Day and night, the soldiers were always there. Amid the palm trees and banana groves of a verdant suburb in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, at least a truckload of armed men never ceased to lurk outside the home of one of the country’s most famous pop stars and actors.
But the security forces were not deployed to protect Robert Kyagulanyi, universally known by his stage name Bobi Wine. As well as being an acclaimed musician, Wine is an opposition leader who tried to break the 40-year grip on power of Uganda’s ruthless dictator, Yoweri Museveni, in last week’s presidential election.
The troops were there to intimidate Wine and follow him whenever he ventured outside during the fraught and all-consuming campaign. Every time he left the house, the security forces tailed him along red earth roads, placing sudden checkpoints in his path, assaulting his supporters with batons and tear gas, and sabotaging or breaking up his tumultuous election rallies, including by opening fire with live rounds.
I spoke to Wine on the phone during the campaign.“Of course, it takes a toll on me and my family, on our mental health and everything,” he said. “But in looking at it, compared to what happens to the people around us, I think we find no reason to even complain, or moral justification to complain, because others are being killed. Others are being massacred. So what’s happening to us, however terrible it is, we are still alive.”
Wine, who grew up in a tiny tin-roofed home in one of Kampala’s poorest slums, represents the hopes of millions of Ugandans yearning to break the chains of dictatorship. “We are protesting against the injustice, we are protesting against 40 years of misrule. We are protesting against police brutality and misrule under the dictatorship,” he told me.
As if to prove Wine’s point, the regime tried to arrest him the day after the election when plain-clothes police scaled the walls of his home as a military helicopter hovered overhead. He managed to escape but his wife, Barbie, was placed under house arrest along with relations who happened to be present. Earlier, the security forces shot dead seven of his supporters as they gathered to watch the results. Then the Electoral Commission – whose main job, in the eyes of the opposition, is to rig elections for Museveni – announced that the president had achieved a sweeping victory with 72 per cent of the vote, and Wine gaining only 25 per cent.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There was a time when it was possible to hope that misrule under dictatorship would no longer be the ordeal of millions of Ugandans or other Africans.
True enough, caricature tyrants held sway over much of the continent soon after African countries achieved independence in the 1960s. They included notorious figures such as Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko and the self-styled “Emperor” Bokassa, who tormented the peoples of Uganda, Congo and the Central African Republic respectively. This first generation of despots, as preposterous as they were brutal, killed hundreds of thousands of people and set back Africa’s development by decades.
Then came the West’s victory in the Cold War, opening a new and more hopeful era in the 1990s and early 2000s. Back then, the United States and its allies had the power and the will to stand up for liberty and democracy, placing African leaders under constant pressure to reform and liberalise.
South Africa escaped apartheid to be reborn as a liberal democracy in 1994, while Nigeria broke free of military rule in 1999, and countries as far-flung as Zambia, Kenya and Ghana legalised opposition parties and held new elections.
Some despots, notably the late Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, stood resolutely against the tide. Yet as one long-serving autocrat, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, accepted defeat in a free election in 1991 and stepped down gracefully, Mugabe and the other holdouts appeared to represent a dying breed, destined to be succeeded by democratic and constitutional presidents.
But no longer. Authoritarianism is back in Africa, and the tragic reality is that ageing tyrants resemble not relics of the past but rather an avant garde. In the hopeful early years of his supremacy, Museveni once called the dictators in the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) – now the African Union – a “trade union of criminals”, before he inevitably joined their ranks.
Today, the established members of this disreputable club are being reinforced by a new generation of young despots who can look forward to decades of plunder and oppression. Contrary to all expectations, the membership of the unofficial union of African tyrants is rapidly expanding.
Since 2020, military dictators have seized power in nine countries, from Guinea to Mali, and Sudan to Gabon. And 2025 saw the continued dominance of Africa’s first female tyrant when Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania claimed victory in a blatantly rigged election, before having her citizens shot in the streets.
If Museveni, now 81, might be considered the senior shop steward of the union of tyrants, who are the other members, old and new?
Despite having stormed Kampala at the head of a rebel army and seized power in January 1986, Museveni is not the union’s longest-serving figurehead. That dubious honour goes to Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea and the doyen of African tyrants, who achieved power fully 47 years ago. He owes his eminence to the accident of birth that made him the nephew of the country’s first president, Francisco Macías Nguema.
As a young man of 37, Obiang overthrew his uncle and then executed him by firing squad. He achieved dominance over a tiny country with more than a billion barrels of proven oil reserves and, in 1979, a population of fewer than 300,000.
Endowed with plenty of oil money and only a small population to oppress (about 1.9 million today), Obiang, 83, has maintained his stranglehold against little opposition, confident enough to appoint his son, also called Teodoro, as vice-president and presumed successor.
The younger Obiang is an extravagant playboy, already notorious for blowing the country’s oil wealth on sports cars and luxury villas. But if all goes according to plan – and there is little reason to suppose that it won’t – one Obiang will eventually succeed another and life for Equatorial Guineans, two thirds of whom endure absolute poverty, will continue much as before.
The next most senior member of the union of tyrants is Paul Biya, the dictator of Cameroon, who won power in 1982. Without large oil reserves and facing a much larger population of 30 million, Biya lacks the advantages of Equatorial Guinea’s tyrant.
He specialises in holding power by artfully dividing his opponents, buying off some and locking up others, while coup-proofing his regime by placing elite military units under his personal command. Biya allows elections, but he carefully tilts the playing field in his favour, including by the time-honoured trick of banning the main opposition leader, Maurice Kamto, from standing against him.
By these methods, Biya was re-elected in October at the age of 92 to serve another seven-year term, promising with apparent irony that “the best is yet to come”. Together with his flame-haired wife, Chantal, Biya seems determined to hold power, God-willing, until the cusp of his 100th birthday.
If that sounds implausible, remember that Hastings Banda, one of Africa’s original dictators, kept his grip on Malawi until 1994 when he was about 100, though no one can be sure since he wisely made his date of birth a state secret.
Next door to Cameroon is the Republic of Congo (not to be confused with the far larger Democratic Republic of Congo) and another old and brutal tyrant, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, who first won power in 1979. He lost an election in 1992 and stepped down, only to fight his way back to the presidency in a welter of bloodshed in 1997, aided by a brutal militia known as the “Cobras”.
Sassou-Nguesso, 82, also benefits from the dictator-friendly combination of big oil reserves (about 1.8 billion barrels) and a small population (6.5 million). The sole purpose of his 40-year rule has been to enrich himself and his family. Global Witness, a campaign group, has documented one case of his son, Denis, siphoning off $50m of state funds, and another of his daughter, Claudia, stealing $20m to buy apartments in New York, including in Trump Tower. Both have denied any wrongdoing.
Elsewhere, perhaps the most brazenly ruthless tyrant is Isaias Afwerki, the dictator of Eritrea. He has dominated this country in the Horn of Africa ever since it broke away from Ethiopia in 1993 after decades of guerrilla war.
Isaias fought in that war, and regards himself as the father of independent Eritrea, determined never to entrust anyone else with power. But Eritrea has no oil or natural wealth, so Isaias, 79, maintains his rule through sheer brutality, keeping his country on a permanent war footing and conscripting most of the adult population for indefinite military service, which often means forced labour.
Unlike other tyrants, Isaias doesn’t bother with pretences. Eritrea is one of the few countries that has never held a national election in its entire history as an independent state. Under Isaias, Eritrea resembles an African North Korea, and the consequences of his unyielding oppression have spread far and wide, including to the south coast of England, where Eritreans were the single biggest nationality among small boat arrivals in 2025.
Just about everyone who can leave Eritrea does so. Whenever its national football team competes overseas, the players routinely abscond.
If Isaias is a big part of the cause of the migration crisis, another African dictator, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, was supposed to be its cure. The Conservative government reached an abortive deal to pay Kagame to accept small boat migrants in Rwanda.
Kagame has been in charge ever since his guerrilla army captured the capital, Kigali, and ended the genocide in 1994. Unlike his Eritrean counterpart, he is wily enough to keep up appearances by holding elections, while ensuring that he won in 2024 with 99 per cent of the vote.
Kagame reserves his worst brutality for his anarchic neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which he has repeatedly invaded. The Rwandan army and its rebel allies now occupy thousands of square miles of eastern Congo, massacring innocent villagers, driving millions from their homes and plundering the area of its vast mineral wealth.
In short, Kagame behaves like an African Vladimir Putin. Yet by making himself useful to the West, including by allowing US president Donald Trump to claim credit for mediating a bogus peace deal between Rwanda and Congo, Kagame has managed to escape condemnation for his expansionist aggression. Of all Africa’s despots, he is at once the most cynical and the most successful at avoiding the international pressure he richly deserves.
Just over the border in neighbouring Tanzania, Kagame has a new colleague in the union of tyrants. Samia Suluhu Hassan became the first female president of Tanzania in 2021, presenting herself as a liberalising and reformist figure. But she was an accidental leader, appointed as vice-president and then gaining power only because her predecessor, John Magufuli, died of Covid. Samia, as she is universally known, struggled to assert herself and quickly became unpopular.
Facing an election in October 2025, she resorted to all the tricks in the tyrant’s handbook, banning the main opposition party and jailing her principal opponent, Tundu Lissu, on trumped-up charges of treason. When polling day came, she announced an absurd result, claiming to have won 98 per cent of the vote on an 87 per cent turnout.
When Tanzanians protested against this obviously fraudulent outcome, Hassan deployed the army to mow them down in the streets, killing anything between 1,000 and 3,000 of her people.
One senior African diplomat in London tells me that, at a minimum, Tanzania obviously deserves to be expelled from the Commonwealth, which is supposed to stand for freedom and democracy. But the diplomat adds that the chances of this happening are practically zero because the club is stuffed with autocrats, who will all shield one another from pressure.
Rwanda, for example, was allowed to join the Commonwealth in 2009, even though it has no history of British rule, and Kagame will oppose any action against his new fellow dictator.
And Hassan can take heart from all the other new members of the union of tyrants. There is Assimi Goita, the military ruler of Mali and the victor of coups in 2020 and 2021, and Abdourahamane Tchiani, the dictator of neighbouring Niger, who overthrew an elected president in 2023.
Perhaps most striking of all is the towering, chiselled figure of Ibrahim Traoré, aged only 37, who seized power in Burkina Faso in a coup in 2023. As a master of social media, Capt Traoré has won a significant popular following by crafting an image of himself as a dynamic young leader, carefully overlooking the fact that brutal jihadist rebels have overrun vast areas of his country.
Then there is Brice Oligui Nguema, the dictator of Gabon, who masterminded a coup in 2023 and soon claimed to have won an election in April 2025 with 90 per cent of the vote. What makes him important for Hassan is that Nguema is a fellow Commonwealth leader, thanks to a preposterous decision to allow Gabon, with no history of British rule, to join the club in 2022. Now that he is inside the Commonwealth, you can forget any idea that Nguema would approve of action against a fellow autocrat.
The more dictators there are, the more they can support one another, and the harder it becomes to place them under concerted pressure to stop oppressing their suffering peoples. In the past five years alone, the union of tyrants has acquired at least nine new members by means of military coups, plus Samia of Tanzania through a rigged election and a blood-soaked aftermath.
But why the re-emergence of the African tyrant? Nic Cheeseman, a professor of democracy and international development at Birmingham University, notes what he calls a “more conducive international environment” for authoritarian leaders.
Trump’s administration has instructed US embassies to stop even reporting on flawed elections or repression by their host countries. Britain, inhibited by fears of being seen as neocolonialist, is reluctant to exert any pressure on dictators. When David Lammy was foreign secretary, it seemed that the progressive and suitably postcolonial option was to turn a blind eye when Africans were being murdered, tortured or oppressed by their leaders.
“That international context has totally changed,” says Cheeseman. “We have the US being very quiet and we have the UK not really sure whether it’s promoting democracy or not.”
With the US and the Western powers in retreat, other countries have filled the vacuum. Russia is openly backing the coup leaders in West Africa, deploying mercenaries to prop up the new regimes in a swath of countries from Mali to Niger and Burkina Faso.
China has become the biggest trading partner and investor for most African countries. More recently, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and particularly the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have extended their influence across the continent. The UAE alone invested $110bn (£80bn) in Africa between 2019 and 2023 while also providing Kenya’s government with a loan of $1.5bn (£1.1bn). Cheeseman notes that a loan of that size would once have come solely from the International Monetary Fund.
What all of these countries have in common is that none of them cares about democracy and all are willing to back any dictator, however brutal, provided that the tyrant in question controls something they want – generally mineral wealth – or might otherwise serve their respective national interests.
Any African leader who rigs an election and then murders protesters can rest assured that even if they ruin relations with the West, they will always have other options and other friends, unrestrained by any scruples.
Cheeseman was not surprised that Hassan chose to rig Tanzania’s election, but he was struck by Britain’s silence afterwards and the near total absence of international pressure or criticism after a death toll that may be in the thousands.
“Tanzania is not a country where we should be afraid to express our expectation that elections should be better and citizens should not be shot in the streets,” he says. “If we’re not going to stand up for democracy in Tanzania, then where are we?”
Now that Britain and the US are no longer willing to stand up for democracy, an even greater burden falls on Africa’s courageous opposition leaders, including Bobi Wine in Uganda. As he risks his life day after day, with his supporters in the recent election campaign being arrested or assaulted – sometimes even killed – all around him, Wine and his counterparts across the continent are grimly aware that they must struggle against Africa’s new breed of tyrants alone.
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