1 Apr 2025 | Africa, News and features, Uganda
In recent months, several young men and women in Uganda have been arrested and charged for views they expressed on TikTok.
In the East African country, the freedom of expression landscape has deteriorated to the extent that one cannot hold a placard and march anywhere in support of a cause or in protest against an injustice. You will be roughed up by the Uganda Police Force, bundled into a police van, locked up in a cell and charged with the colonial-era “common nuisance” offence that the government uses to crush demonstrations.
Consequently, people with critical views turn to social media platforms like TikTok and X. Facebook is not available in Uganda – it was banned in January 2021 after the platform pulled down hundreds of pages that were linked to the government and thought to be fake. Facebook said that it acted after an investigation showed the accounts were attempting to influence the January 2021 presidential elections in favour of the incumbent, Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda since January 1986.
But even on TikTok or X, which are still allowed in the country, there is the likelihood that you will be arrested for expressing views considered offensive (particularly towards members of the first family – the family of the president) or deemed hateful (usually to members of Museveni’s sub-tribe or tribe, Banyankole, who hold many top positions across multiple sectors in the country).
Those recently arrested and charged include 21-year-old David Ssengozi (alias Lucky Choice), 28-year-old Isaiah Ssekagiri and 19-year-old Julius Tayebwa, all charged in November 2024 with hate speech and spreading malicious information against the first family. They are now awaiting trial.
There are more, although reporting is sparse. Instead, TikTokers themselves cover each other’s cases. Agora Discourse, a platform holding the Ugandan authorities to account, gave Index a list of those who have been charged. They include 26-year-old Muganga Fred, 19-year-old Wasswa Noah (alias Sturbon Josh) and Passy Mbabazi, a member of the National Unity Platform (NUP), the leading opposition party in the country, all charged with hate speech against either Museveni, his family or party members.
Except for Mbabazi’s case, which is ongoing at Bushenyi Magistrate’s Court, Western Uganda, the rest of the cases are being tried at Entebbe Chief Magistrates’ Court in Central Uganda, under one magistrate, Stella Maris Amabilis, who has already found two TikTokers guilty as charged and sentenced them to jail terms.
One of these is 21-year-old Emmanuel Nabugodi, who received a 32-month sentence on 18 November 2024 for hate speech and spreading malicious information about President Museveni for a comedy video in which he held a mock trial of the long-ruling soldier and politician, whom he found guilty and sentenced to a public flogging.
The other is 24-year-old Edward Awebwa, who received a six-year jail term for demeaning President Museveni, his wife Janet Museveni and his son General Muhoozi Kainerugaba. These two convictions make Amabilis, the magistrate, predictable – it is likely that the rest of the TikTokers being tried by her will be found guilty as well.
At least three patterns arise from the above arrests and charges (and, in two occasions, prison sentences). First, Museveni and his family members are the offended parties – the untouchables against whom nobody dares raise a voice. This makes the charges politically motivated with their sole aim being to crush dissent.
Second, the commonly preferred charges are hate speech and spreading malicious information about the people in the ruling party, under the notorious Computer Misuse Act (as amended in 2022).
Finally, most of those being criminally prosecuted are young people, mainly in their twenties.
It is nothing new for critical voices posting online to suffer prosecution in Uganda. Take Stella Nyanzi, an academic, poet and politician, and Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, a novelist, memoirist and lawyer. The former was jailed in 2019 for 18 months for writing a poem on Facebook suggesting that Museveni should have died at childbirth to save Uganda from tyranny. The latter was kidnapped, detained and has described how he was tortured in December 2022, when he wrote on Twitter (now X) that Museveni’s son Kainerugaba was “obese” and a “curmudgeon” and that the Musevenis had “imposed enormous suffering on this country [Uganda]”.
These arrests and prosecutions usually target voices critical of the ruling party. The people who use their social media accounts to express views critical of opposition politicians do not face arrest or prosecution.
According to Godwin Toko, a lawyer and human rights activist, and a member of the Network of Public Interest Lawyers (NETPIL), the crackdown on TikTokers is meant to entrench a culture of silence, unaccountability and untouchability by instilling fear in Ugandans so that they do not participate in public debates that call for better governance.
“Generally, freedom of expression is the bedrock for other freedoms. Without it, other freedoms are hard to guarantee. This has greatly impacted our democracy as people aren’t able to hold leaders accountable,” Toko told Index, calling on Ugandans to “boldly, fearlessly and persistently hold their leaders accountable by using any means necessary to safeguard and further freedom of expression”.
Toko is one of the founding members of Agora, a digital public square spotlighting mismanagement of public resources, be it roads that are potholed, hospitals that are not adequately staffed and stocked, or public institutions, like Parliament, that are corrupt.
The platform was founded after it became impossible for Ugandans to hold peaceful protests after the Public Order Management Act came into force in 2013. The Uganda Police Force has been criticised for misinterpreting the law and shutting down any form of demonstration, as shown by how brutally they arrest anybody who attempts to hold a placard in support of a cause or in castigation of an injustice.
But members loyal to the ruling party are allowed to hold demonstrations of any kind, whenever they wish to. These double standards common among Uganda’s ruling elite are what make TikTokers and freedom of expression activists loud in their condemnation of Museveni, his family members, and his ardent lieutenants.
Unfortunately, this comes at a heavy cost – brutal arrests, drawn-out judicial trials and potentially long prison sentences – to which jailed TikTokers Nabugodi and Awebwa, among others, can attest.
28 Feb 2024 | Africa, News and features, Uganda
A prominent Ugandan LGBTQ+ activist Steven Kabuye, who nearly lost his life when he was attacked by unknown men in January this year, believes politicians and other leaders fomenting hate in his country against vulnerable communities must be put under targeted sanctions. As a result, Kabuye backs calls by LGBTQI+ campaigners in the United Kingdom to bar the Speaker of the Ugandan parliament, Anita Annet Among, from entering the country to attend celebrations around the Commonwealth.
Commonwealth Day will be celebrated on Monday 11 March with a series of events and activities that will include a contingent of speakers and presiding officers from the Commonwealth countries, while the 75th anniversary of the modern Commonwealth will be celebrated on 26 April. Kabuye told Index that Among must be barred from these events as she championed the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act last year, which has triggered a rise in attacks against LGBTQ+ persons. Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act imposes mandatory life imprisonment for consenting same-sex acts, and the death penalty for “serial offenders”. Anyone who rents property to persons who commit offences under the legislation faces up to seven years in jail.
Kabuye, the co-executive director and co-founder of Coloured Voices Media Foundation, a youth-led organisation that advocates for equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community, told Index that the environment he finds himself in after the passage of that law is so dangerous that he fears for his life. In January this year, he was hospitalised for three days in Uganda and two weeks outside the country after he was attacked by two men on a motorbike. He said a colleague who took him to hospital after the attack was arrested for assisting him.
“The attack was aimed at silencing me. What the attacker said while trying to swipe a knife to cut my neck and what transpired after the attack clearly shows that,” he said adding that the attacker said “Ffa Musiyazzi Gwe“, translated as “Die you homosexual”, to Kabuye.
He said he has received a lot of death threats, especially on his X account. “Someone could come and tell you, I know your address. We are coming any day, count yourself dead. Dead or soon dead, that’s how I can describe that environment,” he said.
Kabuye’s fears are not unfounded. In 2011, a Ugandan gay rights activist, David Kato, was beaten to death at his home outside Kampala. Before his death, Kato had brought an injunction against a local newspaper, Rolling Stone, which printed his name, photograph and address alongside those of dozens of others the paper claimed were gay or lesbian and called for them to be hanged.
Kabuye believes the architects of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act must be sanctioned, hence his support for the campaign both in Uganda and the UK for Among to be barred from entering the UK.
“Banning the speaker from the UK will send a clear message to any politician out there who is willing to support laws like the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023. You will be punished,” said Kabuye.
“We want all politicians, religious leaders, and other entities who supported the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 to be sanctioned individually.”
Samantha Ainembabazi from Kuchu Times, an online platform that gives a voice to LGBTQ+ people whose are otherwise censored in the mainstream media in Uganda, emphasised in a phone interview with Index the key role that Among played in passing Uganda’s draconian law. She added that the environment the Ugandan LGBTQ+ community lives in can be summarised by a report from late 2023 compiled by the Strategic Response Team, a coalition of Ugandan LGBTQ+ rights organisations, which showed how the controversial law has not only created a hostile environment for LGBTQ+ individuals but has also been used as a pretext to infringe upon a wide range of human rights.
“By the time of this report there had been 180 cases of evictions targeting LGBTQ+ individuals and families, 176 cases of torture, abuse, and degrading treatment inflicted upon LGBTIQ+ individuals. One-hundred-and-fifty-nine cases of violations and abuse of the right to equality and freedom from discrimination have been documented,” said Ainembabazi.
“LGBTIQ+ individuals in Uganda continue to face systemic discrimination and prejudice, which hinders their access to education, healthcare, employment and other essential services and 102 cases of mental health issues among this community highlight the psychological trauma endured due to discrimination, violence and social exclusion. These numbers have almost doubled since the last report.”
UK rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has since joined the campaign to bar the Uganda speaker. Tatchell wrote a letter to Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, saying Among is one of those who championed Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which he described as one of the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws.
“Among’s presence in the UK would send a terrible signal that Britain tolerates the extreme homophobia of those who advocate the killing of LGBT+ people. There should be no facilitation and collusion with a politician who has blood on her hands,” wrote Tatchell.
He said Hoyle should make representations to the UK home and foreign secretaries that the Ugandan Speaker of Parliament should be denied entry to the UK because she opposes the British values of respect and equality, and that her presence would not be conducive to public good, harmonious community relations and public order.
Such a move would certainly send a strong message and for people like Kabuye can’t come soon enough. For them every day brings with it new fears.
25 Oct 2021 | News and features, The climate crisis, Uganda, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
Uganda’s natural resources base, one of the richest and most diverse in Africa, continues to be degraded, jeopardising both individual livelihoods and the country’s economic development.
Evidence from the UN Environment Programme reveals that its forests, home to several endangered or soon-to-be extinct animal and plant species, are being mercilessly ravaged by poachers, illegal charcoal traders and loggers, and greedy investors.
Overfishing in the country’s lakes and rivers is rife. Its wetlands are being cleared for agricultural use and the rate of forest cover loss stands at 2.6 per cent annually, according to independent sources.
As part of efforts to ensure that the east African nation’s natural resources are effectively managed and protected, a group of environmental activists has gone to war to protect these natural wonders from bleeding further.
“Environmental activism in Uganda is not a safe identity – it’s a hostile and fragile environment,” William Amanzuru, team leader at Friends of Zoka, told Index.
“Activists are seen as fronting foreign views and opinions, enemies of the state and enemies of development.”
Amanzuru, who won the EU Human Rights Defenders Award in 2019, says environmental abuse in Uganda is highly militarised, so any intervention for nature conservation seems like a battlefield in a highly sophisticated war.
William Amanzuru, team leader at Friends of Zoka
“You directly deal with our finest military elite who run the show because of the huge profits gained from it,” he said. “We are always being followed by state and non-state actors and those involved in the depletion of natural resources like the Zoka Central Forest Reserve.”
Amanzuru said he had received threatening phone calls and had been intimidated by government and local police officials. “My phone is always tapped,” he added.
Anthony Masake, programme officer at Chapter Four Uganda, a human rights organisation, said environmental human rights defenders in Uganda were increasingly operating in a hostile environment.
“They repeatedly face reprisal attacks in the form of arbitrary arrests and detention, character assassination, being labelled traitors, assaults, intimidation and isolation, among others,” he said.
Masake added that illegal loggers and charcoal dealers, land grabbers and corporations often connived with their government backers to shield them from the law and accountability.
“Politicians, police officers and local leaders have often been cited in incidents of reprisal attacks against environmental defenders in Adjumani, Hoima and other districts,” he said.
Hidden from view
Uganda’s environmental battlefields are located in rural and remote areas where life and time seem to stop – far from the public eye and the noise and the vibe of big cities.
“The terrain has exposed them to easy targeting because the operation areas are far removed from urban areas where they would be able to access quick and competent legal services,” said Masake.
“The rise of incidents of corruption, abuse of office, lack of accountability for abusers and deterioration of the state and rule of law has further emboldened perpetrators to continue attacking environmental defenders because they know they can get away with it.”
As watchdogs of society, journalists who attempt to expose environmental crimes and abuse are also often the victims of sheer brutality and violence, according to several sources who spoke to Index.
“I deplore the way [president Yoweri] Museveni’s security forces ill-treat journalists, especially environmental journalists,” said one. “They have done nothing wrong. All they do is to tell the nation and the world that our natural resources are in danger of being extinct if we do not trade carefully. Is that a crime?”
The journalist, who claimed to fear Ugandan security forces and intelligence services “more than God”, spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Silencing the critics
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and its partners, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and the World Organisation Against Torture, have vehemently and repeatedly condemned the arrest and arbitrary detention of environmental journalists.
Venex Watebawa and Joshua Mutale, the team leader and head of programmes at Water and Environment Media Network (Wemnet), were recently arrested in Hoima, in western Uganda, on their way to attend a radio talkshow at Spice FM.
The FIDH reported that they were supposed to discuss the risks and dangers of sugarcane growing projects in the Bugoma forest and of allowing oil activities in critical biodiversity areas including rivers, lakes, national parks, forests and wetlands.
Home to more than 600 chimpanzees and endangered bird species, including African grey parrots, Bugoma is a tropical rainforest which was declared as a nature reserve in 1932.
Following the arrest of Wemnet members, all hell broke loose when security forces arrested more environmental activists who went to the police station to negotiate the release of Watebawa and Mutale.
The arrests, which are believed to have been called for by Hoima Sugar, the company decimating the Bugoma forest to convert it into a sugarcane plantation, were a bitter pill to swallow. (Index asked Hoima Sugar to comment on these allegations but received no response.)
“Environment stories are so delicate because the people behind the destruction of the environment are people with a lot of money, who are well connected and have a lot of influence,” Watebawa told Index.
He slammed the National Environment Management Authority – which is mandated to oversee conservation efforts – for having been influenced by Hoima Sugar.
“To our surprise, it gave a report in a record time of two weeks to clear the below-bare-minimum-standard environmental impact assessment report to clear 22 square miles of land in a sensitive and fragile ecosystem,” he said.
“The deployment of paramilitary agencies to give sanctuary to the destroyers of the forest speaks volumes of the government’s commitment to protect the environment.”
Journalists who have attempted to get anywhere near the Bugoma central forests have been harassed or faced the wrath of the army.
“These incidents have demotivated and scared us,” said Watebawa. “Between March and June, two of our members lost their cameras and laptops. Our communications officer, Samuel Kayiwa, was trailed, his car broken into in Kajjasi, and his gear stolen.”
The trade in environmental abuse
In another incident targeting the environmental media, Wemnet reported that someone broke into the house of Agnes Nantambi, a journalist working for New Vision, after midnight, forcing her to surrender her laptop and camera.
Amanzuru was arrested in February after an incident in which locals impounded a Kampala-bound truck ferrying illegal charcoal. He claimed that the military provided protection for those investing in illegal logging, illegal timber harvesting and the commercial charcoal trade.
He said the country’s environment sector was highly politicised, with the government drawing a lot of illicit money from the abuse of natural resources.
“Politicians trade in environmental abuse because this is an unmonitored trade … They make quick money for their political sustainability.”
And as the Museveni government’s aggression towards environmental activists increases day by day, human rights organisations have vowed to fight and to die with their boots on.
Amanzuru’s arrest attracted the attention of the EU ambassador to Uganda, who wrote to environment minister Beatrice Anywar Atim to request a fair and speedy trial.
Entities offering support include the Defenders’ Protection Initiative, Chapter Four Uganda and the National Coalition of Human Rights Defenders in Uganda.
But despite the grim outlook, Watebawa remains optimistic about the future of environmental activism.
He says society is stronger, more organised and more determined than ever, and the media persistently exposes environmental abuse.
He believes all responsible citizens must challenge the impunity to which environmental human rights defenders so often fall victim because the environment, ultimately, is a shared resource.
