A week after Uganda's incumbent President Yoweri Museveni was re-elected for a seventh term, opposition leader Bobi Wine says he has evidence the polls were rigged. In an interview with RFI, he calls for peaceful protests - and a firmer stance from the international community.
Wine, head of the opposition National Unity Platform (NUP), officially won 25 percent of the vote compared to 72 percent for Museveni. He rejects the results, which extend the president's four decades in power by another five years. Wine says he's been forced to go into hiding after accusing the authorities of fraud.
RFI: How are you? Are you safe?
Bobi Wine: I need to be congratulated for being alive up to today. I'm not safe because I am being pursued by the military for no crime whatsoever. I am in hiding.
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My wife and my family are not safe. They are surrounded by the military. They cannot go out and nobody can go in. They are hungry and even food that is being delivered to them is being rejected.
RFI: What's the atmosphere like in Uganda since the presidential election on 15 January?
BW: Our people are being massacred. There is a silent massacre that is going on. General Museveni's son came out two days ago and regretted for killing only 22 of us, he wanted to kill more. We have reports of more than 100 people that have been killed across the country.
People are being picked up for no crime whatsoever. Three of my deputy presidents have been detained. Two of them are women, but I don't know where they are. They were picked up on the eve of election day, and it's now been seven days. Nobody knows where these two women are.
Also, my deputy president in charge of Buganda Region in central Uganda was picked up today [Thursday]. And this follows what happened a week ago when 10 people were shot and killed inside his house.
RFI: You're referring to your deputy Mohamed Kivumbi. He says that 10 of your supporters were killed at his home on polling day as they waited for parliamentary election results. President Museveni has described the NUP as "terrorists" following the episode. What's your reaction to his accusations and what's your account of what happened that day?
BW: Out of these 10 people, eight were women. Their duty was to fill in forms and to receive results and DR forms [declaring results] that were coming from different polling stations. They were inside a politician's house on election day, and that is where police found them and shot them dead.
RFI: You claim there was fraud. What proof do you have?
BW: We have videos of police officers, of the military and of Electoral Commission officials themselves pre-ticking ballots in favour of General Museveni. We have dozens of such videos.
But then, even with the pre-ticking and ballot stuffing, we still had resoundingly defeated Museveni. He and the Electoral Commission decided that they are not going to read any results from the DR forms, they just fabricated their percentages and numbers and read them out without any evidence. We have challenged them to upload the DR forms and our district tally sheets, but they failed because they know they don't have that evidence.
'He represents a population desperate for change', Bobi Wine's lawyer tells RFI
RFI: Have you filed an official complaint to contest the results?
BW: No. We don't trust the judicial system in Uganda. It's skewed and bent towards Museveni. Right now, political prisoners don't get given bail. That's the official policy of the Ugandan judiciary. Putting that aside, numerous judgments and decisions have been made and orders given by the Supreme Court of Uganda, but the military simply trashes them.
So our hope is not in the courts of law in Uganda. Our hope is in the people of Uganda to rise to the occasion and dismiss this nonsense.
RFI: What's your next step? Is running for a third time in 2031 conceivable?
BW: We are calling for civil disobedience, we are calling for non-violent protest against the regime. And we are calling for all manner of creative ways to protest until this regime feels the pressure of the people.
We don't even look at next year, we look at freeing ourselves as soon as possible, because the leadership that is forced itself upon us is not our choice, and therefore we have to free ourselves and return democracy.
RFI: What's your message to francophone African countries where opposition parties have also denounced a drift towards authoritarianism?
BW: People living in other dictatorships like Togo, like Cameroon, should pay attention to what's happening in Uganda because we are suffering in the same way and we can take lessons from each other and also support each other by amplifying each other's voices.
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RFI: What do you want from the international community?
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BW: I would like to call upon the international community to hold the Ugandan regime responsible. We thank the international community very much. I want them to know that we appreciate the little that they do to support democracy and human rights development in Africa. But we want them to understand that what brings us together are the values that we all profess - democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
The standard of democracy in Africa should be the same standard of democracy in Europe and South America. For the international community to be castigating dictators like [Alexander] Lukashenko of Belarus and [Nicolas] Maduro of Venezuela while hobnobbing, hugging and kissing dictators in Africa is nothing short of racism.
We want to be treated with the same standard of human rights and the same standard of democracy. While the internet gets switched off during elections, while citizens get shot and killed during elections, we see presidents of the international community continue to do business and cooperate with African dictators as if they are legitimate leaders. We want a revisit on that so that we can feel like we are equal partners.
This interview, conducted by RFI's Christina Okello, has been lightly edited for clarity.
