Uganda: Museveni Wins Elections

By eric sande

Uganda’s incumbent President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has won a fresh bid to a new five-year term Sunday, taking more than two thirds of the vote in the recently held presidential and parliamentary elections.

Opposition leader, Dr Kiiza Besigye, has rejected the results and threatened to call on his supporters to protest against what he referred to as massive rigging.

According to full provisional results, Museveni, 66, was comfortably re-elected at the helm of the east African country, soon to become an oil-producing nation, with 68.38 percent of Friday's vote.

He first came to power in 1986 through a gorilla warfare and has now beaten seven other presidential candidates, including one woman, to win Uganda’s presidential and parliamentary elections with over 50 per cent.

A presidential candidate needs to gain not less than 51 per cent of votes cast to be declared president, as per the Uganda’s constitution. His main challenger Kizza Besigye, who ran as the leader of the Inter-party Cooperation (IPC) opposition platform, lost to the veteran leader for the third time, after garnering only 26.01 percent of the vote.

The East African country, with a population of 34 million voters, had registered 13,954,129 potential voters ahead of the crucial polls.The turnout stood at 59.9 percent, a weaker performance than the 69 percent achieved during the 2006 presidential election.

"With 5428369 votes, which is 69.38 per cent of tallied votes, I declare Yoweri Museveni the winner," declared electoral commission chairman, Badru Kigundu, as he announced the final results.

Museveni will join Libya's Moamer Kadhafi and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, among others, in a club of African leaders who have ruled more than 30 years if he serves another full mandate.

He has dismissed any suggestion of a wave of popular discontent akin to those sweeping the Arab world could rattle his firm grip on east Africa's second economy.