At around 2pm on January 12, more than a dozen armoured military vehicles rolled down Bombo road and entered Kampala, with loud sirens drowning the city din and Bobi Wine’s music playing from a street vendor’s mobile loudspeaker at Makerere Kavule.
The tanks, from Nakasongola airbase and army barracks, 116km north of Kampala, drove through the streets in at least four of five divisions of the city, a stronghold of opposition challenger Bobi Wine, and parked at Kyambogo university grounds, the national election tallying centre.
There were 11 candidates in the presidential contest, but President Yoweri Museveni, 76, and singer-turned-politician 38-yea-old Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu aka Bobi Wine, were in a two-horse race. Their camps and supporters have traded barbs, insults, demonisation and violence over the past one year.
Throughout the campaigns, the president, symbolically the old man with the gun, met with the challenge from a crowd mobiliser, the young man with a mic, who chants urban protest lyrics for the underprivileged youths to lose their fear and vote out the incumbent.
Bobi Wine ran on a campaign to change leadership and create five million jobs in his first term in office for young people, by investing in technology and industrialisation, increasing youth access to capital by facilitating the setting up of trust funds.
In response to his message, the youth clenched fists, and with defiance, sang slogans and shouted insults at the military as they showed off their military power on the streets of Kampala: “We are tired, but we are not afraid, this is People Power.”
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