MASAAKA, Uganda — The elected Woman Member of Parliament for Masaka City and her legal team withdrew from a court-ordered vote recount Friday, calling the process illegal.
The walkout occurred after Masaka Chief Magistrate Albert Asiimwe directed the recount to proceed. He issued the order following an application by Justine Nameere, the National Resistance Movement party candidate who finished second in the race.
The Masaka Chief Magistrate proceeded to start a process of sorting all the ballot boxes in the Electoral Commission stores, to prepare for a recount.
However, Nalubowa, the National Unity Platform-NUP candidate, and her lawyers, Samuel Muyizzi and Hebert Zikusooka, walked out of the premature exercise in protest of the Magistrate’s conduct.
Muyizzi blamed the Chief Magistrate for defying the law when he insisted on proceeding with the recount, despite identifying one of the ballot boxes already tampered with after its seal was broken.
During the sorting of ballot boxes, it was established that one out of the 314 ballot boxes used had its seal broken.
The trial magistrate ruled that the one ballot with a broken seal was an ineligible percentage to abort the exercise.
”Since the vast majority of the ballot boxes have been found still unopened, the process of recount should proceed and only exclude the box whose seal was broken,” he ruled.
But his decision did not go down well with Samuel Muyizzi and Nalubowa, who furiously walked away from the court process in protest.
They detested the fact that the decision of the Chief Magistrate was a deliberate scheme of bending the laws in favour of the NRM.
Nalubowa argued that in his ruling that granted the application, the Chief Magistrate held that the exercise for recount would not proceed if any of the boxes were found tampered with.
Samuel Muyizzi, the head of Nalubowa’s legal team, argued that he could not continue associating with what he described as illegality.
He says they have chosen to file an application for Judicial review before the High Court, to rescind the decision of the Chief Magistrate.
Nameere insists that she was denied her victory, alleging that the Returning Officer maliciously omitted the tallying of results from polling stations where she won overwhelmingly.
Earlier in the day, the court was treated to chaos after the recount was granted, when NRM supporters mobbed up lawyers of the NUP candidate, blaming them of attempting to block the recount by raising “unwanted legal arguments”.
