Bobi Wine And Barbie Kyagulanyi Hope ‘People’s President’ Helps End Support Of Uganda’s Dictator Yoweri Museveni – Contenders Documentary

Fred Topel
·3 min read
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Bobi Wine, the subject of Bobi Wine: The People’s President, said he hopes the National Geographic Documentary Films doc educates international communities who have supported Uganda’s dictator Yoweri Museveni.

Wine had the support of the Ugandan people to be elected president in 2021, yet Museveni remains in power. Wine considers Museveni worse than his predecessor, Idi Amin, by the sheer fact that Amin was only in power for eight years and Museveni for 37.

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“Amin was not educated,” Wine said at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary. “Museveni was a smart dictator that for a very long time has got the international community backing him. I would like to believe that they are doing that ignorantly. I hope this film opens up the reality of General Museveni to the international communities.”

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Wine’s wife, Barbie Kyagulanyi, said Museveni also hires expensive firms to keep his reputation clean outside of Uganda. She hopes seeing the documentary will open people’s eyes to the real Museveni.

“We hope that this film goes far and wide and that the people who work with General Museveni get to see him for who exactly he is without any filter,” Kyagulanyi said. “We are glad that so far this film has got a big platform and then finally all the decision makers and the policymakers who work with him at an international level will see him for who he is.”

Co-director Christopher Sharp, who made the film with Moses Bwayo, witnessed Museveni’s election fraud firsthand.

“We had policeman stuffing black bags,” Sharp said. “We had people signing Museveni’s name on the ballot sheet and then wringing their hands because they’d been doing it for so long. There were areas where we’d film and thousands of people would come out to see Bobi. Then Museveni’s candidate would turn up, no one would go and then he’d win 100% of the vote. What they had to do then was they had to turn off the internet and shut down the whole country and try to come up with an explanation to say that Museveni had won which obviously they did but it was depressing.”

Among Museveni’s resources is $1 billion in annual aid from the U.S. Sharp hopes the film encourages Americans to demand their government pull out of such relationships.

“We understand that Western governments have interests which they think are being served by Museveni,” Sharp said. “Their interests don’t outweigh the fact that 44 million Ugandans are suffering under a dictatorship year after year. I think what makes the film so important and really important as many people see it as possible is there has to be no excuse for Western governments to carry on giving this money with no accountability.”

Nevertheless, Wine and Kyagulanyi remain in Uganda to keep fighting.

“It’s important for us to fix our country rather than running away from it,” Wine said. “It would be a betrayal for all those less fortunate people that have put their lives on the line to support and defend us because they believe in us. Running away from the struggle would be a huge actual betrayal.”

Check out the panel video above.

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