I Was Wrong About Bobi Wine Fleeing Uganda – Ssemujju

Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda speaking from exile.

Exiled former Kira Municipality MP Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda has said that his criticism of the opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) leader Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu aka Bobi Wine for fleeing Uganda was misguided, saying that the situation on ground has vindicated Kyagulanyi’s decision.

Ssemujju, who himself fled the country in June this year to avoid arrest, said he had initially believed Kyagulanyi ought to have remained in Uganda and confronted the state head-on, but that his position has now shifted entirely in the opposite direction.

“When Hon Kyagulanyi went into exile, I thought he would have stayed and fought. But my thinking has now changed. He was very right to go,” Ssemujju said.

The former legislator, who is also Secretary General of the People’s Front for Freedom (PFF), drew a historical parallel with the early days of Dr Kizza Besigye’s opposition to President Museveni, recalling how senior figures once tried to talk Besigye out of a protracted confrontation with the state.

“Dr Kizza Besigye started opposing President Museveni in November 2000. Some of the people who later joined him such as Hon Amanya Mushega, Gen Mugisha Muntu held a meeting at the Ministry of Public Service. Amanya Mushega was Minister of Public Service at the time,” Ssemujju said.

According to him, that meeting was called specifically to persuade Besigye to abandon his challenge to Museveni, on the calculation that the president was serving what they believed would be his final term in office.

“They asked Besigye to stop opposing Museveni, reasoning that Museveni was contesting for his last term. That’s how they saw things,” he said.

Ssemujju said he had approached Kyagulanyi’s exile with the same reasoning that Mushega and Muntu once applied to Besigye — an assumption that the fight was better waged from inside the country than from outside it. That calculation, he said, has been overtaken by events he did not anticipate at the time.

“Same to me. That was my thinking when Hon fled to exile. But it has now changed because at that time, I had not seen Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba arrest and torture a person as he publicly celebrates,” he said.

Kainerugaba, President Museveni’s son and the country’s military chief, has in recent months been accused by opposition figures and rights groups of overseeing a campaign of abductions, arrests and torture targeting government critics, allegations he has not shied away from addressing openly and, in some cases, boastfully on social media.

Ssemujju argued that Kyagulanyi’s decision to leave the country in the aftermath of January’s disputed presidential election was based on an assessment of the security situation that had not yet been available to those who remained behind.

“By the time Hon Kyagulanyi fled the country, he had an assessment that we didn’t have. We thought we would go ahead with the struggle in Uganda. Right now, my thinking has changed. It is no different from his,” he said.

In one of the interviews he conducted before fleeing the country, Ssemujju said Bobi Wine only had capacity to lead a political party, not a country.

Following Ssemujju’s remarks, Bobi Wine who is in the United States posted on X, “Don’t be so quick to judge a man simply because he doesn’t know what you know, or think the way you think. Remember, there was a time when you didn’t know what you know today. -Malcolm X”