Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni holds a solid lead over opposition challenger Kizza Besigye in the country’s landmark elections, the first official results showed on Friday.
Provisional returns gave Museveni almost 60% of the vote compared with 37% for his main rival, Besigye, with only a fraction of the vote counted in the East African nation’s first multiparty polls since 1980.
With results in from about 8% of the nearly 20 000 polling stations around the country, Museveni had won 313 432 votes, or 59,59%, of votes cast. Besigye had 195 948, or 37,25, the Electoral Commission said.
Although the results appear to show the president on track to extend his 20-year hold on power with a new five-year mandate, commission chairperson Badru Kiggundu said the returns were still very partial and could change.
Three other presidential candidates received less than 2% of the vote each, he said.
The partial results were released as the two sides traded accusations about the conduct of Thursday’s polls in which millions turned out to vote peacefully.
Besigye’s Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) is complaining of widespread irregularities, while Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) has pronounced the vote ”free and fair” and branded the opposition ”bad losers”.
A candidate needs more than 50% of the vote to avoid a run-off with the next highest finisher. The FDC has insisted Besigye had enough support to force Museveni into a second round.
LRA
Meanwhile, deadly raids by Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels have forced scores of villagers in southern Sudan to flee their homes to spend nights in the bush fearing abductions and killings, a German humanitarian group said on Friday.
The insurgents have been carrying out raids in the vast southern Sudan belt called the ”LRA Triangle”, which lies between Rasola town near the Democratic Republic of Congo border, the region’s capital, Juba, and Lokukei town near the Ugandan border.
”The threat imposed by the LRA forces the local population to leave the village during the night to hide in the bush,” said Klaus Stieglitz, the deputy director of Sign of Hope.
Last week, LRA fighters attacked villages around Rajef, 12km south of Juba, and brutally hacked to death three people — including a 70-year-old man — and looted cassava farmland, the group said.
”It is a shame that these people nearly feel like animals. They are, in fact, deprived of their human dignity,” he said after touring villagers around Rajef and Nimule outposts in southern Sudan, where the group delivered humanitarian support.
In areas outlying Nimule, about 150km south-east of Juba, the insurgents have abducted at least 92 people, including children, and villagers believe that most of them are still held by the ruthless insurgents, they said.
”The villagers told us they can identify the attackers as the LRA because of the ethnic Acholi accent in their language,” Stieglitz told a press conference in Nairobi.
”These LRA activities pose the most difficult hardship on people who are already struggling to rebuild their lives after suffering from war and displacement,” he said, adding that the raids have disrupted the economic activities.
Uganda
In Uganda, the LRA fighters have forced several thousands of so-called ”night commuters” in the country’s north to flee their home villages each night to relative safety of the streets in larger towns, notably Gulu.
The Ugandan army has been pursuing LRA rebels inside Sudan since 2002, when Khartoum, long accused of harbouring and arming the rebels, allowed Ugandan forces to conduct seek-and-destroy operations against them in southern Sudan areas.
But the army has failed to vanquish the insurgents, who took over the leadership of northern Uganda’s rebellion in 1988 — two years into a conflict fuelled by perceived economic marginalisation of the region by Kampala.
The group distinguishes itself by its brutality and its total absence of a public political face, a characteristic making negotiating an end to the war all but impossible. — Sapa-AFP