By Andrew M. Mwenda
And so, it was that on Friday night Bobi Wine supporters physically assaulted Bebe Cool by throwing bottles filled with urine at him, literally chasing him away from a concert.
Bebe Cool’s only crime was to hold an opinion different from that of Bobi Wine and his hooligan supporters.
I have been warning that Bobi Wine leads a group of radical extremists who are anti democratic, intolerant and violent. His large army of supporters and apologists have accused me of bias and exaggeration. On Friday their true colors were on display for all to see.
Yet unsurprisingly, Ugandan elites who pontificate the loudest in defense of the human rights and democracy when it comes to criticizing President Yoweri Museveni are silent. This is the tragedy of Our country: that none of these elites – be they lawyers, journalists, human rights activists and other pundits really believe in what they say. They use democracy and human rights only as a convenient tool to score political points but not to advance them at all.
If Bobi Wine supporters can exhibit such intolerance and use such violence against opponents even without the repressive power of the state, what will they do if finally they get power? As I have said again and again, the only government Bobi Wine and his supporters can preside over in Uganda is a tyranny akin to that of Adolf Hitler in Germany.
But most critically for the government, these hooligans will not stop their terror unless they are stopped.