Bobi Wine’s slaps and the slippery slope of impunity
COMMENT | Olivia Nalubwama | During the May 2 Capital FM Desert Island Discs radio show, host Flavia Tumusiime, asks her guest, National Unity Platform (NUP) leader, Bobi Wine aka Robert Kyagulanyi, about his foray into politics.
Her question lays the ground nicely. “You were okay, you had a family…leadership in your community, the money…you had a peaceful life. What in the world drove you to disrupt that?”
Bobi laughs and then narrates this riveting anecdote. At the height of his fame as a dreadlocked ‘rude boy’ musician, he acquired a flashy monstrous Cadillac Escalade to match the bounce in his steps. One evening, he rolled up with his crew in his mean machine to Ange Noir nightclub.
All eyes were on him. The rude boy had arrived, and how he lapped up the attention. Unbeknownst to him, his showiness would soon introduce him to a stark reality. After his time at the club, Bobi and his crew bounced to his Escalade.
A man knocked on Bobi’s rolled-up car window. Bobi rolled down his window, perhaps expecting the usual crazed fan. Instead, the man slapped Bobi. A hot one. So hot that Bobi bounded out of his car, ready to deliver some hands-on bruising. Ahem. The man pulled a gun on him and slapped Bobi again.
Staring down the barrel of a gun, I suppose, will have you suddenly fluent in humility. Outgunned, Bobi asked his attacker, “Why are you beating me? What have I done to you?”
His attacker responded, “Why are you showing off? Don’t you know that this country has owners?”
Another hot slap followed those questions. The third in a series of unsolicited hot slaps. Then, the bouncers of the club intervened, pleading with Bobi’s deliverer of hot slaps, “Afande, Afande, forgive him. He didn’t know that we have big people here.”
Bobi plopped his battered ego into his Escalade, his mind aflame, and drove to a police station. Hardly had he registered his complaint with the sleepy officer manning the desk when a vehicle roared into the police station. From the vehicle, Bobi’s ‘Afande’ emerged, proceeded to take a man out of his car trunk, and ordered the police to detain the man.
No questions asked. Only then did Mr. ‘Afande’ notice Bobi and summarily ordered him out of the station. The incident left Bobi shaken – if his celebrity status could not insulate him from impunity, what would have happened to him if he had been an ordinary person? One can surely appreciate why Bobi does not reveal the identity of ‘Afande Slapper.’
What do you do when you have a gun in your face because your very existence has disturbed the ‘owners of the country’? What do you do when you ignorantly believed your citizenship accorded you the right to bounce and flash your ride in your country? For Bobi Wine, his encounter with impunity emboldened his resolve against injustice, pushing him into political leadership, which he describes as waking up Ugandans to their people power.
In joining politics, Bobi has encountered more versions of that gun- in-your-face impunity. In the infamous Arua by-election in August 2018, Bobi Wine’s driver, Yasin Kawuma was shot dead during a clash with security forces; Bobi would later be brutalized and taken into custody.
To date, there has been no investigation into the death of the Kawuma and the conduct of the security forces. On September 3, 2024 Bobi Wine was again at the centre of another brush with Uganda Police – a rather mild one. It was so mild that netizens compared it with the inglorious brutality that embodied Kizza Besigye’s opposition career and found it wanting.
How surreal to compare instances of police brutality as if there is a winner in this macabre contest! Ruling party apologists have accused Bobi Wine of dramatizing the incident, playing to the gallery of the international community. They insinuate that Bobi Wine must have provoked the police, continuing the false narrative that opposition members are hooligans.
They do not question the September 4 police statement which notes, “Demonstrators and rioters are not seen as enemies of the police but as temporary opponents.”
They do not call for an investigation into the conduct of the police officers whose enforcement mandate means they bear greater responsibility when dealing with unarmed civilians. Instead, they blame the victim.
A 2016 article in The Atlantic, ‘The psychology of victim blaming’, notes, “Any time someone defaults to questioning what a victim could have done differently to prevent a crime, he or she is participating, to some degree, in the culture of victim blaming.”
The article quotes Barbara Gilin, a professor of social work, “In my experience, having worked with a lot of victims and people around them, people blame victims so that they can continue to feel safe themselves…it helps them feel like bad things will never happen to them. They can continue to feel safe.”
By removing ourselves from the responsibility of interrogating the oppressor, we unwittingly set up ourselves as the next victims of impunity. Dear reader, when you watch the videos of the September 3 incident, pay attention to how the police handled the civilians around Bobi’s car.
The police rained hard kicks and stiff kibokos on them – for merely existing near Bobi. Whatever your political preferences, consider Bobi Wine and other opposition leaders an opportunity for our security forces to learn a thing or two about treating Ugandans with dignity. You and I are just a teargas canister away, mere kibokos from becoming another police brutality statistic.
A few days ago, I came across a comment under a post on X announcing the tragic death of Ugandan Olympian, Rebecca Cheptegei, who died following a vicious attack in which her boyfriend, doused her in petrol and set her ablaze.
A ‘content creator’ commented complete with all of two crying emojis, “Before they imprison her boyfriend they should first listen to his side.”
Dear reader, what side of the killer’s story would justify setting ablaze a whole human? Thus, pause and behold the insidiousness of this slippery slope of impunity.
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Olivia Nalubwama is a “tayaad Muzukulu, tired of mediocrity and impunity” smugmountain@gmail.com
THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE OBSERVER
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