Former FDC Presidential candidate Col Dr Kizza Besigye has acknowledged holding talks at a personal level with President Yoweri Museveni over matters of national interest are eminent.’
Dr Besigye has stood for president four times, three of them on FDC ticket, and the Supreme Court confirmed irregularities in the 2001 and 2006 elections but decided that the anomalies did not affect the final outcome in a “substantial manner” to warrant annulment of the results.
After losing last year’s vote, which he claimed to have won by 52 per cent, Dr Besigye began what he baptised a “defiance campaign”, leading to repeated collisions with police that had placed him under virtual house arrest on the voting day, February 18, 2016.
On Tuesday while speaking at a workshop for Forum for Democratic Change party members in Soroti District, Dr Besigye said that an agreement had been reached to have an audit of the 2016 presidential elections results.
Besigye said: “Now we have all agreed that we can have a dialogue on the audit of the election so we can conclude the matter. That is the dialogue you have been hearing of ..”
He added,”The only dialogue is how he (Museveni) leaves not how to stay.”
But Uganda Media Centre executive director and government spokesperson Ofwono Opondo on Wednesday attacked the four-time presidential election loser saying; “That the President approached Dr Besigye for talks is ridiculous and laughable because Museveni has just been elected by a popular mandate of 62.6 percent. Besigye has had twelve months to publish details of his winning but hasn’t done so before any credible and transparent platform including free media.”
He added, “Those are his (Besigye) false creations and we challenge him to go public on who actually approached him.”
President Museveni and Dr Besigye have, since falling out in 1999, only publicly met twice during the Pope’s visit in November 2015 and again during a presidential debate for the February 2016 election.
Daily Monitor reported last week that the Swedish Government has confirmed that it has been approached and, has accepted, to mediate planned talks between the two principles.
The latest planned talks, however, are being convened as one between the two former presidential candidates and main political leaders in the country, and neither broadly as between the Opposition and National Resistance Movement (NRM) party nor a national dialogue.
Conveners hope a consensus between President Museveni and Dr Besigye, the two politicians with the largest followings in the country, will increase the prospects of a wider and an all-inclusive national dialogue.
It is also alleged that the President and former premier and presidential candidate, Amama Mbabazi, were in preliminary talks for a reunion.
