Introduction
While a consensus definition of populism remains elusive among scholars, there is general agreement that ‘the people’ is a foundational concept in populist studies (Mudde 2017). This category, however, is never simply constructed out of whole cloth. Indeed, populist movements and leaders tend to ‘define “the people” in terms of some of the key features of the self-identification of the targeted community’ (Mudde 2017, 32). Contemporary right-wing populist leaders in Europe and the United States have often sought to construct ‘the people’ in ethno-nationalist terms, marginalising ‘non-native’ populations and the liberal technocratic elites that are said to pander to them, while left-wing populist movements in southern Europe and Latin America have frequently defined ‘the people’ in more class-based terms. In these latter populist projects, the emphasis is placed not on sociocultural identifiers, but on ‘the people’s’ shared experience of socioeconomic marginalisation (De la Torre 2018). Populist studies that have documented and theorised diverse configurations of ‘the people’ in practice, therefore, not only attest to the phenomenon’s ‘chameleonic nature’ (Mudde and Rovira 2013, 150), but also help to elucidate the character and political orientation of the populist project, as well as revealing its effects on democratic institutions (Katsembekis 2022, 53–54).
To date, however, the generational dimensions of populist publics and politics have remained understudied. This gap is particularly noteworthy in societies characterised by demographic youth bulges, where a disproportionate percentage of the adult population is composed of young people. The world’s youngest region, sub-Saharan Africa, with a median age of just 19.7, contains many societies marked by such demographic characteristics. Currently, 60% of the continent’s population is below the age of 25, and approximately one-third is between 15 and 34 years old. This raises an interesting question for scholars of populism: in societies where most of the population is below the age of 30, do intergenerational political dynamics shape the construction of the categories of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ for populist politicians or movements?
As the world’s second-youngest nation, Uganda provides an ideal case study to address this question. This article examines the political rise of a Ugandan opposition leader, Robert Kyagulanyi (aka Bobi Wine) and his political pressure group, People Power, Our Power. Since his election to parliament in 2017, the popular musician-turned-presidential candidate has led a spirited challenge against the world’s fifth-longest serving leader, 78-year-old Yoweri Museveni. Described as a ‘populist’ by domestic critics, including Museveni himself (Daily Monitor, January 7, 2021) and international observers (Time Magazine, November 19, 2020; Rolling Stone, April 25, 2020), Kyagulanyi finished an impressive second in the disputed 2021 presidential election, behind Museveni. He garnered 35% of the popular vote, with his political party, the National Unity Platform (NUP), rising from obscurity to win 57 seats in parliament and become the country’s official opposition. These outcomes, which saw Kyagulanyi displace long-time Museveni opponent Dr Kizza Besigye as the undisputed face of the country’s opposition, were achieved despite unprecedented state repression against the NUP leader and his supporters.
In analysing Kyagulanyi’s unanticipated political rise, this article documents the development of his populist discourse, from its early ‘ghetto populist’ iteration utilised in his parliamentary campaign in June 2017 to its more expansive conception of ‘the people’ which emerged later as he became a prominent national political figure. In charting this evolution, it contends that Kyagulanyi’s political project contains both discursive and performative dimensions that can be accurately described as populist, according to the classic conceptualisation of Ernesto Laclau.
The paper also argues that in a country where approximately 80% of the population is below the age of 30, Kyagulanyi’s brand of populism is novel, precisely because of how it has come, at times, to be generationally inflected, often being deployed in the service of his broader call for a generational transfer of power in Uganda. This version of populism can be characterised as generational populism: a mobilising discourse which generates a new collective sense of political identity among supporters of a populist leader or movement, around the nodal point of ‘the people’ (Stavrakakis and Katsembekis 2014), defined primarily in relation to their generational status as youth, and in antagonistic opposition to an elite, which is depicted as defending a gerontocratic political order.
Kyagulanyi is not the only contemporary African politician labelled as a populist to have effectively mobilised the youth during a recent electoral cycle. Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in South Africa, Nelson Chamisa’s Citizens’ Coalition for Change (CCC) in Zimbabwe, and, most successfully, William Ruto’s ‘hustlers vs. dynasties’ campaign in Kenya, have all been described in this manner, for how they have used anti-establishment rhetoric to secure impressive electoral showings that have defied expert predictions. Kyagulanyi’s distinctiveness within this continental context is not, however, solely down to his ability to leverage his unique status as a cultural icon in the political arena. Beyond this, in routinely characterising his challenge of the Museveni regime as a part of a ‘generational cause’ (The Guardian, January 9, 2021) that pits ‘the Facebook generation’ of his followers against the President’s ‘facelift generation’ (African Arguments, November 11, 2020), Kyagulanyi has, far more than any of his African counterparts, framed the struggle between ‘the people’ and the political elite in Uganda explicitly in generational terms.
Academic research on People Power and Kyagulanyi has so far focused on the movement’s historical origins (Kiwuwa 2019), its use of social media (Muzee and Enaifoghe 2020), the political economy and agency of Ugandan activist musicians (Friesinger 2021; Schneidermann 2020), and the successes, possibilities and limitations of Kyagulanyi’s 2021 presidential campaign (Wilkins, Vokes, and Khisa 2021; Abrahamsen and Bareebe 2021). This article focuses specifically on the populist dimensions of Kyagulanyi’s political project, making both theoretical and empirical contributions to the political science literature on populism. First, at a theoretical level, it broadens our conception of populism, by introducing a new subtype of the political phenomenon which demonstrates the importance, in certain cases, of intergenerational dynamics in the construction of the discursive categories of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. Second, this article challenges common depictions of populism in Africa as being primarily a threat to unconsolidated democracies on account of its illiberal and anti-pluralist tendencies (Fölscher, De Jager, and Nyenhuis 2021, 536; Melber 2018). Such a perspective obscures a different set of populism’s possibilities and limitations. On the one hand, the growing popularity and influence of People Power/NUP in Uganda offers evidence that populism in African countries has the potential to electorally challenge incumbent regimes, by helping to build political coalitions across ethno-regional lines, incorporating previously excluded social groups into the political process, while placing new emphasis within popular political discourses on common socioeconomic, political and generational grievances.
On the other hand, however, Kyagulanyi’s appropriation of radical symbols and slogans (i.e. red berets, boxing gloves and People Power discourse), central to his populist performance, has often distracted attention away from his project’s underlying (neo)liberal politics. While he has demonstrated an impressive ability to mobilise and forge a close connection with large sections of what Adam Branch and Zachary Mampilly (2015, 9) call ‘political society’1 – and in particular the urban youth, his ultimate embrace of formal party politics and his repeated espousals of a commitment to improved service delivery and liberal good governance have failed to offer any real ideological alternative to the neoliberal orthodoxy that has characterised Museveni’s Uganda over nearly four decades (Wiegratz, Martiniello, and Greco 2018). In examining these tensions in Kyagulanyi’s political project, this article contributes to the nascent study of oppositional populism on the African continent.
This research is based on an examination of thousands of newspaper articles and 75 interviews conducted with People People/NUP leadership and rank-and-file membership, current and former Ugandan politicians and Members of Parliament, activists and journalists, based primarily on two research trips to Uganda carried out since 2019.2 While only a few respondents requested to remain anonymous, the informants’ list has been anonymised due to the sensitive nature of the interview material and Uganda’s current political situation.3
The paper first establishes the central tenets of its Laclauian theoretical framework to the study of populism, then examines the historical conditions that have given rise to the People Power movement in Uganda, before charting the evolution of Kyagulanyi’s populism from his election as a Member of Parliament in June 2017 to his return to Uganda from the United States following emergency medical treatment for state-inflicted injuries in September 2018.
Defining populism
Attempts to define the political phenomenon of populism have historically been hindered by the elusive and contested nature of the concept. Within this growing literature, scholars have variously defined populism as an ideology (Mudde and Rovira 2013), a particular type of political strategy or style (Moffitt 2016), a discursive frame or logic of articulation (Laclau 2005a) or a combination of some of these elements (Cheeseman 2018).
Until recently, African case studies have remained marginal within this literature. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, this has started to change, as an emerging Africanist literature has documented the contemporary rise of populism on the continent. This work has largely focused on populist opposition leaders (Fölscher, De Jager, and Nyenhuis 2021; Resnick 2014, 2017; Cheeseman 2018; Frasier 2017; Larmer and Frasier 2007) and former liberation movement incumbents in southern Africa (Melber 2018; Hart 2014). However, few of these studies have focused on the discursive construction of the categories of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. This is because, while Africanist studies of populism have frequently adopted a ‘cumulative conceptual approach’ (Resnick 2017), combining features of different theoretical perspectives into a common framework (Cheeseman 2018; Fölscher, De Jager, and Nyenhuis 2021), populism in these studies has most often been understood as a distinctive type of political strategy (Resnick 2014, 2017; Cheeseman 2018; Cheeseman and Larmer 2015). From this perspective, therefore, the concept refers to a specific set of ‘methods and instruments of winning and exercising power’ (Weyland 2001, 12).
One problem with these variations of the politico-strategic approach is that these authors often present an instrumentalist assessment of the main characteristics and primary causes of populist successes. Specifically, as Alastair Fraser notes, in focusing more on the campaign promises of populists and ‘survey data on urban residents’ concerns and voting choices’, such studies tend to reduce populism to little more than a ‘marketing strategy’ appealing to ‘a pre-existing common set of needs’ of strategically important groups of voters (Fraser 2017, 460). This approach, therefore, serves to flatten tensions that exist within the identified constituencies – such as those within political society – and to present populism reductively as little more than a set of policies geared towards opportunistically attracting populist voters (ibid., 460). In so doing, these studies neglect the discursive and performative dimensions of populism’s appeal and therefore fail to satisfactorily explain how and why certain populist politicians are successful in mobilising bases of popular support, and in constructing new collective political identities among followers.
In contrast, Africanist studies of populism that have utilised the theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau have been far better able to apprehend the distinctive appeal of populist politicians (Larmer and Fraser 2007; Fraser 2017) and, in the process, to identify and theorise new populist sub-types (Paget 2019b). Laclau argues that ‘the people’ in populist discourses ‘is never a primary datum, but a construct’ (Laclau 2005b, 48). Populist discourses, therefore, do not simply appeal to a pre-existing popular identity, but rather help bring it into being (ibid., 48). Laclau’s theoretical framework rejects the idea that populism is a specific type of ideology or political strategy. Conceptualising it as a particular ‘logic of articulation’, Laclau convincingly theorises the process through which populist identities come to be discursively constructed. First, he contends that at the origin of ‘populist ruptures’ lay crises of political representation. Where representative political institutions successfully function in meeting the individual demands of citizens, the potential for any notion of ‘the people’ to emerge is constrained or neutralised. It is only when these institutions fail to satisfy a proliferation of diverse social demands that the conditions for populism’s emergence are created (Laclau 2005a). In these instances, unmet demands can come to be ‘articulated’ through what he refers to as ‘chains of equivalence’ (Laclau 2005b, 40). These varied requests, which may initially be perceived as disparate or isolated from one another, are revealed to be mutually connected to a deeper set of shared popular grievances.
Under these conditions, the chains of equivalence can forge bonds of solidarity among the bearers of these unmet demands. As they extend across a society, these chains bifurcate the social world, antagonistically pitting the holders of unmet social demands – ‘the people’ – against a common foe, comprising those who, due to their perceived disinterest, corruption, neglect or incompetence, are held responsible for failing to meet those demands, represented as ‘power’, ‘the elite’ or ‘the establishment’ (ibid.).
This process of populist mobilisation can only be realised through the creation of an empty signifier which serves to structure the field of politics into a fixed system of identifications. It requires ‘a particular demand, without entirely abandoning its own particularity, to start also functioning as a signifier representing the [equivalential] chain as a totality’ (ibid., 39). This signifier can often be the populist leader themselves. The vaguer or more ambiguous these populist symbols are, the more powerful they can become in mobilising and unifying a diverse populist public in the name of ‘the people’.
While most politicians, in the context of electoral competition, want to increase their share of the popular vote, not all use populist means to achieve this result. The populist politician is distinctive, in Laclauian terms, both because their discursive practice is routinely ‘articulated around the nodal point [of] ‘the people’ and because their representation of society is ‘predominately antagonistic’, which serves to simplify the political field into a stark dichotomy, reducing all conflicts down to one: ‘the people’ versus ‘power’ (Stavrakakis and Katsembekis 2014, 123).
In explaining factors that draw ‘the people’ to the empty signifier of the populist leader, recent research emerging from ‘the performative turn’ (Ostiguy and Moffit 2021, 49–53) in populist studies has offered a useful complement to the Laclauian approach. Defining populism as specific type of ‘embodied, symbolically mediated performance’ (Moffitt 2016, 38) and focusing on its aesthetic dimensions and mediatised nature (televisual performance, rallies, speeches, dressing attire, etc.), this literature convincingly argues that an analysis of populism’s appeal must extend beyond the focus on discourse, to also consider its ‘performative and stylistic dimensions’ (Ostiguy and Moffitt 2021, 51). Fraser’s (2017) work on the 2006 presidential campaign of Zambia’s Michael Sata has demonstrated the potential of supplementing the Laclauian approach with an analysis of populism’s theatricality. He compellingly argues that the strength of Zambian voters’ attachment to Sata as a ‘populist signifier’ relied heavily on the former Lusaka mayor’s distinctive political style, which served to dramatise the boundary dividing ‘the people’ from ‘the elite’ and to signify his position as the primary representative of the former (Fraser 2017, 462).
In blending the discursive and stylistic theories of populism, Fraser offers a theoretical approach which better explains Kyagulanyi’s distinctive brand of populism. As with Sata, Kyagulanyi’s appeal relied far more on his populist discourse, reinforced by and reflected in his iconoclastic stylistic choices, than it did on any of his avowed programmatic commitments, the latter of which were often indistinguishable from his centrist political rivals in the Ugandan opposition (Wilkins, Vokes, and Khisa 2021). Before evaluating the populist dimensions of Kyagulanyi’s political project, the following section situates his political rise within the historical and political economic context of Museveni’s Uganda.
Historical and political background
Kyagulanyi’s political emergence cannot be understood outside of the context of the deepening crisis of legitimacy that has characterised the Museveni regime since the reintroduction of multiparty elections in Uganda in 2005. To fully understand how and why these shifts created the conditions for a ‘populist rupture’, it is important to briefly review the history of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) government, foregrounding its ardent embrace of neoliberalism and the significant role that international actors have played in fortifying and consolidating the NRM’s rule during this period (Wiegratz, Martiniello, and Greco 2018, 2). When Museveni came to power in January 1986, his political rhetoric promoted a people-centred vision of democratic reform, which he presented as a ‘no-party’ political system. Under this system, elections would be conducted as competitions between candidates based on individual merit rather than political party affiliation.
In a time of growing international pressure on African states to embrace political liberalisation, the Museveni regime received ample economic support and praise from Western donors and international financial institutions (IFIs) despite their initial rejection of multipartyism (Carbone 2008). This support, which was essential to the creation and strengthening of Uganda’s narrow military-political-business elite, was predicated on two factors. First, as one of Africa’s earliest leaders to embrace neoliberalism in the late 1980s, Uganda’s transformation from one of the poorest economies in the world to one of its fastest growing by the mid 1990s was held up by donors as a valuable example of the wisdom of IFI-mandated neoliberal economic reforms.
Second, the Museveni regime’s willingness to repeatedly align itself with the United States’ geopolitical interests in the region, most notably as a reliable ally in the global war on terror, consolidated Uganda’s position as a ‘donor darling’ (Branch and Mampilly 2015). As a result, it routinely received foreign aid that accounted for up to 80% of its development expenditures. In addition, the USA provided ample military aid to the Ugandan state, enabling its rapid and robust militarisation (Branch 2011).
While debates about the true sources of Uganda’s impressive economic growth persist, by the 2010s the shortcomings of the country’s economic ‘success story’ were undeniable, as were its main beneficiaries. The neoliberalisation of the economy led to the privatisation of social welfare programmes, trade liberalisation, and the deregulation of industry. These changes accelerated and deepened processes of primitive accumulation, growing inequality between social classes, and rising economic insecurity, poverty and un- and underemployment (Wiegratz, Martiniello, and Greco 2018). These policies have served to enrich a handful of powerful international and domestic interests, including foreign capital, a domestic comprador class and connected local businesses (ibid.). Taking advantage of sustained national economic growth rates, these actors have advanced their financial interests through their connections to, and control of, the state (Tangri and Mwenda 2008; Rubongoya 2007). Decades of neoliberal restructuring have produced what Joshua Rubongoya describes as a national economy characterised by ‘growth without development or equity’ (Rubongoya 2018, 105).
On the political front, the 2005 referendum saw the lifting of presidential term limits and the return of multiparty politics. Since then, however, organised resistance to the NRM government has continually been hampered by the highly militarised and repressive nature of the Museveni regime, its formidable presence and enduring support in rural areas, entrenched class and ethno-regional divisions, a fragmented political opposition, and the weakness of organised labour (Branch and Mampilly 2015). In the electoral realm, the state’s deployment of violent repression against its opponents, unprecedented use and misallocation of state resources, and other blatant forms of corruption and electoral malpractice have ensured NRM victories in presidential and parliamentary elections (Khisa 2019). By the 2010s, the Museveni regime, backed by Northern donors and a powerful and concentrated military-political-business elite, had made a peaceful, democratic transfer of power in Uganda virtually impossible (Branch and Mampilly 2015).
Nowhere has this crisis of representation been more evident than in the Museveni regime’s relationship with its younger generation, its bazzukulu (‘grandchildren’). In discussing the politics of Ugandan youth, it is important to recognise that this social group is not homogenous, as the meanings and expectations attached to this category, and the experiences of youth, are deeply contingent, mediated by class, gender, race, ethnicity and geographical location (Kimari, Melchiorre, and Rasmussen 2020). Uganda’s deteriorating social conditions, for example, have hit working-class youth far harder than their middle-class counterparts.
This heterogenous social group does, however, share important similarities, including varied experiences of state surveillance and violence, and the routine obstruction of their pathways to political power, representation and economic accumulation (ibid.). Youth unemployment in Uganda, for example, has reached as high as 83% (Reuss and Titeca 2017, 2354). Additionally, the NRM’s history as a ‘liberator’, which remains a key source of legitimacy not only for Museveni, but also for leaders of his ‘historical’ generation who fought in the bush war, is less resonant for young people with no memory of Uganda’s liberation struggle (ibid.).
On the contrary, the fact that since birth Ugandan youth have witnessed a national politics ‘dominated by a small, established and apparently corrupt elite’ has led to their ‘widespread disillusionment with politics and mistrust of politicians’ programmes and claims’ (Vorhölter 2018, 332). This disenchantment has meant that Ugandan youth, within both civil and political society, have been disproportionately drawn to support opposition candidates (Vokes and Wilkins 2016, 595) and motivated to participate in anti-regime protests (Reuss and Titeca 2017, 2354; Branch and Mampilly 2015, 133).
That in 2021 approximately 41% of Uganda’s electorate was between 18 and 30 years old (Kaheru 2020) attests to the importance of this disaffected generational cohort as a potential voting bloc. Their growing opposition to the Museveni regime, therefore, poses a threat to the NRM’s long-term electoral strategy, especially as their proportion of the total electorate will only increase over the coming years (The Conversation, August 31, 2018).
This reality is not lost on the regime. In December 2019, the Electoral Commission closed voter registration more than a year before the 2021 general election. Critics interpreted this as a move to limit the number of new young voters who could participate in the forthcoming polls (Daily Monitor, December 10, 2019).
Within this broader historical and political economic context, Kyagulanyi and his People Power movement have been able to appeal to and mobilise a significant portion of this social category through the deployment of a populist discourse. The next sections chart the political emergence of Kyagulanyi and the evolution of that populist discourse, from his first parliamentary campaign in 2017 to the August 2018 Arua by-election, which was marked by widespread political violence.
‘Politics unusual’: ghetto populism in Kyadondo East
In April 2017, following the announcement of a by-election in Kyadondo East, Kyagulanyi announced his intention to run for parliament in that constituency. The singer had initially come to national prominence in the 2000s as one of the biggest stars of a new wave of homegrown Ugandan pop music. The lyrics of Kyagulanyi’s early music, which blended local afrobeat with Jamaican dance hall, presented the singer as a ghetto hustler and playboy. Beginning in the early 2010s, however, Kyagulanyi’s songs, which had periodically documented the hardship of ghetto living, more overtly expressed political grievances and earned him the nickname ‘Ghetto President’. Kyagulanyi’s decision in October 2016 to reject Museveni’s lucrative offer to participate on the Ugandan president’s electoral campaign song Tubonga Nawe (‘We are with you’) distanced him from many of his popular musical colleagues who accepted the invitation, and burnished his political reputation among opposition politicians and supporters (interviews 1/MOP/KAM/2019; 2/MOP/PHO/2021; 1/POL/KAM/2019) as a public figure who remained ‘independent of the established political elite’ (Schneiderman 2020, 11). 4
The subsequent release of more explicitly political songs like 2016’s Situka, which called for oppositional political action in the face of the NRM’s growing oppression, gestured towards Kyagulanyi’s political ambitions. They also signalled his transition from pop singer to ‘political musician’, a term used by Tejumoja Olaniyan in his work on Fela Kuti to describe ‘a musician who devotes his or her musical resources to evoking, interrogating, and pronouncing judgements on the partisan political arrangements and attendant social relations of his or her context’ (Olaniyan 2004, 3).
From his first public expression of interest in running for parliament, Kyagulanyi, like many populist politicians before him, leveraged this status as the quintessential famous, but inexperienced and untainted political outsider. He continually, for example, rejected the label of ‘politician’, preferring instead to describe himself as a ‘leader’ (Matooke Republic, May 17, 2017). At an organisational level, Kyagulanyi played up his outsider reputation by deciding to run without the backing of a formal political party. He believed that in running as an independent, he could unify the disparate opposition under a common banner, making it clear that his allegiances were not to ‘a particular party’, but to ‘representing the people of Uganda’ (interview with Robert Kyagulanyi, 2021). In the weeks leading up to his official nomination in late May, he held meetings with both the official opposition, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) (interview 15/POL/PHO/2022), and Uganda’s oldest political party, the Democratic Party (DP) (interviews 3/MOP/PHO/2022; 10/MOP/PHO/2021), where he unsuccessfully sought to convince them to withdraw their candidates and formally support his own candidacy (Matooke Republic, May 31, 2017; Daily Monitor, June 1, 2017).
In addition to emphasising his status as a political outsider, from the beginnings of Kyagulanyi’s campaign, ‘the people’ occupied a central position in his political discourse. This was reflected in one of his campaign’s main slogans, Edoboozi lyomuntu wabulijjo (‘the voice of the common person’). While Besigye had also regularly utilised ‘the people’ as a main discursive referent on the campaign trail, Kyagulanyi’s ‘ghetto populist’ appeals, as one of his campaign advisors christened them (interview 1/PADV/PHO/2020), had different sociological moorings, emphasising the social class and generational identity of the ‘ghetto people’ he sought to represent. His invocation of this signifier was often grounded in, and lent legitimacy by, his recounting of his own experience of growing up in the ghetto.
On the campaign trail, for example, he regularly recalled his own humble origins in Kamwokya, a large informal settlement in the constituency, reminding voters that they had ‘seen [him] grow up as a ghetto boy, hustling to survive from selling groundnuts on the street to performing music’ (Kyagulanyi, quoted in Kazungu 2017). As a result of their intimate familiarity with his history, he argued that voters ‘ha[d] heard [him] speak out many times against the injustices that are poisoning our society today’ (ibid.). For this reason, Kyagulanyi represented a far more potent signifier to disenfranchised ghetto youth than Besigye ever had.
Part of the distinctiveness of Kyagulanyi’s populist appeal also related to the nature of his own musical celebrity. The popularity of his songs and their subject matter meant that prior to making a single campaign speech or policy statement, Kyagulanyi enjoyed an intimate and direct relationship with a generation of younger voters who had grown up with his music. His reputation as ‘the ghetto president’ perfectly captured the essence of his appeal to these voters, who saw him as both ‘an ordinary person – someone like me’ (Panizza and Stavrakakis 2021, 36), but also as a signifier of their aspirations for upward social mobility, with his noted success as a musician, businessperson, husband and father. Crucially, despite these achievements, Kyagulanyi remained ‘accessible and understandable’ to his supporters (ibid.).
This close connection with Kyadondo East voters was reflected in, and reinforced by, Kyagulanyi’s distinctive style of campaigning, in particular his staging of political rallies. As Dan Paget notes, ‘[n]owhere is the preponderance of [such political events] greater than in sub-Saharan Africa’, where rallies are an ‘essential feature’ of candidates’ attempts ‘to multiply and target campaign contact for the purpose of persuading and mobilizing citizens’ (Paget 2019a, 451). Even within Uganda, which ranks third highest in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of rates of rally attendance, Kyagulanyi’s were exceptional.
First, in the lead-up to the by-election, he ‘addressed more rallies than his colleagues’ (The Observer, June 21, 2017) and was likened by one observer to ‘a bull in a china shop’ (interview 2/POL/KAM/2022), both for his frantic campaigning and the way he appeared, at times, to antagonistically upstage the rallies of his opponents in both the ruling party and the opposition (interviews 3/POL/KAM/2022; 4/POL/KAM/2022). Second, while the ‘entertainment component’ of rallies is a common feature of many African political campaigns (Paget 2019a, 450), Kyagulanyi’s rallies were unusual in that they often turned into concerts headlined by the candidate himself (The Observer, June 30, 2017). This allowed Kyagulanyi to capitalise politically on his widespread popularity as a musician and performer. Third, as Fraser noted in relation to Sata’s 2006 populist presidential run in Zambia, Kyagulanyi’s campaign did not simply involve a populist politician ‘performing to passive, leader-worshipping masses’ (Fraser 2017, 463). On the contrary, his supporters’ significant contributions through their volunteer work and creation of homemade posters, banners and slogans became an important informal feature of his campaign (interview 5/POL/KAM/2019), which demonstrated both his fervent grassroots support and the way in which ‘the people’ who backed Kyagulanyi were being ‘brought on stage’ (Fraser 2017, 463) over the course of the by-election.5
Finally, unlike his opponents, who were running ‘executive’ campaigns (interview 6/POL/PHO/2022) often ‘moving in suits and in cars with tinted windows’ (interview 1/JOURN/KAM/2019), Kyagulanyi adopted a more intimate approach to canvassing: traveling by foot or on motorbike taxis (boda boda) through villages in the constituency, wearing ‘overalls’ (interview 2/JOURN/PHO/2020), moving, as his campaign manager recalls, ‘house to house’ (interview 2/PADV/KAM/2019), eating meals with his prospective constituents and talking with them ‘in a language that was from the ghetto’ (interview 2/JOURN/PHO/2020). These aspects of his populist style both validated Kyagulanyi’s avowal to representing ‘politics unusual’ and demonstrated his closeness and familiarity with ‘the people’.
Another key feature of Kyagulanyi’s campaign was its anti-elitism which, following Laclau’s theory of populism, represented the social field in antagonistic and dichotomic terms. Notably, throughout his Kyadondo East campaign, Kyagulanyi made it clear that his criticism of the political establishment extended beyond just Museveni and ruling party politicians. In announcing his candidacy for the by-election, for example, Kyagulanyi chastised his immediate predecessor MPs (now his opponents) in the constituency from both the ruling and opposition parties, contending that while both had initially ‘convinced [him] that [they] were different’ from conventional politicians, Sitenda Sebalu of the NRM ended up only ‘work[ing] … for his family not the electorates that had sent him’, and Apollo Kantinti, the leading opposition candidate, proceeded, along with his parliamentary counterparts, to ‘demand … more [MP] allowances’ and a ‘salary increment’(Kyagulanyi, quoted in Kasadah 2017). As a result, Kyagulanyi had decided to run for office, because he ‘c[ouldn’t] trust anyone else’, as parliament was full of ‘eaters and not leaders … [whose] mouths are for eating only and not speaking for people they represent’ (ibid.). In contrast to the historical neglect of ‘ghetto people’ by all the traditional political parties, Kyagulanyi presented himself as the former’s pure embodiment, promising that, if elected, ‘the voice of the people as it comes from the ghetto … will be going straight to parliament unedited’ (Kyagulanyi, quoted in Chimp Reports, June 29, 2017).
For all the press attention that Kyagulanyi’s formal announcement in May 2017 garnered, some observers doubted the viability of his candidacy. While most conceded that he was an impressive ‘crowd puller’ (Daily Monitor, June 8, 2017), who could easily use his celebrity status to attract people to his rallies, there was scepticism about whether this enthusiasm would translate into votes (interview 1/JOURN/KAM/2019; PML Daily, June 14, 2017). As one of his opponents in the Kyadondo East by-election admits: ‘I could not take [Kyagulanyi’s campaign] seriously [at first] … here comes this youthful guy [with] dreadlocks on [his] head … no name in politics … I have to be honest … I dismissed him and so did my party. So did very many Ugandans’ (interview 7/POL/PHO/2020).
In addition, there was a belief within Kyagulanyi’s campaign that ‘all of the established institutions were up against [them]’ (interview 5/POL/KAM/2019). First, the campaign was in Besigye’s home constituency (Matooke Republic, May 31, 2017) and the FDC leader openly campaigned for Kantinti (Daily Monitor, June 11, 2017). Second, some of Kyagulanyi’s closest aides initially feared that his lack of a formal political organisation would play against him, or as his older brother, Eddy Yawe, warned in April, ‘politics is like poison and [Kyagulanyi] d[oes] not have the team to withstand that poison’ (Daily Monitor, April 30, 2017). Finally, Kyagulanyi is a member of the Baganda, the most populous ethnic group in Uganda, who christened himself Omubanda wa Kabaka (‘the Kabaka’s gangster’) in honour of the king of Buganda. In April, just prior to the campaign, however, Kyagulanyi was involved in a ‘well-publicized and … vicious’ public confrontation with the Kingdom over the demolition of a disputed piece of land on his Busabala Beach property by the Buganda Land Board (Daily Monitor, April 9, 2017; July 2, 2017). In a constituency where the Buganda’s king, the Kabaka, wields significant political influence, this public spat was also expected to work against him with many voters.
Despite these obstacles, and the fact that police detained him the day before the election (Daily Monitor, June 28, 2017), Kyagulanyi ultimately secured a historic landslide victory in Kyadondo East, gaining 25,659 out of 32,999 votes (The Observer, June 29, 2017). This emphatic triumph, in a by-election that had attracted unprecedented national attention, instantly positioned Kyagulanyi as a political figure of significant importance in Ugandan politics.
Generational populism and the age limit amendment
In the year following his election to parliament, while Kyagulanyi’s populist discourse continued to centre on ‘the people’ and their struggle against an unresponsive elite, the meaning of this former category shifted from an initial emphasis on the ‘ghetto populism’ of the Kyadondo East campaign towards a conception of ‘the people’ that was more explicitly informed by generational grievances and identification. In this discursive iteration, the new confrontation was presented as being one which pitted ‘the people’, defined primarily in relation to their generational status as youth, venerated as agents of political change and entrepreneurial innovation, in antagonistic opposition to an entrenched, geriatric elite. Kyagulanyi presented the latter as being out of touch with the realities of the country and committed to stifling not only ‘the people’s’ political freedom, but also their creativity.
The discursive shift towards generational populism reflected the changing political imperatives confronting Kyagulanyi at the national level. As one member of People Power/NUP’s executive recalls: ‘in Kyadondo [East] the campaign was mostly about … the dynamics within that constituency, the ghettos … But when you come to the political stage nationally, you have to look at the bigger picture. And indeed, over 85% of the people of Uganda are young people … so … you need to speak to them’ (interview 8/POL/KAM/2022).
The first episode which gestured towards this shift to generational populism came when, in the immediate aftermath of Kyagulanyi’s victory, President Museveni published a public letter congratulating the newly elected MP, but also diminishing his electoral victory. In it, Museveni stated that Kyagulanyi’s election represented a triumph of ‘biology over ideology’, the inference being that Kyagulanyi had used his musical popularity to pander to younger voters. Museveni even claimed derisively that ‘[i]t is credit to the NRM that our slum dweller children [i.e. Kyagulanyi] can today even make it to parliament’ (PML Daily, July 17, 2017).
Kyagulanyi’s response offered a critique of the NRM government, portraying it as ‘not [being] in touch with the people they claim to work for’ (Kyagulanyi 2017). Citing the Museveni regime’s neglect of ‘GHETTO YOUTH’ (he explicitly rejected Museveni’s nomenclature of ‘slum dweller’) as a prime example of this disconnect, the Kyadondo East MP defended those who Museveni criticised for heckling the Ugandan president at Zirobwe Road Junction. He argued that ‘[a] powerless, suppressed people may heckle a Head of State simply because that’s the only opportunity they ever got to have their leader listen to them since the government is very far from them’ (ibid.).
In explaining the growing distance between the regime and ‘the people’, Kyagulanyi repeatedly foregrounded the generational dimensions of this divide. While he expressed gratitude to ‘the generation of the 1960s and 1970s’ who ‘respond[ed] to challenges of that time’, he questioned the appropriateness of that generation of leaders’ continued dominance over Ugandan politics, given that ‘the challenges of our time require a new kind of ideology and approach’ (ibid.) In addition, he squarely placed responsibility for the younger generation’s economic struggles on Museveni, asking the president ‘why youth on other continents are inventing and innovating useful products every day’, while Ugandan youth, by contrast, are confronted with the problems of ‘underemployment and unemployment’, despite having ‘great ideas’ (ibid.)
In analysing his own electoral victory, Kyagulanyi rejected Museveni’s ‘biological’ thesis, attributing his triumph in Kyadondo East instead to the NRM’s political neglect of the younger generation of voters. The reason he believed that many of them ‘massively’ supported him was precisely because these people ‘were just yearning for a microphone (obwogelero/obugambiro) so that they could be heard’ (ibid.) He concluded his response by boldly alluding to the need for a generational transfer of power in Uganda, chiding Museveni that ‘it’s time to focus not on the NEXT GENERAL-ELECTION but rather on the NEXT GENERATION’ (ibid.).
It is important to note that Kyagulanyi’s arrival in parliament corresponded with a constitutional crisis in Uganda. Beginning in mid 2017, rumours began to intensify that a bill would be tabled to amend Article 102(b) of the Constitution, removing the age limit provision that prevented candidates over the age of 75 from running for president. Such an amendment, which would require the support of a two-thirds majority of MPs to be passed, would open the way for the then 73-year-old Museveni to seek a sixth term in the 2021 presidential elections. Unsurprisingly, this issue served to further politicise intergenerational tensions in the country.
As murmurings of the proposed amendment gained strength throughout August 2017, Kyagulanyi embarked on a tour of Uganda, playing concerts in major towns and cities like Gulu, Mbale and Mbarara (Daily Monitor, September 23, 2017). During these events, his explicit appeals to Ugandan youth far beyond the Kyadondo East constituency were made plain. While speaking to hundreds of young people at the Hi5 Club in Mbale in eastern Uganda, for example, Kyagulanyi proclaimed, perhaps anticipating the announcement of the amendment, that ‘President Museveni is too old to lead the country’ (Daily Monitor, August 14, 2017). In addition, he affirmed that he had decided to enter politics to ‘address the challenges facing the youth in the nation’ as ‘[w]e ha[ve] no voice [in parliament] that truly understands [our issues] … The time is ripe … for change and it’s the youth who are the majority. It’s upon us to determine our future’ (ibid.).
As expected, in September 2017, the age limit bill was finally tabled in parliament. From the outset, the proposed amendment was controversial among lawmakers, as dissenting MPs believed that the age limit clause was the ‘only safeguard [that Ugandans] had to ensure a peaceful transfer of power’ to a post-Museveni political dispensation (interview 4/MOP/KAM/2019). On 19 September, the day the bill was formally introduced, Kyagulanyi immediately became a prominent public face opposing it, drafting a letter to the Electoral Commission chairperson requesting a copy of the national voter register to enable him to collect signatures calling for a referendum on the amendment (Business Focus, September 20, 2017) and later holding public consultation rallies with constituents dressed in his trademark red overalls and beret.
When the bill was first tabled, Kyagulanyi found himself at the centre of violent altercations in parliament between MPs on both sides of the issue, culminating with security forces dragging him and another opposition parliamentarian outside the chambers (interview 9/MOP/PHO/2022). The episode, which resulted in Kyagulanyi and 24 of his parliamentarian colleagues being suspended (Daily Monitor, September 27, 2017), was reminiscent of a similar fracas in the South African parliament, which also centred on a populist opposition leader, Julius Malema. In physically defending himself in chambers, Kyagulanyi deployed what Moffitt calls ‘bad manners’ (Moffitt 2016, 44), ‘a disregard for “appropriate” modes of acting in the political realm’. In so doing, however, he was seen by his supporters to have bravely stood up against the arbitrary use of violence by Museveni and his allies against their opponents (interview 12/POL/PHO/2022).
In the aftermath of the bill’s eventual passing in December, Kyagulanyi and his newly formed, amorphous political pressure group, People Power, Our Power, began to garner press attention (Daily Monitor, January 15, 2018). The new organisation was able to capitalise on the growing popular anger towards the NRM, which the age limit debate had crystallised, and the political ‘vacuum’ that existed in opposition politics (interviews 2/POL/PHO/2022; 9/POL/KAM/2022) to rapidly rise to national prominence. Over the course of 2018, Kyagulanyi would gain a reputation as the ‘kingmaker of the by-elections’ (interview 10/POL/KAM/2019), because four candidates he endorsed in Jinja East, Rukungiri, Bugiri and Arua all won their elections. In the latter two cases, Kyagulanyi-endorsed candidates even defeated their FDC opponents.
As a result, many political analysts within Uganda and abroad began to attribute these opposition successes to what they called the ‘Bobi Wine factor’ (The Observer, June 20, 2018); the idea that Kyagulanyi’s popularity was becoming so decisive that a simple endorsement by him alone had the power to swing by-elections in the opposition’s favour. While this type of personalistic analysis surely exaggerates Kyagulanyi’s impact on these races, which each contained their own distinctive local and regional political dynamics, charting the evolution of Kyagulanyi’s political discourse during this period is instructive because it demonstrates the growing force and evolving character of his populism.
The OTT protests
Perhaps no event or issue more powerfully illustrates the shift in Kyagulanyi’s populism during this period than the July 2018 protests against the social media tax. In late May of that year, the Museveni regime passed a new law which introduced a tax on the use of popular social media platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, among numerous others. The Over-The-Top (OTT) tax required Ugandan social media users to pay UGX200 a day (about US$0.05) to access 60 platforms set out in the OTT legislation. Arguing that social media had become a source of olugambo (‘gossip’) and falsehoods (Daily Monitor, March 31, 2018), particularly among Ugandan youth, the OTT tax was justified by Museveni as a means of curbing the spread of misinformation and widening the tax base. Critics of the new law immediately argued that the proposed legislation was a deliberate attempt by the Museveni regime to curtail people’s right to freedom of expression (Daily Monitor, July 3, 2018), especially among youth, who are most active on these platforms, limiting their ability to participate in politics and criticise the regime.
From the bill’s first mention in parliament in March, Kyagulanyi emerged as one of its most outspoken critics. In criticising the law, Kyagulanyi again deployed populist discourse. On 2 July, for example, he emphasised how debates over the tax revealed the deep fault lines that existed in Ugandan politics between ‘the people’ on one side, and their parliamentary representatives on the other. Taking to Facebook, he argued that ‘Parliament and other government institutions have consistently been used to fight against the PEOPLE instead of fighting for [them].’ He pointed to MPs who ‘do not take orders from the people who elected them but from State House’, as a particularly troubling example of this type of elite co-optation and betrayal. He concluded by promising to ‘rally THE PEOPLE … us[ing] all avenues possible to counter th[e] broad-day robbery’ of the OTT tax (Nassuuna 2018).
Subsequently, the Kyadondo East MP spearheaded the resistance against the social media tax, using his parliamentary office as a headquarters to organise a public protest before the vote on the bill (interview 2/JOURN/PHO/2020). On 11 July, Kyagulanyi, wearing his now trademark red ‘People Power’ beret, moved towards Constitutional Square in Kampala, with arms enjoined with his fellow protestors, including prominent fellow musicians and journalists. Chanting ‘People Power, Our Power’ and dressed in the anti-age limit colour of red, the 300 protesting youths were quickly confronted by police officers, who fired tear gas and live ammunition into the crowd (BBC, July 11, 2018). Kyagulanyi was eventually detained for his participation in the protest.
Following the demonstration, Kyagulanyi organised an online petition against the bill which further clarified who he understood ‘the people’ to be. The petition opens: ‘We, the young people of Uganda demand that the Social Media and Mobile taxes be annulled’, before reminding readers that ‘[y]outh represent 78% of the population’ (Daily Monitor, July 14, 2018). In his full statement accompanying the petition, Kyagulanyi challenged Museveni’s claims that youth ‘use social media platforms to promote gossip’. On the contrary, he contended, using an argument with an unmistakable neoliberal valence that aimed to appeal particularly to middle-class youth, that ‘the majority of [young people] in Uganda are using social media to create new jobs, connect to both local and international audiences, and find markets for their products’ (ibid.).
Ultimately, Kyagulanyi’s decision to use the OTT tax as one of his first forays into protest politics is revealing, as this law did not simply reflect the generational divide between the Museveni regime and its citizens, but was also actively seen to target Ugandan youth specifically (interview 1/STACT/KAM/2019). In addition, the OTT tax angered both working-class and middle-class elements of Ugandan youth alike. As such, in evoking ‘the people’ in his fight against the proposed legislation, Kyagulanyi’s populist discourse aimed to enable youth, across social classes, to imagine themselves as part of a burgeoning new collective political identity organising in opposition to the OTT legislation and its architects. In so doing, his discourse revealed the generational dimensions of his conception of ‘the people’.
The Arua saga: a ‘baptism of fire’
The August 2018 Arua by-election, more than any other event in the first 14 months of Kyagulanyi’s parliamentary career, catapulted the Kyadondo East MP and his political movement, People Power, to international prominence. This is because his participation in Kassiano Wadri’s triumphant campaign resulted in the arrest and torture of 33 opposition figures (including Kyagulanyi) and the killing of Kyagulanyi’s driver at the hands of state agents. It also represented a new phase in the evolution of his populist discourse, which saw him expanding his conception of ‘the people’ beyond a strictly generational focus.
The fact that such an incident occurred in Arua in Uganda’s northwest was not a coincidence. Resentment in the constituency towards the NRM regime stemmed from the popular local perception that the regime had historically ‘neglected’ the constituency (interview 5/JOURN/PHO/2020). Their anger had been ratcheted up by the tragic events which necessitated the by-election in the first place.
On 8 June 2018, the popular NRM Arua MP, Ibrahim Abiriga, along with his brother, was gunned down in front of his home in Wasiko county by two assassins. Believing the state had played some part in Abiriga’s fate, locals even publicly insinuated on camera that the president was involved, as the slain MP’s coffin arrived in the municipality (interview 4/JOURN/PHO/2020). This contentious history informed rising levels of local anger against the ruling regime in the lead-up to the by-election.
In making his first foray into this tense northern political terrain, Kyagulanyi initially leaned towards supporting the young, independent candidate Robert Ejiku (interview 3/JOURN/PHO/2020). Ultimately, he decided to back a far better known and experienced politician, 66-year-old Kassiano Wadri. Wadri’s reputation as an articulate firebrand, who had proven to be a reliable parliamentary thorn in Museveni’s side, endeared him both to voters in Arua and a variety of opposition politicians, including Kyagulanyi and prominent, estranged members of the FDC, like Paul Mwiru and General Mugisha Muntu, who also backed him.
While this growing support undeniably made Wadri one of the frontrunners in the race, it also posed a challenge to Kyagulanyi who had increasingly emphasised the generational dimension of his populist project over the preceding year. In light of this, during the Arua campaign, Kyagulanyi modified his political discourse once again. While chastising the ‘many elders that continue to sell our people to the regime’ at one campaign rally, he also stressed that as youth take over leadership in Uganda, ‘we must also tap into the wisdom and guidance of … elders that Museveni fears most, like Kassiano Wadri’ (Kyagulanyi, quoted in Aine 2018).
Later, in a speech on 13 August, Kyagulanyi declared that his movement’s ultimate ambition was to ‘unite [people] to remove Museveni from power’ (ibid.). To ‘complete this mission’, he reasoned that the Ugandan electorate had to understand that ‘[t]his is not a clash between parties … [nor] a clash of generations’, but rather that it required ‘the unification of the oppressed against the oppressor’ (Daily Monitor, August 17, 2018). As Laclau might surmise, Kyagulanyi’s discourse here extended the chains of equivalence across Ugandan society, erecting an internal frontier which antagonistically pitted his supporters, the holders of a diverse set of unmet social demands – ‘the people’ or the ‘oppressed’ – regardless of generation or party, on one side, against those in the Museveni regime, who failed to meet those demands – ‘the elite’ or ‘oppressor’ – on the other (Laclau 2005b, 38).
While it is difficult to assess how decisive Kyagulanyi’s presence in Arua was for Wadri’s ultimate victory,6 two things about his role in the by-election are beyond dispute. First, the violent crackdown of opposition politicians and supporters would not have happened had Kyagulanyi not been campaigning for Wadri in the constituency. Reports confirm that the state’s heavy-handed repression of the opposition in Arua was the direct by-product of Museveni’s ‘personal order to … have Kyagulanyi “disciplined”’ after his appearance at a campaign event in Arua Town on 13 August (Africa Confidential, September 15, 2018). In the immediate lead-up to the by-election, rumours circulated about a state plot to assassinate Kyagulanyi in Arua (interview 3/POL/KAM/2022). The fact that eyewitness reports suggest that Kyagulanyi’s driver ended up ‘t[aking] his [employer’s] bullet’ only lent further credence to these suspicions (interview 6/OPPMP/KAM/2019). In a broader political context within which Kyagulanyi-endorsed candidates had been victorious in three by-elections in three different regions, the behaviour of police and security personnel in Arua represented the Museveni regime’s attempt to break People Power’s ‘chain of winning’ (interview 5/OPPMP/PHO/2020).
Second, in standing up to the state-inflicted killing of his close colleague, and withstanding his own arrest and torture, the events of ‘Arua canonized [Kyagulanyi]’ in the eyes of many Ugandan voters (interview 2/JOURN/PHO/2020). In its aftermath, nationwide ‘Free Bobi Wine’ protests galvanised anti-Museveni sentiment across the country and garnered international headlines (interview 9/MOP/KAM/2019); Daily Monitor, August 20, 2018). Reports of the torture of opposition leaders in Arua were viewed as ‘completely unacceptable to a majority of Ugandans’ (interview 6/JOURN/PHO/2020), many of whom ‘turned against the state’ as a result (interview 7/MOP/PHO/2021). For his part, following the ‘baptism of fire’ of Arua, Kyagulanyi concluded that there was ‘no other way but forward’ in terms of his own political path, and, as such, his desire to mount a presidential run in 2021 was further solidified (interview with Robert Kyagulanyi, 2021)
Expanding the meaning of ‘the people’
In the aftermath of the Arua saga and following Kyagulanyi’s trip to the United States to receive emergency medical treatment for his state-inflicted injuries, the Kyadondo East MP delivered a speech upon his return at a press conference in Kampala. An analysis of the discourse deployed by Kyagulanyi during this speech exhibits again the shifting populist coordinates of his political discourse.
He opens the address by identifying the Museveni regime as ‘the enemy’, accusing them of carrying out the ‘senseless murder’ of Kyagulanyi’s driver, Yasmin Kawuma, and condemning them for ‘the torture, indignities, and brutal treatment’ that Kyagulanyi and his ‘comrades’ were forced to endure in Arua (Kyagulanyi 2018). After asserting that People Power represents the idea derived from Article 1 of the Ugandan Constitution that ‘all power belongs to the people’, Kyagulanyi seeks to clarify what exactly he means when he refers to ‘the people’.
Over the course of the latter half of his speech, he identifies a variety of social groups, which he argues comprise ‘the people’, all of whom he contends the Museveni regime has failed in one way or another. While the speech continues to stress the plight of Ugandan youth, his conception of ‘the people’ in this iteration extends far beyond this social category. It also includes, for example, migrants forced to leave the country ‘against their will’, patients victimised by the poor quality of the country’s health care system (he cites ‘mothers who die in labor everyday’), journalists who are ‘beaten for their work’, and teachers who are poorly compensated (ibid.).
In this speech, Kyagulanyi’s conception of ‘the people’ undeniably has a multi-class character, which includes not just sections of the working class, like ‘market women’, ‘ghetto youth’, and ‘the boda boda rider’, but also capitalist and petty bourgeois elements. For example, Kyagulanyi namechecks ‘the wealthy investor whose investments are under threat because of the bad politics of those steering the ship’, the entrepreneur ‘struggling to run a business’ due to ‘heavy taxes’ imposed by the state, and, perhaps most interestingly, ‘that politician who belongs to the NRM party but is bothered by the way things are going’ (ibid.).
As Laclau might have observed, in articulating these social groups’ disparate grievances to a common source – the corruption, venality and incompetence of the Museveni dictatorship – Kyagulanyi seeks to ‘simplify’ the political space, ‘replacing a complex set of differences and determinations’ (Laclau 2005a, 18), for example, the differences between the class position and social demands of ‘ghetto youth’ and ‘wealthy investor[s]’, and instead creates ‘a stark dichotomy’ between ‘the people’ on one side of the internal frontier, in antagonistic opposition to the Museveni regime on the other. In this way, his discursive choices are an attempt to extend the chains of equivalence more broadly across the whole of Ugandan society, ‘among heterogeneous frustrated subjects, identities, demands, and interests by establishing and/or highlighting their opposition to a common “other”’ (Stavrakakis and Katsembekis 2014, 129). In this formulation, the ‘enemy of the people’ is embodied in the Museveni regime, whose embrace of arbitrary state violence, political corruption and economic mismanagement have, in Kyagulanyi’s estimation, betrayed both the Ugandan people and the country’s constitution.
While ‘the people’ remains a central referent in this speech, the plurality of this category has been expanded in this version of Kyagulanyi’s populism, to incorporate a broader swath of the population. As before, Kyagulanyi continues to represent the Ugandan political world in antagonistic, dichotomic terms, using the intractable struggle of ‘the people’ against the Museveni regime, to justify his call for the removal of a dictatorship. Following this address, Kyagulanyi’s populist project would repeatedly reaffirm its commitment to its ‘generational cause’ (interview 13/POL/KAM/2022). In making speeches like this one, however, the future presidential candidate was unmistakably aiming to foster a broader, multi-class alliance in support of his People Power movement, as the country approached the 2021 general election.
Kyagulanyi’s electoral successes in the year following his election to parliament would continue into the 2021 election, where his NUP party would ride an ‘umbrella wave’, which saw them embarrass Ugandan opposition stalwarts like the FDC and DP, while winning decisive electoral victories in traditional NRM strongholds in Buganda (Kyagulanyi’s home region) and Busoga (Daily Monitor, January 23, 2021).7 These impressive electoral results suggest that Kyagulanyi’s brand of populism helped to build political coalitions across ethno-regional lines, incorporating previously excluded social groups (particularly young people) into the political process. In a continent where many countries share similar demographic characteristics with Uganda and where opposition parties confront common political obstacles, features of Kyagulanyi’s generational populist discourse may yet be replicated against other African incumbents.
Conclusions
There is no denying that for many youths in Uganda, Kyagulanyi, dressed in a slim-fitting suit with a trademark red beret atop his head, has come to be, over the last five years, a potent symbol of their own desire for generational political change. That said, the power of Kyagulanyi as a signifier has often eclipsed substantive discussions of the underlying politics of his political project. Comparisons have been drawn between the 41-year-old presidential candidate and radical African political figures of yesteryear, like Burkina Faso’s former president, Thomas Sankara, who appears on a mural on the wall of NUP’s political headquarters in Kamwokya. While Kyagulanyi’s bravery, charisma and popularity with young people across the continent certainly calls to mind Sankara, the limitations of his political project appear to have far more in common with contemporary African politicians, like Kenya’s Ruto and Nigeria’s Peter Obi, who have recently effectively appealed to younger voters in their respective national elections by presenting themselves as ‘underdog outsiders’ pushing up against establishment interests and promising to deliver a fairer form of liberal good governance. If the NUP leader’s commitment to ‘removing a dictator’ in Uganda cannot be questioned, especially given the violent repression he has endured over the last five years, the idea that his populist project offers any real ideological alternative to Museveni’s neoliberal governance seems far more doubtful.