By Praise Aloikin Opoloje
From a student who vanished for six weeks to a novelist who fled barefoot after military torture, Uganda has built an architecture of digital fear so efficient that many citizens now police themselves. The government barely needs to lift a finger. In a country where a shoe hawker named Juma Musuuza received twelve months in prison for a TikTok post, where a 21-year-old called Emmanuel Nabugodi spent two years and eight months in jail for a mock video he uploaded to his social media, where a novelist was held in a military facility for twenty-eight days, tortured with pliers, and told by the president’s son to stop writing, the decision not to put your name to a political opinion is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.
Uganda’s government arrested enough people, at scattered intervals, in ways visible enough to register but irregular enough to feel unpredictable, until the population learned to regulate itself.
The Law
Section 25 of the Computer Misuse Act of 2011 criminalised “offensive communication,” defined with the kind of latitude that made it useful for almost any purpose: the “willful and repeated use of electronic communication to disturb or attempt to disturb the peace, quiet, or right of privacy of any person.” In January 2023, the Constitutional Court Petition No. 5 of 2016 unanimously declared Section 25 unconstitutional, citing its vagueness and broadness, giving enforcement agencies “unfettered discretion to punish unpopular or critical protected expression.” The petitioners were lawyer Andrew Karamagi and blogger Robert Shaka, who had himself spent time in detention after police alleged he was operating under the pseudonym Tom Voltaire Okwalinga, a Facebook page followed by hundreds of thousands of Ugandans for what it claimed were insider accounts of the first family’s private affairs. Shaka denied it. Police, in their charge sheet, said he had disturbed the president’s privacy by posting statements about Museveni’s health.
The ruling was a real victory. But by the time it came, the government had already moved. The Computer Misuse Amendment Act of October 2022 introduced a new set of offences: sharing “malicious information,” “unsolicited information,” or content “likely to ridicule, degrade or demean” any person. “The real purpose of this law,” as one commentator put it with precision, “is to protect the thin-skinned political class.”
What Disappearing Does to People who Watch
On June 8, 2025, Elson Tumwine was working as an agricultural intern in Hoima, western Uganda. He was twenty-three years old and in his third year at Makerere University. He had posted a TikTok video in May in which he used a “doctored” clip of parliament speaker Anita Among appearing to accuse President Museveni of various historical atrocities, including the 1989 Mukura massacre in Teso region. On June 8, Tumwine vanished.
Makerere University’s Guild Council issued a public appeal for information. Six weeks passed. On July 13, Tumwine reappeared at a police station in Entebbe, 230 kilometres from where he had been working. NUP Secretary General David Lewis Rubongoya said he had been “dumped” there after being subjected to torture at the hands of military intelligence. The authorities did not comment on how Tumwine had come to be in Entebbe. They charged him with two counts under the Computer Misuse Amendment Act: hate speech and malicious information. Tumwine had refused to allow lawyers from civil society organisations to represent him, and had instead pleaded guilty and asked the court for forgiveness. The Entebbe magistrate sentenced Tumwine to two months in prison on August 5, noting his plea for leniency.
Three weeks later, on August 29, Juma Musuuza, a twenty-seven-year-old shoe hawker who posted political commentary on TikTok under the name Madubarah, was sentenced to twelve months for hate speech and spreading malicious information about Museveni, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, and speaker Among. Among his alleged offences: saying publicly that if Museveni handed power to his son, “the country will be destroyed within two days.”
The Effects on Society
In Uganda, the impact of laws restricting online expression is palpable. Cases of individuals facing prosecution for social media posts have led to widespread self-censorship, with content creators, journalists, and citizens hesitant to express dissenting opinions. Ismael Basalirwa, a Makerere University student representative, questioned the limitations on free speech in a democratic society, saying, “How shall we live in a country where dissenting opinions are being sidelined? There should be no limitation to free speech in a democratic dispensation.”
The Centre for International Peace Research and Initiatives (CIPESA) in its pre-election reporting noted that this fear of legal repercussions is affecting not just individuals but also media houses and telecom companies, which often comply with state directives that may infringe on constitutional rights.
The political consequence of Uganda’s surveillance system is indeed difficult to measure precisely because it suppresses measurement itself. When people stop expressing their true opinions, polling becomes unreliable, and journalists self-censor, creating an incomplete public record. Activists also self-censor, losing civil society’s diagnostic function.
The government benefits from all three of these outcomes. A population that has learned to paraphrase its political opinions in socially acceptable language looks, to a certain kind of analysis, like a population that has accepted the status quo.
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