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Uganda’s presidential candidates turn to social media

Saturday November 28 2015
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Politicians have turned to the Internet, especially social media sites, to lure new voters. PHOTO | FILE

The 2016 presidential candidates seem to have shifted their campaigns to popular social networking sites to mobilise support in nearly the same way they resorted to cellphones and popular music in 2011.

President Yoweri Museveni officially launched messages to social media sites last Friday, and Prof Venansius Baryamureeba ditched, albeit temporarily, open-air campaigns to mobilise support for his candidature via the same platforms.

A week before the presidential elections in 2011, President Museveni delivered a pre-recorded message using an automated “robocall” system in which he asked millions of mobile phone users to vote for the “man in the hat,” his trademark head gear.

The auto-call stunned many of its recipients, a majority of whom believed it was real, just as when — a day before nominations — Museveni broke into a traditional chant in his native Runyankore language, sparing off the two-minute recording that got remixed to hip-hop beats and released as You want another rap?  It became an instant hit and got credited for mobilising support from a new generation of voters, especially the urban, young and often poor Ugandans.

This time round, neither Museveni nor his competitors can rely on robocalls or mass text messages unless they defy the Uganda Communication Commission, which outlawed their use in June.

What is more, for Museveni in particular, the star-studded Tubonga Nawe song he bankrolled in praise of his achievements has failed to catch on as his “rap” hit did, leaving social media sites the newest and freest hunting grounds for the new generation of voters.

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Because of the exponential growth in Internet subscription and usage, popular sites like WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook have been and continue to play host to streams of new, sometimes scintillating, information as well as bitter disagreements among people with divergent opinions all of which would otherwise not find space in traditional platforms.

As such, they have wrested control and influence of mass opinions, perceptions and actions of a majority of people whose opinions were previously shaped by information from mainstream media, noted communication experts at a Social Media Conference in Kampala in July.

They have also altered ways of civic engagement, and changed dynamics in political communication because of their immediacy, user-friendliness, interactive qualities and their immense potential to enable complete strangers to connect over common beliefs, desires or interests, the experts added.

“In the 2016 presidential elections, more than 20 per cent of the registered voters will make their choice based on information from social media sites. This is a big number to ignore,” said Prof Baryamureeba, one of five first time presidential contestants.

He and former prime minister Amama Mbabazi announced their bids via YouTube as if to underline the pre-eminence of social media. They command the most vibrant online platforms of all the eight candidates in this year’s presidential race.

“Most breaking news happens first on social media sites even for the traditional media,” noted Prof Barya, a data communications expert, who estimates that at least four million — out of an estimated total of between 15 and 16 million — registered voters are on social media. 

“Social media comprises of people with a lot of influence and can influence people around them even their relatives in the villages. So you can ignore them at your own peril. Even the majority of Ugandans who never voted [in the last elections] are on social media.

“So if we want them to come out and vote we have to find them on social media. It worked for Barack Obama in the US, David Cameron in the UK, Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya, and many others,” said the former vice chancellor of Makerere University and Uganda Technology and Management University, which he founded.

According to Uganda’s Communication Commission, Internet subscription, usage, and penetration have grown rapidly between the last elections to date because of a consistent reduction in the cost of technologies and an increase in demand for more connectivity. 

Between June 2011 and March 2015, penetration grew from about 13 to 34.2 per cent; subscriptions, on both fixed and mobile devices, went from 934,758 to 6,022,916 connections; while estimated users went from 4,662,240 to 11,924,927 million people.

This number of users is 2,177,612 people more than the total population in Uganda’s 12 most populous and urbanised districts, according to the provisional results of the 2014 National Population and Housing Census.

Although some technology pessimists continue to dismiss the relevance of online audiences, some analysts warn such interpretation is unmindful of thechanging times.

“It is not necessarily true that urban dwellers do not vote. In my view, where urban centres are short on voter turnout, they compensate in terms of voter volumes. It is simply that they are more inquisitive and require much more conviction to go out and vote,” said Muhereza Kyamutetera, a communications and strategy expert at Corporate Image, a Kampala based public relations firm. 

The challenge, according to communication and political analysts, lies in how to get the ‘netizens’, as avid Internet users are called, to actually come out and cast their vote.

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