The Generational Populism of Bobi Wine and Uganda's Neoliberal Consensus

• In Event: Critically Reinterpreting Populism in Africa

Abstract

Populism is commonly associated with political rupture. Populists’ defenders often present them as anti-establishment agents of much-needed political transformation, while critics deride them as representing an existential threat to democracy on account of their illiberal and anti-pluralist tendencies. But need populists always be radical challengers of the status quo? This paper considers this question by examining the unanticipated political rise of Uganda’s opposition leader, Robert Kyagulanyi (aka Bobi Wine). Since being elected to Ugandan parliament in 2017, the popular musician-turned-presidential candidate’s political party, the National Unity Platform (NUP), has become the country’s official opposition in parliament. Over that period, the NUP leader’s distinctive brand of what I have termed elsewhere, generational populism (Melchiorre 2023), has demonstrated an impressive ability to appeal to, and mobilize, a disaffected younger generation of Ugandans particularly among poor and working-class urban dwellers.
This paper situates these developments within the historical and political economic context of neoliberal Uganda. Representing one of the continent’s first and most fervent proponents of neoliberalism in the late-1980s, the Ugandan regime, led by Yoweri Museveni, has been celebrated as a poster child of the effectiveness of neoliberal economic reforms by Western donors and International Financial Institutions (IFIs) alike, dating back to the 1990s. For much of the last four decades, the neoliberal consensus in Museveni’s Uganda has consisted of two elements: first, the implementation of market-friendly economic policies at home, and second, the explicit alignment of the Ugandan government with the West (particularly the United States) on issues of security and foreign policy abroad. In this paper, I ask: to what extent does Kyagulanyi’s populist project represent a fundamental challenge of, or offer a real ideological alternative to, this aforementioned consensus?
Based on an examination of thousands of newspaper articles and 75 semi-structured interviews conducted with NUP leadership and rank-and-file membership, current and former Ugandan politicians and Members of Parliament, activists, and journalists carried out over two research trips to Uganda since 2019, I argue that, despite its deployment of revolutionary political symbols and rhetoric, NUP’s ultimate embrace of formal party politics with its attendant fixation on elections, its repeated espousals of a commitment to (neo)liberal good governance, and its explicit alignment with the West on questions of foreign policy, have all demonstrated that in many respects this populist movement has struggled, thus far, to imagine politics beyond Uganda’s neoliberal consensus. While NUP have fought to restore to Uganda the rule of law and a more pluralistic conception of liberal democratic politics, Kyagulanyi’s brand of populism has failed in other important ways to offer any significant ideological or political alternatives to the neoliberal orthodoxy that has characterised Uganda for most of the Museveni years.

Author

• Luke Melchiorre, Universidad de los Andes