President Yoweri Museveni has never been a fan of social media.
It’s unlikely he even owns a smartphone to say the least.
To him, social media is synonymous with idle talk, gossiping and wasting time.
In making a case for expanding the country’s tax base, the President in 2018 suggested to the Finance Minister that users of social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatApp, Twitter, Skype, Viber among others should be taxed “a small fee of Shs 100 per day.
“Olugambo (gossip) on social media (opinions, prejudices, insults, friendly chats) and advertisements by Google and I do not know who else must pay tax because we need resources to cope with the consequences of their ‘lugambo’,” Museveni wrote in 2018.
He said taxing social media usage would help stop social media users from spending most of their time ‘rumormongering’ and become more productive.
In 2021, he again described social media as “an idiotic problem”, days after some social media users falsely announced him dead.
The President’s stance on social media is a representation of his general lifestyle including his eating habits and fashion style. Having been brought up in a peasant pastoralist family in Ankole (western Uganda) and lived the larger part of his life in an era when the influence of technology and the internet on lifestyle was minimal.
On Tuesday, while addressing a gathering of techies, majority of them youths, he confirmed that he indeed does not own a smartphone. That he only uses a feature phone (‘katokyi’) without internet capabilities.
“I have heard about the smartphones, I have seen them at a distance, but in my work, I need to do more thinking than tinker with data and so on and so forth,” the President told the gathering at the 2nd National ICT Job Fair held at Kololo Independence Grounds.’
He adds that he has someone (an aide) who keeps him in the loop of what’s happening on social media. She’s called Precious Kamwiine.
“If I want to know what’s happening on the smartphones, I ask Precious Kamwiine. I ask her ‘What are the rumormongers saying?’ So, my smartphone is indirect through Precious,” the President added.
Turns out Precious’ routine involves rummaging the internet to dig out what netizens are commenting about the President and other government policies. Which is kinda cool but also not quite, especially when you have to deliver some unsavory messages directed at the President and the choice of adjectives that some internet users often prefer to address the Head of State with.
We cannot confirm whether it is her that runs the President’s different social media accounts.
Precious is the Private Secretary to the President in charge of ICT, a position she has held for the last 8 years.
Prior to that, she was a Citizen Verification Officer with the National Security Information System (formerly known as the National I.D project) under the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
She is a graduate of Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University in Scotland UK, where she pursued a Master of Business Administration.
A daughter to former executive director of Uganda Investment Authority (UIA), Jolly Kaguhangire, Precious also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology (IT) from Makerere University.
In the 2018 film 27 Guns (an action, adventure biopic film about the civil war that brought Museveni into power) which was written and directed by first daughter Natasha Museveni Karugire, Precious played the character of Joy Mirembe.
Mirembe, said to be the first woman to have joined the bush war, died in 1982. She was involved in the armed struggle since the 1970s and would later become a member of the National Resistance Council.
