FALSE: Bobi Wine did not win Uganda’s presidential election with 54.19% of the votes
Uganda’s Electoral Commission declared President Museveni the winner of the election with 58.38 percent of votes cast.
A tweet claiming that former presidential candidate Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine, won the Uganda election is FALSE.
The tweet claims Bobi Wine beat then incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni, by clinching 54.19 percent of the vote in the presidential polls.
However, the Electoral Commission (EC), which is mandated with tallying and publishing poll results, announced that Bobi Wine got 35.08 percent of the vote against President Museveni’s 58.38 percent. Subsequently, the electoral body declared President Museveni winner of the presidential polls on January 16, 2021.
The election results were published on the EC’s official website and on the commission’s Twitter page on January 28, 2021.
On February 1, 2021, Bobi Wine filed a petition contesting the re-election of President Museveni, citing fraud and irregularities in the electoral process. He later withdrew his petition from the Supreme Court, citing judicial bias.
PesaCheck has looked into a tweet claiming that former presidential candidate, Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine, won the Ugandan election with 54.19 percent and finds it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Pius Enywaru and edited by chief copy editor Rose Lukalo. It was approved for publication by managing editor Enock Nyariki.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.
