By Frank Kamuntu
After a bloody by-election marred by daylight vote rigging and ballot stuffing, National Resistance Movement (NRM)’s Ms. Mary Akol has been declared as the new Bukedea District LCV.
In these elections, journalists were beaten by armed men in plain clothes, their cameras broken before they were confiscated as a measure of preventing ”dirty electoral games” from being exposed to the public.
Later in the deep night, Joel Mugyenyi, the Bukedea District returning officer declared Akol as the winner with 79692 votes against her rivals Lokwiski Tychicus Ebukalin who garnered 4941 votes while Sam Oita Odeke got 2343 votes.
Mr Ebukalin was an independent candidate while Mr Odeke was on the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) ticket but decided to withdraw from the race a few hours after the commencement of the voting exercise, citing fraud.
Akol will now be replacing Moses Olemukan who succumbed to cancer last year.
Olemukan died at a time when he was serving his second term as the Bukedea LCV Chairperson, he had previously served as the LC3 chairperson of the same district.
In the 2016 election, he contested for the LC5 seat, where he defeated the incumbent, Wilberforce Tukei.
In the 2021 election, after losing in the NRM primaries, Olemukan ran as an independent and secured victory for a second successive term at the helm of the district.
