In March he sang that people should “keep a social distance”. Now he addresses crowds of fans, who have become blasé about the disease. Uganda, with the second-youngest population in the world, has registered just 250 covid-19 deaths. Mr Wine is more worried about bullets, like the one that police fired through his windscreen in the eastern city of Jinja. On December 27th, he says, an army truck struck and killed one of his bodyguards; the army says he fell from a car. The next day another opposition candidate, Patrick Oboi Amuriat, was pepper-sprayed by a policeman.
The worst violence was back in November, when Mr Wine was briefly detained for violating covid-19 guidelines. Unruly protests broke out in several towns. Police, soldiers and plainclothes gunmen shot dead at least 54 people; more than a thousand were arrested. Mr Museveni later said that it was legitimate to fire at stone-throwing civilians, even if, on his own count, only 32 of those killed were actually “rioters”. He has since put a son back in charge of Special Forces Command, a feared army unit, in a sign that the hardliners are on top.
Meanwhile journalists following Mr Wine have been tear-gassed, beaten and targeted with rubber bullets. Ali Mivule, a cameraman, says a police commander shouted “collateral damage” before firing a tear-gas canister at his leg on December 27th. Ashraf Kasirye, another cameraman on the scene, was shot in the head and rushed to hospital. He works for Ghetto TV, one of several online outlets that back Mr Wine; the communications regulator has asked Google, so far in vain, to block these channels’ YouTube accounts. A team from Canada’s CBC has been kicked out of the country. Foreign journalists have been stopped from entering at the airport or stymied by ever-changing accreditation rules.
Local NGOs are under threat, too. In October authorities shut down National Election Watch Uganda, a coalition of groups planning to observe the elections. The bank accounts of two of its members were frozen for “financing terrorism”. On December 22nd gunmen burst into a restaurant where Nicholas Opiyo, a leading human-rights lawyer, was meeting three colleagues and one of Mr Wine’s campaigners. They were handcuffed, blindfolded and driven away. Mr Opiyo was released on bail eight days later. Escalating repression may test relationships with Western governments. An American official says the “shrinking of political space” could have “negative ramifications” for future aid and security assistance.
