Museveni declared winner as opposition cries vote rigging.

President Yoweri Museveni was on Saturday declared by the Uganda Electoral Commission (EC) Chairman Simon Byabakama as the winner of the 2021 Presidential elections with 5.85 million votes equivalent to 58.54%, while Museveni’s main challenger Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine of the National Unity Party(NUP), secured 3.48 million votes equivalent to 34.83%. The total voter turnout country wide was reported to be 52%, while 18.1million people had registered to vote according to official results by the EC.

The presidential contest attracted 11 candidates, the highest number since 1996, and included two former military Generals, Mugisha Muntu and Henry Tumukunde.  Immediately after the announcement of the official results, Bobi Wine’s spokesperson Benjamin Katana dismissed the outcome of the elections as fraudulent describing the announcement as, “an attempt to undermine the will of the people of Uganda”.  Bobi Wine claimed that he had video proof of voting fraud and would share the videos as soon as internet connections were restored. The government ordered internet providers to suspend their services one day before the election.

Bobi Wine’s house under heavy siege as presidential results were being announced

As the results were being announced, heavy security forces were deployed around Bobi Wine’s house, an act that would probably stop him from stepping out of his house and calling for his party members to protest the outcome of the results.  Benjamin Katana said that his Party-NUP will use all possible legal actions. The biggest part of the capital city Kampala and its suburbs which is an opposition strong hold remains under heavy security deployment after elections.

In Buganda region, youthful NUP candidates won a number of Parliamentary seats, beating veteran long time serving politicians including the Vice President Edward Kiwanuka Ssekandi, Amelia Kyambadde, Judith Nabakooba, Ruth Nankabirwa, Isaac Musumba and many others. 

The Daily Monitor publication one of the main-stream print media and online outlets in Uganda had in the morning of Saturday published a story titled “inconsistency sighted in presidential elections”, but within two hours, the story had been pulled down from the website! Prominent media personalities in the region suspected the article was censored by the government, one of the reasons the country is in an internet black out to keep such censorship out of the public eye. 

The Daily Monitor story that was pulled down after 2 hours!

Samuel Azuu Fonkam, the head of the African Union observer team while talking to reporters after the announcement of the presidential election results, could neither confirm nor deny whether the elections were free and fair. He mentioned that the “limited” AU mission mainly focused on elections in the capital Kampala. Asked about NUP allegation of vote rigging, he said he could not “speak about things we did not see or observe.”

As for the East African Community (EAC) observer team, its preliminary election observers statement underlined issues including “disproportionate use of force in some instances” by security forces, the internet shutdown, late-opening of some polling stations and isolated cases of failure in biometric kits to verify voters. Generally, the EAC observer team called the vote largely peaceful and “demonstrated the level of maturity expected of a democracy.” The European Union and the US declined to  deploy observer teams, but the US State Department’s top diplomat for Africa, Tibor Nagy, said in a tweet on Saturday that the "electoral process has been fundamentally flawed".

The 2021 presidential campaigns were the bloodiest since Museveni came to power in 1986, characterized by harassment and detention of opposition candidates and their supporters, crackdown on the media and the death of more than 45 people killed in protests.