KAMPALA — Bobi Wine will challenge President Yoweri Museveni’s election victory in Courts of law, Judiciary Spokesman, Solomon Muyita said Friday evening.
Muyita said Bobi Wine real name Robert Kyagulanyi has notified the Supreme Court that he will be filing a petition regarding the just concluded Presidential election.
Amid growing international concern about the conduct of the election, Mathias Mpuuga National Unity Platform’s Vice Chairperson for Buganda said: “We have evidence of ballot stuffing and other forms of election malpractice and after putting it together we are going to take all measures that the law permits to challenge this fraud.”
Museveni, 76, who has ruled Uganda without pause since seizing control in 1986, when he helped to end years of tyranny under Idi Amin and Milton Obote, claimed a sixth five-year term, extending his rule to four decades.
In a generational clash watched across the African continent with a booming young population and a host of ageing leaders, the 38-year-old Bobi Wine, a singer turned lawmaker, posed arguably the greatest challenge yet to Museveni.
Bobi Wine, who dismissed Museveni’s victory as “cooked-up, fraudulent results,” remained under military house arrest for 11 days.
Uganda’s electoral commission said that Museveni received 58% of the vote to Wine’s 35%, with a voter turnout of 52%.
Museveni dismissed the claims of vote-rigging. “I think this may turn out to be the most cheating-free election since 1962 [when Uganda won independence from Britain],” said Museveni in a national address.
Although Museveni stays in power, at least nine of his cabinet ministers, including the vice-president, were defeated in the parliamentary elections, many losing to candidates from Bobi Wine’s party.
Bobi Wine had strong support in Uganda’s cities, where frustration with unemployment and corruption is high.
The electoral commission deflected questions about how countrywide voting results were transmitted during the nationwide internet blackout by saying “we designed our own system”.
“We did not receive any orders from above during this election,” the commission chair, Simon Byabakama, told reporters, adding his team was “neither intimidated nor threatened.”
Tracking the vote was further complicated by the arrests of independent monitors and the denial of accreditation to most members of the US observer mission, leading the US to cancel its monitoring of the vote.
