President Yoweri Museveni, at the helm of the east African country since 1986, is seeking re-election but faces a fierce challenge from his two-time opponent, Besigye, who is the flag bearer on an Inter-Party Cooperation coalition ticket.

The government has said the Electoral Commission (EC) is the only constitutionally-mandated body allowed to declare election results, and a parallel vote count would not be tolerated.

The opposition plans to have an agent at each polling station across the country, who will send results to a tallying center by telephone.

Uganda’s opposition coalition has urged Museveni to sack the current senior leadership of the EC and appoint impartial commissioners, but Museveni has resisted saying he had faith in the electoral body’s integrity and capability.

Delivering its verdict in 2001 and 2006 petitions in which Besigye challenged Museveni’s victory on grounds it was secured through massive rigging and intimidation, Uganda’s supreme court said the EC had failed to conduct both polls according to the law and that it had exhibited gross partiality.

Besigye said his party, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), plans to announce results of the February polls ahead of the EC, which he described as prejudiced and incompetent.

“We are making arrangements to electronically collect and collate the election results immediately the counting of votes takes place,” Uganda’s Daily Monitor newspaper on Thursday quoted Besigye as saying to an audience of Ugandans in London.

“That way, we shall be able to announce the precise outcome of the elections ahead of the EC. We shall be doing this with or without the electoral reforms.”

Tamale Mirundi, Museveni’s spokesman, told Reuters such an act would never be tolerated.

“Besigye is a mad man and I think what he said is simply a meaningless political statement. If he wants to announce his own results then he can dream even bigger; let him as well go ahead and organize his own national election and declare himself winner and become Uganda’s president,” Mirundi said.

In neighboring Kenya, the electoral authority used electronic counting during a referendum on a new constitution in August, which observers hailed as more transparent than the country’s 2007 national election. During the election, claims the poll was rigged triggered violence after the opposition’s vote tally and the electoral authority’s failed to match.

Museveni, who is seeking to extend his rule to 30 years with another five-year term next year, has seen much of the praise by the West during the earlier part of his rule evaporate, with critics now accusing him of turning despotic, corrupt and seeking to install his son as successor.

The east African country is eying a slot in the top-50 world crude producers after it struck vast deposits of hydrocarbons in the Albertine Rift basin along its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006.