Ugandans vote in an election expected to extend President Yoweri Museveni’s 40-year rule amid fears of a crackdown and pre-poll intimidation.
KAMPALA: Ugandans will vote in elections on Thursday which are all but guaranteed to extend the 40-year rule of President Yoweri Museveni.
The 81-year-old incumbent faces singer-turned-politician Bobi Wine, who is taking a second run at the presidency after his 2021 campaign ended in bloodshed.
Rights groups and international monitors have accused Ugandan authorities of arrests, abductions, and media intimidation in the run-up to the polls.
Kampala has been quiet in recent days as residents headed home to their villages to vote or take shelter.
Wine campaigned in a flak jacket, saying the race has become a “war”.
“They cannot abduct all of us. The jails are already full and we are still millions of change-seeking Ugandans out there,” he said at a rally last week.
Fears of a repeat of the 2021 violence are scaring some Ugandans.
“People lost their lives, people lost their things, so it frightened us,” Kampala resident Winnie Promise Nantume told AFP.
There are also concerns of a wider erosion of democracy in east Africa after violent elections in neighbouring Tanzania.
Museveni is the third-longest serving president on the African continent.
More than 70% of Uganda’s population is under 30 and have known nothing but Museveni’s rule.
To many, he is still the father of the nation who rescued the country from political and economic chaos.
“You could say that these elections are kind of a shadow play,” Kristof Titeca, an expert on Uganda at Antwerp university, told AFP.
“The key questions are not the elections, but what comes after, i.e. the transition.”
Museveni’s son, army chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has made no secret of his desire to rule as his father’s age forces him to scale back.
Wine’s rallies have drawn larger crowds than many expected, keeping up pressure despite the risks.
“Many of our leaders are being picked up, arrested, abducted,” David Lewis Rubongoya, secretary-general of Wine’s party, told AFP.
Amnesty International says roughly 400 people have been arrested for supporting Wine’s National Unity Platform in recent months.
The only other significant opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, remains behind bars on treason charges after being kidnapped in Kenya last year.
