‘Opposition was lucky,’ Ugandan President Museveni says after securing seventh term

By AP

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni told the nation on Sunday that his landslide election victory 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.

“The opposition was lucky,” he said about his victory despite low voter turnout in Thursday’s election.

“10 million of my people did not turn up. They (the opposition) would have been embarrassed badly,” said Museveni.

Voter turnout stood at 52 percent, 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 the president 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.

Museveni took more than 71.6 percent of the vote while his closest challenger and Uganda’s most prominent opposition leader, Bobi Wine, took 24.7 percent of the vote, according to official results rejected by Wine as fake.

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-ruling 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 on Sunday, 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 Mpigi, he said.

Internet shutdown

Uganda’s election was marred by a days-long 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 ballot stuffing 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 authorities followed him and harassed his supporters, using tear gas against them. He campaigned in a flak jacket and helmet due to his security fears.

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 Museveni’s possible rivals have been jailed or sidelined.

Museveni has not said when he will retire and 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 he says are politically motivated.

Uganda has not witnessed a peaceful transfer of presidential power since independence from British colonial rule six decades ago.