In ‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President,’ A Pop Star Turned Politician Risks Everything To Save His Country From Repression

If elections in Uganda were free and fair, pop star-turned politician Bobi Wine might be president of his country instead of the dictator Yoweri Museveni, who has clung to power for 36 years.

But elections aren’t free in Uganda, and opposing Museveni can be a very dangerous proposition, as starkly portrayed in National Geographic’s award-winning documentary Bobi Wine: The People’s President. Despite the risk to his life, Wine has boldly challenged Museveni, who faces potential charges in the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity.

Wine was first elected to parliament in 2017, attracting overwhelming support from voters dispirited by decades of Museveni’s rule. Among those he inspired was Ugandan native Moses Bwayo, who co-directed the documentary with Christopher Sharp.

“This guy, he’s literally speaking to my heart, and these are the things I see in a leader that I want,” Bwayo says of Wine’s arrival on the political scene. “And I believe a lot of people my age were thinking the same.”

The documentary, which opens theatrically on July 28 in New York and Los Angeles before a broader rollout, shows how Wine’s charismatic presence galvanized the electorate. He supercharged rallies with performances of his songs containing pointed political lyrics. Wine says the tremendous crowd reactions “[made] it clear to me that I’m here for a purpose, and maybe my music is a calling. It’s exciting, it’s humbling. It’s nice. It’s so much love… It’s a reassuring feeling of sharing a common feeling with many other people and not being wrong.”

The audience response, he tells Deadline, “Also gives another feeling, and this feeling is kind of scary. It’s so much responsibility, especially after realizing what we have to achieve as a generation and what we actually can achieve. The enormous task ahead, it almost appears insurmountable.”

The scale of the challenge emerges in the documentary, which tracks Wine’s run against Museveni in the 2021 presidential election. The dictator controlled the media, the military and security apparatus and the courts, and met Wine’s rising popularity with repression. The candidate’s driver was shot to death in an apparent assassination attempt on Wine; police broke up rallies and flogged his supporters.

“At the beginning [of the campaign] his people were kidnapped and, yes, attempted assassinations on Bobi’s life, and the people close to him,” Bwayo says. “The violence kept on increasing as we got close to the election… [In mid-November 2020], as you see in the film, the police and military were on the streets shooting at people.”

In the midst of his run for president, authorities seized Wine and held him at a military barracks. He emerged after a couple of weeks, badly beaten, alleging his captors had tortured him.

“They did horrible things to me,” Wine tells Deadline. “They beat me. They used pliers to pull my ears. They put pepper spray in my eyes. They squeezed my testicles, they kicked me… I had to spend the whole week urinating blood and pus. They hit my ankles with pistol butts, they hit me with wire cables everywhere, [waterboarded] me. They hurled insults at me.”

At one point during the campaign, Wine and his wife Barbara (“Barbie”) Kyagulanyi sent their four kids out of the country for their safety. It was a temporary measure, and they were later reunited as a family.

“My wife and I try to keep them sane, try to protect their childhood,” Wine says of his kids. “But of course, they’ve been forced to grow much faster than their age. We’ve been forced to tell them the truth. We sit down with them and explain to them the situation so that every now and then when I’m arrested, they know that their dad is not a criminal,” he says, managing a laugh, “so that they don’t get pushed around at school. They know that even when I fall in trouble, it is for moral reasons.”

Bwayo and Sharp’s film shows how Wine rose from humble circumstances in a Kampala slum to achieve fame as a recording artist. Early in his career, he sang about themes common to pop artists everywhere before his lyrics became more socially conscious. He told Deadline about the key moment that transformed him into an overtly political performer. 

“I went to a nightclub at the height of my music career — bought a new Cadillac Escalade with 24 inches spinning wheels, customized. I was around 25,” he recalls. “Every girl was looking at me, and that offended another young man who was around the same age, but he was working with [state] security… The guy looks at me taking all the attention, and he gets offended, and he walks to my car, knocks on the window. When I open, he slaps me and then pulls a gun on my head and asks me why I am showing off, as if I don’t know that the country has owners.

“For me, that was so humiliating,” Wine continues. “Even when I went to the police, I could not report [it] because I later learned that he was a high son of an important military officer… That, for me, reminded me of the oppression of all other people that did not have a voice like mine, that had been facing the same for the longest time. And I decided that I would use my music to speak about the injustices.”

Wine has been criticized for expressing homophobic views in the past in lyrics and public comments. 

“It is true I made some statements in the past, so many years ago as a young person,” he acknowledges. “As an individual, I’ve gone through a lot of transformation, having learned so much, struggled, and met various people… I’m not representing what I used to represent. I now represent inclusiveness, I represent transformation, I represent love, I represent freedom, and I represent human rights and justice and equality.”

In fact, during the presidential campaign, Museveni’s people tried to smear Wine as appealing to LGBTQ people. Wine says he opposes an extremely harsh anti-LGBTQ legislation approved in May that calls for life in prison for engaging in gay sex, and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”

“That law in Uganda as has been signed by Gen. Museveni is not the answer to the problems of Uganda,” Wine insists. “It’s used as a diversion from the corruption, from the mismanagement, from the dictatorship. It’s targeting the opposition, including myself, so that they can present us as supporters of something outlawed, therefore imprison us and ensure that I’m not liable to run against Gen. Museveni.”

The Biden administration, in a message posted to the WhiteHouse.gov website, condemns Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act as “a tragic violation of universal human rights—one that is not worthy of the Ugandan people.” But that very same post points out that the U.S. government “invests nearly $1 billion annually in Uganda’s people, business, institutions, and military to advance our common agenda.” That immense financial support is propping up the Museveni regime, Wine and Bwayo insist.

“The guns that shoot our people are American guns. We are fighting against the tyrant in Uganda. We are fighting against dictatorship in Uganda, but we cannot fight against a billion U.S. dollars every year,” Wine says. “So, between us and our freedom is a billion U.S. dollars; between us and human rights is a billion U.S. dollars every year. When you see hundreds of people massacred on the street in Uganda, it wouldn’t be if the U.S. did not sponsor it… Of course, we need a lot of help from the U.S.A. But to the U.S.A. we say, if you cannot help us, please don’t sponsor our oppression.”

Bwayo puts it this way: “We’re talking of a ruthless regime that completely has total disregard of human rights and the rule of law. The U.S. gives all this money, which is going straight to the government… Are there other ways of funding the people instead of the dictatorial state?”

The director almost lost his life in the making of the film. “I was shot in the face at close range. I was locked up in jail. I was arrested a couple of times,” he notes.

Having put his life on the line to make Bobi Wine: The People’s President, he believes in the documentary’s significance.

“I hope this film can show the world how fragile democracy is. Democracy is very, very fragile,” Bwayo says. “Every individual can do something about this. We can all act for the greater good. The fight that Bobi and Barbie are leading back in Uganda, yes, that’s the fight of Uganda, but there is Ukraine, now there is Sudan.”

Museveni, 78, has indicated that if he ever steps down, he plans to hand control of Uganda over to his son, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba. Wine, if he runs again for president, will once again face all the forces of state power against his candidacy. Despite the threats to his life, he says he has no intention of abandoning his homeland.

“I can’t leave Uganda, man. Uganda is home,” he says. “I have my whole life around Uganda. That’s where my children are, that’s where my brother, my family are. That’s where my soul is.”

He adds, “Me leaving would mean deflating millions of people, demotivating millions of people, because they live under the same threats every day. By being here, it gives hope that I decided to stay so that we fight together. After all, we are so many. We are millions.”