KAMPALA.
Uganda’s strongman President Yoweri Museveni ,who is seeking re-election to extend his rule to almost a half a century in the January 15 polls , has accused his closest challenged singer turned politician Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine of stage managing crowds during the current vote hunt across the country .
The ruling NRM presidential candidate claimed that Bobi Wine moves with mobile audiences in about 200 vehicles to create impression that he has mass support across the country which is not the case .
“I have, however, heard that the mobile audiences of Mr Kyagulanyi have been looting people in some cases,” Museveni said in a recorded televised New Year address on December 31 , citing accounts he said he personally heard in Abim District.
Museveni banned the caning of “lawbreakers” during the current political campaigns ahead
He however defended the conduct of security agencies while announcing what he called a rejection of corporal punishment, even as more than one opposition supporters have been shot dead or killed during rallies by the National Unity Platform (NUP).
“I reject the practice of caning lawbreakers. Some police forces in the world do it using batons. I reject it and it must stop,” Museveni said, adding that caning by teachers and parents during his youth was “a wrong method
The ban comes as rights groups and opposition figures accuse security forces of excessive force, arbitrary arrests and intimidation as campaigning intensifies less than two weeks before polling day.
Bobi Wine and NUP allege that hundreds of their supporters have been detained this year, including during campaign events, in what they describe as a strategy to sap morale and intimidate voters.
Bobi Wine himself was beaten by security forces while campaigning in northern Uganda, police said an investigation would be launched, but no findings have been released.
More than 30 people are currently before court following a sweeping security operation in Mbarara City on November 7 during a Bobi Wine campaign rally.
In his address, Museveni accused the opposition of orchestrating disorder and being backed by foreign interests.
“On law and order, you have been seeing the indiscipline and anarchic conduct of some of the opposition, guided by the wrong politics in their heads and the parasitic foreigners that back them,” he said.
Museveni emphasized that those arrested during Bobi Wine’s rally at Mile 4 in Mbarara had confessed to organising crowds using “a fleet of possibly 200 vehicles transporting those nomadic audiences”.
Museveni accused Bobi Wine and his backers of plotting chaos and dismissed previous opposition-led mobilisations, including calls for civil resistance and Kenya like Gen Z-led protests, saying they were rejected by the public. The July 2024 protests were swiftly managed by security forces during repeated crackdowns.
“The criminal opposition must also stop intimidating Ugandans. You have no right to intimidate a Ugandan,” he said, urging voters to turn out without fear.
‘Warn them’
While rejecting caning, Museveni defended the use of teargas, saying it was “legal and non-lethal” and preferable to live ammunition, though he urged police to give warnings and allow bystanders to move away before deploying it.
By press time, neither Bobi Wine nor his NUP party had responded to Museveni’s remarks, which came outside regular working hours.
Museveni ended his address with a message of confidence, declaring Uganda secure, the NRM “unstoppable”, and announcing that the country’s first oil production would begin next year.
‘Stop pseudo politics’
Still in his address, Museveni urged political actors to abandon what he called “pseudo-politics” driven by personal ambition, warning it is destructive to countries.
Recalling the early 1970s, Museveni said he and others “left well-paying jobs in 1971 to fight Idi Amin because threaten he ed their vision of patriotism, Pan-Africanism, socioeconomic transformation and democracy.”
“Previously, we had been massaging Obote because there was a possibility he could move with us, for instance on Pan-Africanism and the East African Community Federation,” he said, adding: “Political actors should stop the pseudo-politics of ‘me, me, me’ because it is not only barren but very destructive for countries.”