Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine said he directed his lawyers to withdraw a case he had filed challenging last month's election won by President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.
President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has been in power for 35 years.
Robert Kyagulanyi and his allies were claiming that the nationwide 14 January vote was plagued with ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. Activists pointed out anomalies, like 409 polling stations where everyone who was registered voted.
The electoral commission declared Museveni the winner with 58.6% of the vote compared to Kyagulanyi’s 34.8%, and the oppositionist accused the Supreme Court’s judges of “unprecedented bias, partiality and double standards.”
Claiming that the Supreme Court was in Museveni’s pocket, Kyagulanyi said: “We are taking the case to the Court of the People”.
Kyagulanyi’s lawyers were a day late in filing affidavits in support of his case, so the court rejected them. That – and the fact that judges refused to recuse themselves due to their ties to the ruling National Resistance Movement – led him to judge that the court was unlikely to give him the hearing he felt he deserved.
Kyagulanyi explained his original reasoning: “But, again, there was also another school of thought, which we agreed with, that much as the judiciary has been reduced to a mockery, it’s an institution that we believe in while we might not believe in the people that are superintending over it.”
The NUP was divided about whether to go the legal route in the first place, with many arguing that the courts would never overturn a Museveni victory.
Debates are ongoing about the way forward.
