Uganda’s continued shutdown of Facebook hurting development – report

The Government of Uganda’s continued shutdown of Facebook has limited peoples’ access to information hence denying them to contribute to development planning, a new report indicates.

According to the 26th Annual Report of the State of Human Rights and Freedoms in Uganda for 2023 released on Thursday in Kampala, more than 3 million Ugandan users have been affected.

 “For more than a year now, Facebook, with more than 3,328,000 million local subscribers, has been blocked,” the report stated in part.

Uganda shut down Facebook in the country ahead of the 2021 General Election, with President Museveni saying the social media platform refused to heed the appeals by his government to unblock his supporters’ social media pages. 

“Why would anybody do that? When I heard about that, I told our people to warn them…That social channel you are talking about, if it’s operating in Uganda, it should be used equitably by everybody who wants to use it. If you want to take sides against the NRM, then that group will not operate in Uganda. Uganda is ours, it’s not anybody’s…And I am sure government has closed the social media.

There is no way anybody can come [here] and play around with our country and decide who is good [and] who is bad. I’m therefore very sorry about the inconvenience to those who have been using this channel,” he said then.

Most Ugandans are using Virtual Private Networks (VPN) to access Facebook.

Early in 2024, Dr Chris Baryomunsi, the Information minister, assured Ugandans that the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) was in talks with Facebook on how they can resume operations in the country.

 “Facebook has been closed for a while although many people can still access it through VPN which becomes costly to the users,” he said.