OPINION: Bobi Wine in Kenya: We’ve been there before

Youthful Ugandan MP Robert Kyagulanyi, more popularly known by his musician name Bobi Wine, was in Kenya last week.

From arrival at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, through a series of rallies, media events, and the high and mighty of Kenyan activist world, Kyagulanyi received a hero’s reception and celebrity treatment.

With Embakasi East counterpart Babu Owino, Kyagulanyi addressed an enthusiastic rally at Jacaranda Grounds, and together they launched a “Youth for Africa” movement.

Even hardnosed veterans of Kenya’s activism and democracy movement told me they were impressed by Kyagulanyi, although they considered him to be a work in progress, and still far from being fully-baked.

Kyagulanyi has ridden an incredible wave ever since he was bludgeoned by President Yoweri Museveni guards, then jailed, in August in the aftermath of a contentious bye-election in the northwestern of Arua, which was won by an independent candidate he backed.

First charged in a military court with treason, the case was dropped, but later picked up by a regular Magistrate’s Court. Bruised and limping, Kyagulanyi was granted bail and eventually allowed to travel to the US to mend his broken body parts.

A stream of international news, and media appearances, cast him as the face of a new politics bubbling around Africa, in which the youth are rejecting the rule of the continent’s septuagenarian and octogenarian strongmen. In Uganda, Museveni, officially 74, will soon clock 33 years in power.

Are Kyagulanyi and Babu Owino up to something new?

While clearly in the last five or so years there has cross-border political inspiration taking place in the region, especially between Kenya and Uganda (in 2013 after Kenyan activists took to release pigs and piglets upon Parliament to protest corruption in the legislature their Ugandan counterparts followed suit), we have been there before.

In the 1950s, Tanzanians joined the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.

Uganda’s independence Prime Minister, Milton Obote, cut his radical teeth in the early labour movement in Kenya.

In the 1960s, many of Kenya’s future radical politicians and intellectuals got their baptism at Makerere University in Kampala. And in the late 1960s and the 1970s, with Dar es Salaam playing the role of the liberation capital of Africa, Dar es Salaam University incubated Uganda’s and Kenya’s future progressive class.

In the 1970s dictator Idi Amin was wreaking havoc in Uganda, and a record number of political exiles scattered to Kenya and Tanzania. Eventually, several Ugandan dissident groups formed in both Kenya and Tanzania. In late 1978 they rallied around Tanzania as it struck back against Amin, and ejected him from power in April 1979.

Kenya was again an important staging point for Museveni’s National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/NRA), in its war that eventually led to victory in January 1986. In turn, Museveni’s NRA was heavily staffed by Rwandese refugees, who would defect en masse in October 1990 to launch their fight to return. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, was one of the early members of the NRA, and was a senior intelligence officer when the October war started.

Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania supported various groups in the long Burundi civil, and though they have since fallen out, President Pierre Nkurunziza, was what Kenyans would call a “Kagame project”.

Kenya and Uganda then supported the Sudan People’s Liberation Army of John Garang. Kenya backed the SPLA diplomatically and financially, but Uganda brought the sharp edge, deploying its forces to fight the Khartoum forces.

In fact between 1990 and the start of the Sudan Peace Talks in Kenya in 2002, most of the major offensives against the SPLA by Khartoum were repulsed, or made possible, by extensive Ugandan boots on the ground.

During Kenya’s democracy struggle in the 1990s against the government of Daniel arap Moi, many activists fled through Uganda or were openly active there – the most prominent being Koigi wa Wamwere, who was unmistakable in his military fatigues when he was in town.

There has therefore been no major ouster of an entrenched ruler or regime in the region, which has not been possible because a neighbouring country was heavily vested in backing too.

The difference with Kyagulanyi’s “People Power” is that regional support for it so far is from the people, down up, not from governments. But, I guess, the Tanzanians who supported Mau Mau and the Kenyan labour leaders who supported Ugandan pro-independence politicians, would say they did that too over 60 years ago – and won something.