After Biko’s death, his family and friends, led by his wife Ntsiki Mashalaba and best friend Donald Woods, demanded an inquest into his death.

The naysayers scoffed, believing that an inquest was a waste of time.

The verdict, they rightly said, would surely absolve the security agencies that were responsible for the death in prison of Biko.

Sure enough, the verdict tipped the scales of justice in favor of the rogue South African police. And thereupon, the cynics who said the inquest was a waste of time felt vindicated.

However, Donald Woods and Biko’s wife Ntsiki were under no illusions that they would win a guilty verdict against the pigmentocracy, as it were.

Their aim in pushing for an inquest was to ensure that the apartheid regime would be exposed for the evil that it wrought in killing Biko; who would then personify the widespread sufferings of his fellow persons of colour.

As a result, thanks to the inquest, the world did learn how Biko died.

The inquest revealed how he was shackled, naked and left unattended on the cold cement floor of a cell in a Pretoria prison.

Biko was foaming at the mouth, indicating he suffered some kind of head trauma, but he was thrown into the back of a Land Rover and driven to a prison hospital 700 miles away, bumping his head along the way.

He died the next day of a massive brain hemorrhage.

When all this was exposed in the Inquest, the world was aghast and these findings formed the basis of two of Woods’s books: “Biko” and “Asking For Trouble: Autobiography of a Banned Journalist”, which created the story arc for the film “Cry Freedom”.

This film was released in 1987 and won several Academy Awards, including an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for a little-known thespian called Denzel Washington.

By bringing worldwide attention to apartheid, the Inquest had done exactly what Donald Woods and Biko’s wife had hoped it would do.

Namely, spread awareness which served as a reference point to activists rising to the high moral ground shaped by universally recognized standards of justice.

In Uganda, to its critics, the National Unity Platform (NUP) also appears to be wasting its time contesting elections against the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement (NRM).

The fledgling party, which was formed in July last year, has been belittled by senior politicians such as the Democratic Party’s Norbert Mao as a “kindergarten party.”

Dr. Kizza Besigye, who ran against President Yoweri Museveni four times and lost at each go, says: “Elections are utterly useless if people do not have power. The masses are captives of a few individuals that results in the powerlessness of the population.”

However, Bobi Wine believes that elections are simply a weapon in a quiver full of arrows aimed at the Bull’s Eye of regime change.

“Like we said, our protests will not take only one format. Some will organise prayers, others will march, others will just do sit-ins, others will do songs of freedom. We shall protest in different ways as long as our protests are lawful and peaceful,” Bobi Wine said.

In opposing the advice of more senior politicians in the opposition, Wine is clearly distinguishing himself as a leader of a new generation of politicians who are challenging old-line leaders and harnessing the deep dissatisfaction among younger voters.

However, President’s Museveni’s powerful patronage networks, long-established political machines and support from the security forces stands in his way.

Media reports during the recent Kayunga LC Five by-elections details how security services were deployed around Bobi Wine’s house in Magere.

However, the government says such measures are preventive and accuses Bobi Wine of stoking civil disturbances and ethnic hatred.

After the January 14th presidential elections, the president accused Bobi Wine’s party of rigging the elections in Buganda region, where Mr. Museveni’s NRM was roundly defeated.

“The problem was these anti-democratic groups who were trying to intimidate people not to support the NRM and the massive cheating yet the NRM won,” Mr. Museveni said.

“Despite the massive cheating, NRM won, because it is a massive party. It is just like an elephant. All those who were intimidating just injured the ear of the elephant but it is still standing,” he went on.

And there was more.

“We shall defeat the tribalists because they cannot block our historical journey. If they push for that road, they know who will oppose them as determinedly as we opposed all the other traitors in the past,” Mr. Museveni concluded.

The Opposition’s ahistorical challenge, as the president called it, translated into the intimidation and violence meted out by state agencies against the Opposition in Kayunga.

However, these events reawakened a sense of déjà vu.

As members of Bobi Wine’s party were brutalized, it reminds one of a past where South African security operatives were granted immunity from prosecution and had extrajudicial powers to control civic outcomes.

And so, just like in the case of apartheid’s security agencies, the brutality of Ugandan security agencies contributes to the growth of international awareness about the true nature of Uganda’s politics.

What Besigye and Mao forget is that elections, like the Biko inquest, may not have short term gains such as immediate electoral victory.

However, elections do lend themselves to a Domino sequence in which every political event will affect a related event as each electoral defeat becomes like a falling domino causing an entire row of upended dominoes to fall in favor of the universal condemnation of elections as unfree and unfair.

Then, when it is unanimously agreed that democracy is illusory in Uganda, the forces of change will pave the way for the evolution of a truer democratic setting in the country that will favour the likes of Bobi Wine, just like South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom.