No such title has been bestowed on Kizza Besigye by Guinness World Records
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on January 24, 2020 at 17:07
- 3 min read
- By Mary KULUNDU, AFP Kenya
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Besigye has dominated opposition politics for two decades with his Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) party and unsuccessfully challenged Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni four times.
His many arrests over the years have repeatedly sparked online claims bestowing him with the dubious record title.
NBS TV, a Ugandan television station, shared the latest claim on January 22, 2020 on its Facebook page, which has more than one million followers.
“BREAKING: Dr Kizza Besigye has been recognized by the Guinness World Book of Records as the most arrested man in the world. The Guinness World Book of Records mentioned that Besigye was arrested 50 times as per Monday, 20th January 2020,” reads the post, which has since been deleted.
A similar post was shared here on The Investigator, another Ugandan Facebook page with more than 100,000 followers.
An article by Opera News, archived here, makes the same allegations and has had more than 2,000 online interactions, according to social media analytics tool CrowdTangle.
It was shared on this Twitter account belonging to a Ugandan journalist, who has nearly 400,000 followers.
The claim was also picked up by Citizen TV, a local television station in Kenya. The video, titled "Kizza Besigye enters the Guinness Book of World Records as ‘the most arrested man'", received more than 3,000 views on its YouTube channel before it was pulled down.
Other posts sharing the claim can be found here, here, here and here.
The tale of the dubious record is not new: in 2016, online news platform Ventures Africa published this article under the headline “Museveni’s long-time rival features in Guinness World Book of Records, all thanks to him”.
The story is almost identical to the recent one published by Opera News.
Is the claim valid?
Guinness World Records spokeswoman Jessica Spillane told AFP the claim was “not true” and that Besigye had "not been recognised for such a title”.
"Although it [the category] is not actively open for applications and we do not encourage people to strive to break the record, the closest category we have is ‘Most arrests’, held by Tommy Johns of Brisbane, Australia, who by 1988 had been arrested almost 3,000 times for being drunk and disorderly in a public place," she said in an email.
Ronald Muhinda, the spokesman of Besigye's FDC party, told AFP there were no official records of the number of times the veteran opposition politician had been in police custody.
“I don’t think there are any official records of that [the number of times Besigye has been arrested]. I don’t think that even he himself can trace the number of times he has been arrested,” Muhinda told AFP on the phone.
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