20110217
Xinhua
KAMPALA, Feb. 17 (Xinhua) -- Uganda will on Friday hold presidential and parliamentary elections in which a total of eight candidates are vying for the country's presidency.

Kizza Besigye is the main opposition presidential candidate, running against incumbent President Yoweri Museveni who is a candidate from the ruling party.

Although Besigye is running on the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) ticket, he is also representing a loose coalition of four opposition political parties under the umbrella Inter-Party Cooperation.

Besigye was born on April 22, 1956 in the western Ugandan district of Rukungiri. During his primary school, he lost both his parents.

After obtaining a degree in human medicine in 1980 at Makerere University in Uganda, he joined politics as a member of the Uganda Patriotic Movement, an opposition political party which was headed by Museveni then.

According to his website www.kizzabesigye.org, he was arrested for his political activities but later escaped from prison and fled to neighboring Kenya where he practiced medicine for a short while.

While in Kenya, in 1982 he joined the rebel National Resistance Movement/Army led by Museveni who declared war against the Ugandan government led by Milton Obote who he accused of stealing the 1980 general elections.

While in the bush, Besigye served as a personal physician to Museveni who later won the rebellion in January 1986.

Since then until 1999 Besigye rose through different military and government ranks including becoming a minister.

In 1999 he fell out of the government after he wrote a critical document entitled "An Insider's View of How the NRM Lost the Broad Base".

He was dragged to a military court because serving military officers are not supposed to publicly express their views.

The charges were later dropped after elders from his home area brokered a deal with the government.

On October 20, 2000, at the rank of Colonel, Besigye retired from the army and returned to civilian life. A week later he announced that he would run against Museveni in the 2001 elections. He lost the election.

In March 2001, Besigye petitioned the Supreme Court to nullify the election results. The judges ruled that although there had been cheating and widespread irregularities, the election results could not be annulled.

After the elections, Besigye fled to exile after being questioned by police over allegations that he was behind a shadowy rebel group, People's Redemption Army (PRA), which was allegedly based in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

He returned from South Africa in October 2005 to contest again for the country's presidency in 2006.

He was arrested and charged with treason for his alleged links to the PRA and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army which was then fighting in the northern part of the country.

The High Court released him on bail just in time for him to contest in the 2006 presidential elections, the country's first multiparty elections after multiparty politics was banned in 1980.

Running on the newly created FDC, Besigye again faced Museveni who was running under the National Resistance Movement party.

Besigye again lost the elections to Museveni attributing the loss to alleged vote rigging.

Last year, the court dismissed treason charges against Besigye and his co-accused.

In the Friday elections, Besigye predicts that this time round he will win by 60 percent if the elections are free and fair.

However, different opinion polls have ranked him second after Museveni.