Of all the world’s opposition leaders, Kizza Besigye may be the most reliable, or at least predictable. For a decade, he has challenged Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni for his seat in three separate elections, losing each time. Between those races, Besigye has consistently staged protests against President Museveni’s unyielding rule, ensuring that he and his supporters would forever be acquainted with the wrath of the President’s riot police. At the last protest of his that I witnessed, a demonstration in late 2007 against Museveni’s hosting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, I was nearly hit by an overzealous policeman’s baton (I was mistaken for a protester), and Besigye ended up stumbling through the street next to the capital’s airfield, bloodied and dazed. Now, as the leader of protests called Walk to Work, in which participants walk en masse to work, Besigye has rallied thousands of Ugandans who are incensed at high food and fuel prices and persistent unemployment and corruption.
Besigye is coming off a recently lost (and possibly rigged) election in February, and Museveni supporters accuse him of calling for “Egypt-style” protests to compensate for his diminishing relevance in Ugandan politics. Since the demonstrations began in mid-April, at least seven people have been killed, Besigye and other opposition politicians have been repeatedly beaten and detained, with scores of more Ugandans injured and jailed.
The images of Uganda burning—parts of the hilly green capital Kampala have been on fire—are startling. Action for Change, the group that initiated Walk to Work, has said the uprising is in support of the Ugandans who have to walk to work each day because they can’t afford the rising price of fuel. Only about a fourth of the four hundred thousand new entrants to the Ugandan labor market find formal employment; the rest enter the informal economy, where wages are minimal and survival is a struggle. Roads, hospitals, and other public services have all withered from government neglect. Residents are amazed as the government prepares to spend almost eight hundred million dollars on new fighter jets and over a million on a lavish swearing-in ceremony for Musveni’s new Presidential term, while food prices jumped by thirty-one per cent from April of last year (a jump the government blames on drought) and year-on-year inflation stands at fourteen per cent, up from eleven per cent last month.
The severity of the violent crackdown of the protests is unprecedented in Uganda; Besigye just left the country for neighboring Kenya to seek medical treatment after his abuse, and four arrests by government security forces. The forces, which have freely used both live bullets and tear gas on unarmed protesters, allegedly shot and killed a two-year old girl.
Besigye, strangely enough, was once Musveni’s personal doctor, but he has not spoken to the President in years. (The two are rumored to have fallen out over a personal matter.) Besigye is a complicated figure. He is both a member of the Ugandan social and economic elite and a shunned political dissident, and it is difficult to determine whether his split, a decade ago, from Museveni’s party, which has ruled for a quarter of a century, is a genuine desire to see flourishing multiparty politics or is simply a grab for his own power. Though Besigye has now latched on to the Walk for Work protests, one Ugandan wrote in to a local newspaper to ask why the opposition leader had not decreased prices at the gas station he owns in Kampala.
President Museveni’s base is dominated by rural voters, who make up the majority of the country and who, the government explains, gave him a legitimate win in the last election. It can’t explain, however, how the unrest has spread to multiple towns, where people, joined by the Internet and word of mouth, have vowed not to stop.
