Mounting fears that the opposition could reject the results of the election and plunge the country into chaos are based on the growing suspicion between Museveni and now his three-time challenger for the chair, Col. (RTD) Kizza Besigye.

After the previous two elections, in 2001 and 2006, Besigye challenged Museveni’s re-election in the Supreme Court. The court ruled in Museveni’s favour on both occasions, but it acknowledged that there were irregularities like falsification of results and intimidation of Besigye’s supporters.

These decisions were reached by majority decisions of 3:2 in 2001 and 4:3 in 2006. Majority of the Justices argued that the irregularities weren’t substantial enough to alter the final result. Besigye now says he can’t appeal to the same court in case the coming election is stolen.

“If the election is rigged again, I will not go back to court; the struggle is not mine alone. It belongs to all our supporters across the country. If our victory is stolen it is to the court of public opinion to which I will appeal,” Besigye stated in a written statement he delivered to members of the armed forces as they commemorated 30 years since the start of the armed rebellion that brought the current government to power on Feb. 6.

He says the ideals for which huge risks were taken have been forgotten by the ruling government and Uganda is still bedeviled by the same ills that sparked the bush war.
He appealed to the armed forces not “to dishonor the blood and memories of the 300,000 Ugandans who died in the resistance war (and) desist from being used by interested parties to frustrate the electoral process.”

He says there are some officers of the army who have remained loyal to the uniform, but some like the Chief of Defence Forces Gen. Aronda Nyakairima are biased to President Museveni.

Museveni marked 25 years on Jan. 26, having shot to power after a five-year bush war that was sparked off by accusations of vote rigging during the 1980 general elections.
But he has since come under criticism for vote rigging. Ballot box stuffing, falsification of election results, voter bribery, intimidation and disenfranchisement of voters are some of the things that have come to be associated with his reign.

Besigye is angry that his former colleague rejected all calls for electoral reforms in the run up to this election.

So intense were the calls for reforms that opposition groups threatened to boycott the election. Even America’s Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Africa, Johnny Carson, made a trip to Uganda to implore Museveni to agree to reforms to no avail. Last week, America’s Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg was in Kampala and met both opposition leaders and Museveni over the same issue.

Of the eight candidates in the race, only Museveni trusts the Electoral Commission, which other parties wanted to disband and replace it with one that represents the interest of all the parties since the country moved from no-party to a multiparty system in 2005.

Currently, all the commissioners are nominated by the President and vetted by a ruling party-dominated Parliamentary Appointments Committee.

Besigye has designed plans to tally his results and announce the “true” provisional results before the Electoral Commission announces the final results. But the President has warned that this could be a “short cut” to Luzira (the national prison) for Besigye.

Many Ugandans are drowned in prayer, hoping the post election violence that gripped following the botched 2007/8 elections in Kenya will spare them. Others have taken practical steps. Ismail Mulumba, a resident of a Kampala suburb, has stocked rations to sustain his family in case there is violence.