The turmoil according to party officials, also scared away those who would have contested on the party ticket. Before the election, of the 37 MPs the party has in the 10th parliament, only 22 contested again on the party ticket. According to Patrick Amuriat Oboi, the party president who was also its flagbearer in the presidential election, those who wanted to kill FDC were unsuccessful. Amuriat who was elected party president in 2017, said he was happy that the party proved a hard nut to crack by its distractors.
Amuriat explains that he got into direct confrontations with security agencies—mainly police and the army—on several occasion. For instance, he says he was arrested 13 times, confined in different places, taken to court three times.
“We have a principle called "Prior full and informed consent", where counsel has to tell everything to his client about what he should expect from court. I have a feeling that if Kyagulanyi was properly briefed on the nature of our court, probably he wouldn’t have gone to court in the first place,” Ssemakadde said.
Unlike previous elections where Museveni won in both districts, he lost to the National Unity Platform (NUP) candidate Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu also known as Bobi Wine. Bobi Wine won Buvuma district with 64 per cent of the total votes cast while Museveni scored 32 per cent, a drop from the 57 per cent score against Kiiza Besigye in 2016.
The said polling stations account for 22,103 registered voters and are part of the 83 stations across the country whose results were nullified by the Electoral Commission. The highest number of these were from Kawempe North.
Godfrey Kiwuuwa, the chairperson of Kitaka cell in Nyendo ward, a registered voter at Market Triangle disputes polls results on the tally sheet, indicating that figures from his polling station were exchanged during the final tallying process hence giving President Museveni a false win.
In the petition which seeks to invalidate the declaration of Museveni as president-elect, Kyagulanyi says that his actions greatly intimidated, terrified and horrified his electorate thereby affecting the percentage of voter turnout.
