Writer: Philip Matogo. PHOTO/FILE
A 27-year-old second-hand shoe hawker, Mr Juma Musuuza, alias Madubarah, has become the fifth Ugandan TikToker to be remanded to prison in less than a week for allegedly demeaning the First Family.
Madubarah is accused of saying, “If Museveni hands over power to his drunkard son, the country will be destroyed within two days, let Ugandans pray for our country and ourselves,” Daily Monitor reported recently.Musuuza, no relation to Edrisah Musuuza, alias Eddy Kenzo, is only 27.
This is the magic double digit that was the number of men or guns that eventually overthrew a placeholder regime.
However, that is beside the point. What should be considered is how our government keeps fiddling as Rome burns, as it were.It recently made Parliament pass the National Coffee (Amendment) Bill, 2024, integrating the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) into the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF).
Avowedly, on the government’s part, this move is part of the government’s Rationalisation of Agencies and Public Expenditure (RAPEX) policy aimed at streamlining public spending and reducing redundant administrative structures.
However, police arresting wananchi for what they show or tell online is the opposite of rationalisation and rationality. Governments have bot farms. To those who do not know, bot farms are “a network of bots, or automated programmes created to perform repetitive tasks at a scale way beyond human capability”.
Bot farms work expeditiously and autonomously, spreading misinformation, artificially increasing website traffic, launching cyber-attacks, or automated clicks on ad campaigns.
If the government appreciates that arresting any deviant social media user is overkill, with the existence of bot farms, it can rationalise and thereby save money by integrating its bot farms into the police force. Then the money that would otherwise be used arresting and holding errant TikTokers or the like can be saved. And the bot farms may nullify the so-called abuses of government personalities and entities by manipulating social media through evangelising its own standpoint and demonising any opposing view thereto.
It can take its war against its adversaries to the worldwide web. Also, because bot farms operate anonymously, the government will have plausible deniability. Bot farms were used quite effectively during the 2016 US election, which saw Donald Trump become president by winning the Electoral College with 304 votes compared to 227 votes for Hillary Clinton.US officials later identified and took down an artificial intelligence-powered Russian bot farm, said to have been deployed to ‘correct’ the outcome of the 2016 US election.
Engadget, a site dedicated to technology news and reviews, said the farm consisted of nearly 1,000 accounts and spread disinformation and pro-Russian views on X. The Justice Department said the bot farm was activated by software, possibly the tool “Meliorator,” capable of creating “authentic appearing social media personas en masse,” and was created by a digital media department within RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet.
Uganda government should do the same. Not only to rationalise its activities but to accept that politics is partly a marketplace for ideas, where brawn bows to brains. So why doesn’t the government shape those ideas in its favour by using a bot farm?
Right now, by arresting harmless-looking TikTokers, the optics shape ideas against the government by making it appear autocratic and incompetent. As I type, my sympathy vote goes to Musuuza.
As for the Big Bad Wolf otherwise known as government, well, it gets my protest vote registered against it for coming across as a bully.
Politics, after all, is largely about appearances and, right now, appearances make the government look bad.
