Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has been declared the winner of the country’s presidential election, securing a seventh term in office with 71.65 percent of the vote, according to official results announced on Saturday. The outcome extends Museveni’s rule to more than four decades, following a tightly watched contest marked by political tension and allegations of irregularities.
Museveni’s main challenger, musician-turned-politician Robert Kyagulanyi, widely known as Bobi Wine, garnered 24.72 percent of the vote. Kyagulanyi, who has positioned himself as the face of generational change, is widely expected to reject the results. He has already condemned the electoral process as fundamentally flawed, citing an internet shutdown, heavy military deployments, and alleged abductions of his polling agents during the vote.
The election has also drawn scrutiny over technical failures that disrupted voting on polling day. Biometric voter identification machines malfunctioned in several areas on Thursday, leading to significant delays, particularly in urban centres such as Kampala, which are considered opposition strongholds.
Following the breakdown of the biometric systems, electoral officials reverted to manual voter registers—a move that alarmed pro-democracy activists who have long advocated for biometric verification as a safeguard against electoral fraud. The failure of the machines is expected to feature prominently in any legal challenges to the declared results.
While the government maintains that the election was conducted in line with the law, critics argue that the combination of technical failures, security deployments, and communication restrictions undermined the credibility of the process. As tensions persist, attention is now likely to shift to potential court challenges and the broader implications for Uganda’s democratic trajectory under Museveni’s continued leadership.
