The Electoral Commission (EC) yesterday belatedly cleared the leader of Uganda’s largest opposition party in Parliament, Mr Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentemu, better known by his stage name of Bobi Wine, to run for president in the 2026 race.
Bobi Wine’s certificate of verification of supporters forms for aspiring presidential candidates from the EC was dated Friday, September 19, but was only released on Monday, even when the EC worked across the weekend, and had curiously sent Bobi Wine back to collect more signatures. The EC claimed Bobi Wine had not secured enough signatures to second him to run for president.
But Bobi Wine, writing on his verified microblogging site X, formerly twitter, faulted the EE for foul play. “As predicted by many Ugandans, the ridiculous claims about us not submitting enough signatures was intended to push our date of nomination. The cowardly regime did not want us to be nominated on the same day as [President] Museveni!”
He added: “Well, they just gave us our certificate confirming that we have submitted the signatures but pushed our nomination from Tuesday 23rd to Wednesday 24th September at 2:00pm! This is despite the fact that we had written to them booking Tuesday, 10:00am! Pushing it to 2:00pm is clearly intended to frustrate our plans to have two rallies because the first one was meant to begin at midday.
“Since we know how they normally behave, as soon as they started those stories, we moved ahead of them and booked both Katwe Grounds and Kaala Playground (Nateete) for both dates! Nothing will stop the revolutionary cause!”
Bobi Wine ended with the hashtag: #FreeUganda #ANewUgandaNow.
Mr Museveni, who won the violent 2021 election with 6,042,898 votes against Bobi Wine’s 3,631,437, is running for a seventh elective five-year term in office, having shot his way to power following a bloody five-year guerilla war, largely fought in Central Uganda.
He has now kept his vise-like grip on power for the last 39 years uninterrupted.
The two-day nomination exercise starts tomorrow and ends on Wednesday.
By Monday afternoon, only three of the 38 presidential aspirants who had picked up and returned copies of nomination forms and supporter signature forms, had been cleared by the EC and given the nod to pay the required Shs20 million nomination fee.
