Uganda’s president says strong election victory over his youthful challenger a taste of his strength
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — President Yoweri Museveni said Sunday that his landslide victory in Uganda’s election showed the dominance of his party, which has governed the East African country for four decades.
Museveni said a day after he was declared the winner that the result gave “a good taste of the strength” of his party, known as the National Resistance Movement.
Museveni, 81, has stayed in power over the years by rewriting the rules. The last legal obstacles to his rule — term limits and age restrictions — have been removed from the constitution, and some of his possible rivals have been jailed or sidelined.
Museveni took more than 71.6% of the vote while his closest challenger and Uganda’s most prominent opposition leader, Bobi Wine, took 24.7% of the vote, according to official results rejected by Wine as fake.
“The opposition are lucky,” Musevi said about his victory after low voter turnout in Thursday’s election. “They have not seen our full strength.” Voter turnout stood at 52%, the lowest since Uganda’s return in 2006 to multiparty politics.
Addressing the nation from his country home in western Uganda, where many dignitaries gathered to hear him speak publicly for the first time since his victory, Museveni said that he believed many of those who didn’t vote were members of the governing party.
Wine, 43, a musician-turned-politician whose real name is Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, has the option of launching a legal challenge with the courts, which previously have refused opposition efforts to nullify Museveni’s victories while recommending electoral reforms.
Museveni, Africa’s third-longest governing president, will serve a seventh term that would bring him closer to five decades in power. His supporters credit him for the relative peace and stability that makes Uganda home to hundreds of thousands fleeing violence elsewhere in the region.
In his speech, Museveni accused the opposition of trying to foment violence during voting. He urged religious leaders to reach out to young people who are likely to be misled into violence.
At least seven opposition supporters of a losing parliamentary candidate with Wine’s party were killed by police after they attacked a polling station with machetes in the central district of Butambala, he said.
“Some of the opposition are wrong but also terrorists,” he said, calling Wine and others “traitors.”
Uganda’s election was marred by a dayslong internet shutdown and the failure of biometric voter identification machines that caused delays in the start of voting in areas including Kampala, the capital. Wine has also alleged that stuffing ballot boxes happened in some areas seen as Museveni’s strongholds.
The failure of biometric machines is likely to be a basis for any legal challenge to the official result.
The security forces were a constant presence throughout the election campaign, and Wine said that authorities followed him and harassed his supporters, using tear gas against them. He campaigned in a flak jacket and helmet because of security fears.
Museveni hasn’t said when he will retire, and he has no rivals in the upper ranks of his party.
Veteran opposition figure Kizza Besigye, a four-time presidential candidate, remains in prison after he faced treason charges that he says are politically motivated.
Uganda hasn’t witnessed a peaceful transfer of presidential power since independence from British colonial rule six decades ago.