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General Muhoozi takes charge of the post poll crackdown

As a dispute rages over the election results, police have attacked the wife of opposition candidate Bobi Wine

At the centre of President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’s campaign against opposition activists ahead of the 15 January general election, Museveni’s son, Defence Forces chief General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, is leading the post-election crackdown on dissenters (AC Vol 67 No 1, Museveni hopes black gold will buy off dissent).

In a series of late-night posts on social media on 22 and 23 January, Gen Kainerugaba said that state authorities had detained 2,000 opposition supporters and killed 30, accusing them of being ‘terrorists’.

In an earlier social media post, subsequently deleted, Kainerugaba had threatened to torture and kill the opposition National Unity Platform leader Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine, who has been on the run since the election. Gen. Kaineruguba’s latest threat is slightly more legalistic but with the same goal: he has given Wine 48 hours to surrender to the police. ‘If he doesn’t we will treat him as an outlaw/rebel and handle him accordingly.’

On 24 January, Wine said his wife, Barbara Kyagulanyi had been taken to hospital after soldiers invaded their family home, started to strangle her and strip off her clothes to force her to unlock a phone with its key contact information. He added that his house was ‘still under siege’ and that three of his party’s four Deputy Presidents: Lina Zedriga Waru, Jolly Jacklyn Tukamushaba and Muwanga Kivumbi were either missing or, in Kivumbi’s case, detained by the government. Kivumbi is accused of leading an attack on a police station and will be arraigned in court ‘in due course’, according to the police force.

Gen Kainerugaba’s suppression of opposition parties during the election period is being seen part of his preparation to succeed his father who, at 81, is said to be unlikely to contest another election.

While the focus in Kampala has been focused on the crackdown against the NUP, Robert Kasibante, the presidential candidate of the National Peasants’ Party, has filed a petition to the Supreme Court challenging Museveni’s election. A former candidate for Museveni’s National Resistance Movement in 2021, Kasibante, who obtained a mere 0.3% of the vote, cited electoral irregularities and violence in his petition.

Museveni was declared the winner with 72% of the vote to Wine’s 25% on a 52% turnout, numbers which have been described as ‘statistically impossible’ in an assessment by the Kenya Human Rights Commission published on 19 January (AC Vol 67 No 2, How Museveni won in Buganda).

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