geographic has made the film accessible on their YouTube platform for free in the whole of Africa. Ugandans have been seeing the film on their phones. We also have something we call chibanda, and there are video halls that hold about 400 people. Some Ugandans have screened the film that way.

Brooke Gladstone: The government is just looking the other way.

Moses Bwayo: They don't know most of this is happening.

Bobi Wine: It's done secretly. Actually, the day that we screened it, that's when three of our colleagues were abducted. It's dangerous to screen it, but the people still watch it. Ugandans are stubborn, they're young, and they are out to defy the regiment.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you, Moses, have any plans to return to Uganda?

Moses Bwayo: As we speak today, I cannot live in Uganda. I had been identified while I was following Bobi. There were two attempted kidnaps on my wife. I had been locked up in prison, interrogated. We couldn't live in the country anymore. We had to flee to the US, and we're here seeking political asylum. If leaders like Bobi Wine and what he represents coming to power, I hope to return to my country one day.

Brooke Gladstone: Are you hoping that the Oscar nomination raises the profile of the struggle for democracy in Uganda?

Moses Bwayo: The military and police that had cordoned off Bobi's house withdrew because of the news of the nomination. Now, as we speak, the current regime run by Museveni, they're backtracking on a lot of the repression that they had done. We hope that all democracy-loving people of the world will see this film, share it, and keep their attention on Uganda. Don't ignore the Ugandan struggle. Please do not ignore us.

Brooke Gladstone: Is there anything that you could possibly do in a future political campaign to try and limit the violence that your supporters suffered at the hands of the military?

Bobi Wine: Yes. To appeal to the international community to stop sponsoring that brutality.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a telling moment in the film when a reporter asks what you expect from the West.

Bobi Wine: I will not say what I expect. I'll say what I request. The United States gives way beyond $100 million to Uganda. The European Union supports Uganda a great deal. Question is, do they know what they are supporting? The people of Uganda, while they appreciate their assistance, would want the European Union, America, and all development partners to make respect for democratic principles and human rights a precondition for all that aid.

Brooke Gladstone: Has anyone reached out from the US Aid Department or the EU?

Bobi Wine: Not as yet. I've spoken and met the EU delegation at my house, at my office, and all that.

Brooke Gladstone: Not the US.

Bobi Wine: I've met the US ambassador, and I've had a few meetings at the State Department, but apart from acknowledging that indeed there's a flaw in democratic governance in Uganda that should be fixed, we've not had more than that. I am, however, hopeful that one day the US will decide not to be associated with any oppressive or dictatorial regime.

Brooke Gladstone: There is another part of the film that really got to me. A reporter asked you.

Speaker 5: What would stop you from becoming like the president is now? What would stop you from becoming someone who just kept hold of power and became the same as the man that you would replace?

Bobi Wine: That's a fear. Why? Because many of the things I'm saying today, our president said when he was my age. The only way we can be sure, not me, but we can be sure that nobody will hold on to power, is by not making it about an individual. No, it's to make sure that even during our liberation efforts, we do it together to ensure that no single human being will ever rise to claim that he or she liberated us. We want to liberate ourselves as a nation and guarantee that we can do that again and again and again if anybody ever turned into another Museveni.

Brooke Gladstone: As you say, for that you need institutions, you need the rule of law, you need courts, you need fair elections, you need a robust media. Do you have any of that?

Bobi Wine: We don't have any of that now. What we have in Uganda is absolute state capture. When we finally free Uganda, we want to free institutions and empower them to be independent of the executive.

Brooke Gladstone: Getting it is hard. Keeping it, as we're learning here in the US--

Bobi Wine: Is even harder. Our situation is not only a lesson to Uganda, it's a lesson to everywhere, those that are aspiring for democracy and those that have democracy to know that democracy is always fragile and must be guarded jealously and is always one step of sliding out of your hands. For people that have democracy, just like you, the US, guard it jealously.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much.

Bobi Wine: Thank you very much for having me.

Moses Bwayo: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Bobi Wine and Moses Bwayo. Their documentary is Bobi Wine: The People's President.

MUSIC - Bobi Wine: Not Your Enemy]

Micah Loewinger: Hey, thanks so much for listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. You can find us at On the Media on Instagram and Bluesky. Don't forget to listen to the big show when it drops on Friday. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Micah Loewinger.

[MUSIC - Bobi Wine: Not Your Enemy]

 

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