Bobi Wine Has Challenged Uganda's 2021 Election Results

Ugandan political Bobi Wine has officially filed a legal challenge at the Supreme Court against the outcome of the recent presidential elections which took place amid an internet shutdown. The highly contested national elections, which saw the opposition leader going head-to-head with Yoweri Museveni, saw the latter winning the majority vote by 59 percent while Bobi Wine's National Unity Platform (NUP) secured 35 percent. Seventy-six-year-old Museveni is now serving his sixth term in office following over three decades in power.

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According to Aljazeera, lawyer to Bobi Wine's NUP party, George Musisi, has commented on the legal challenge saying, "We want the poll cancelled and repeated." He goes on to add, "There was outright ballot-stuffing, there was intimidation of NUP agents and supporters, some were arrested on the eve of the election, there was pre-ticking of ballots."

Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM) has responded to Bobi Wine's legal challenge by saying that the opposition leader will not prove successful and added that he is "trying to give his supporters a soft landing but inside himself he knows he lost genuinely," according to Rogers Mulindwa, NRM's spokesperson.

Shortly after the national elections took place, Bobi Wine and his wife, Barbara Itungo Kyagulanyi, were held under a near two-week house arrest after the military surrounded their home. After a Ugandan court found the opposition figure's house arrest to be "unlawful", this subsequently led to the withdrawal of security forces from his residence. The house arrest had been preceded by the military raiding Bobi Wine's residence and arresting a number of his security staff.