Uganda’s elections came to an end on 15th January after a turbulent day of voting during which the internet was shut down, and there were lengthy delays due to technical faults as President Yoweri Museveni tries to prolong his 40 years in office.

Broadly expected to be elected to a seventh term in office by constitutional means, Museveni, an 81-year-old, assumed power back in 1986, leading a rebel army and commanding the state apparatus and security agencies.

However, in an opposition stronghold, Kampala stadium, there were deafening shouts as people gathered to watch the vote counting and returning officers announce ballots in favor of the lead challenger, singer-turned-politician Bobi Wine.

The 43-year-old identifies himself as the ghetto president in the slums of the city he was brought up in, yet has been viciously suppressed in his campaign by rights groups.

It was required to submit official results within 48 hours.

Wine alleged that the government had engaged in mass ballot-stuffing as well as arresting several of his party officials in the guise of an internet blackout that the government was practicing this week.

Voting was also postponed in most of the polling stations across the country by several hours as the ballot boxes had taken longer than usual to deliver; the biometric machines, which could identify the voters, were having breakdowns, and some would attribute this to the blockage of the internet.

Wine said that he voted in the dark.

He said, “this was done so as to make it easy to rig the regime, which was intended. We would urge the Ugandan people to fight back.”

But voting was carried on peaceably. A spokesperson of the Ugandan Red Cross, which was on the ground in the country before the polls, said that they had not received substantive reports of violence.

Police and army presence was heavy all day long, and the authorities were keen not to allow anti-government protests, as were witnessed in neighbouring Kenya and Tanzania in recent months.

Even Museveni himself admitted that he had his problems with the voting machines and assured that he would look into the matter.

“I put my right… thumbprint. The machine did not accept it. I inserted my left, and it did not take it, and it did not take it, and finally, he was able to vote with the help of a scan of his face by the machine,” he said to journalists.

‘Peace and security’

Similar to the 2021 campaign by Wine, hundreds of his supporters were arrested before the vote. He used to wear a flak jacket during rallies, and he termed the election a war and Museveni a military dictator.

The suspension of 10 NGOs, one of which is an election monitor, this week has been condemned by the Human Rights Watch.

According to the government, the internet shutdown was necessary to stop the circulation of misinformation and encourage violence. The United Nations termed it as being of great concern.

The other significant opposition figure, Kizza Besigye, who has contested against Museveni on four occasions, was kidnapped in Kenya in 2024 and returned to a military court in Uganda to be put on trial on the charges of treason, still pending.

Museveni is still praised by many Ugandans as the one who put an end to the post-independence breakdown of the country and managed to achieve an impressive economic growth, though much of it was wasted on a series of massive corruption scandals.

“The country is very good in terms of peace and security. The party is very organised, and I am waiting to vote in Kampala,” Angee Abraham Lincoln, 42, a supporter of Museveni.

Museveni has been allowed a free pass since he lured Western countries to accept their demands of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and became a useful tool in the US-led war on terror in the 2000s, and particularly, as a troop donor in Somalia.

“When the president eventually cast his ballot,” he said that he was “voting for any person who believed in Uganda… who believed in Africa.”