Going to court is a waste of time – FDC

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Going to court is a waste of time - FDC
Going to court is a waste of time - FDC

Africa-PressUganda. Way forward. “FDC is going to come back and issue a statement in two weeks after adequate consultation about our next steps. All I can promise Mr Museveni is that the next five years are not going to be five years of him resting. We are going to engage him using all forms that are available to us in order to return the power of the Uganda people to the citizens of this country,” Mr Patrick Oboi Amuriat, FDC president

The Opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) party’s presidential candidate, Mr Patrick Oboi Amuriat, has said they will not challenge the presidential elections results in court.Out of the 11 candidates that contested for the presidency on January 14, Mr Amuriat garnered 3.24 per cent thus placing him in the third position.

Mr Museveni of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) was declared winner with 5,851,037 votes while National Unity Platform’s (NUP) Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, alias Bobi Wine, got 3,475,298 votes.The FDC party has since rejected the results but declined to seek court redress, saying it would be ‘a waste of time’.Addressing journalists at the party headquarters in Najjanankumbi yesterday, Mr Amuriat said the FDC does not accept the results.

Rejects results

“As the FDC, we want to reject this election results with the contempt that it deserves. These are results that will not occupy any space in our minds or any space in our shelves. I feel totally dissatisfied with what took place,” Mr Amuriat said.

“In rejecting the election results, somebody may say that you seem to have the evidence, why don’t you go to court? To me that is laughable. We can never go to a Museveni-ordained and supervised court. We will never subject ourselves going on our knees before an election thief because he is the one who is going to determine what happens in the courts,” he added.The FDC promised to go to what they called ‘courts of public opinion’ and also engage other party leaders to inform the next course of action in relation to the results that were released.

“We will be going to the court of public opinion; the owners of the votes whose powers that [Justice Simon] Byabakama was used to take away,” Mr Amuriat said.He did not specify what the courts of public opinion entailed.Mr Amuriat urged colleagues in the Opposition not to go court, claiming they would not yield to their expectations.At the weekend, Bobi Wine said he will go to court to contest the presidential election results.

“We have said it before that we have all options on table including the legal option. We intend to go to local and international courts of law to challenge this election which was filled with irregularities,” Bobi Wine said.Mr Amuriat also promised to ‘audit’ all media houses to establish those that allegedly maligned the image of the FDC during the campaign period.“We are going to examine what every media house did and did not do. It is not upon me to say this, [but] may be this is the last time they are coming here. This decision is going to be taken by the internal institutions of the party,” he said.

“I came to understand that some media houses were for hire to go against us. To report favourably for the other candidates and where they reported about us, they distorted information in order to falsify what was obvious about us,” he added.

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