Heading down the home stretch of Uganda’s 15 January 2026 presidential poll, the eight men intent on leading the East African nation for the next five years have moved up a gear with last-minute pitches. It has been a bruising and nerve-jangling campaign for leading challengers, such as Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, alias Bobi Wine, who are trying to snap incumbent Yoweri Museveni’s nearly four-decade rule. Perennially forced to use back roads covered in red dirt, ostensibly to avoid disrupting traffic, the challengers have done their best to wear faces that do not betray the long journey. Even if sometimes just barely.
While promises of, for one, getting a handle on crime or ensuring that cities pick up their own garbage have earned the candidates media coverage, the velocity of the rise to prominence of Nyombi Thembo has not gone unnoticed. Thembo, Executive Director of the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), has—at the final bend—had to embark on the unenviable task of articulating the promise not to shut down the Internet. But after the 2016 and 2021 polls brought with them Internet blackouts, albeit of varying degrees, it feels as if the guilt of the UCC has in one manner or another, already been established. While a screwdriver-style arrangement targeted social networks in 2016, with VPNs or virtual private networks offering respite, the UCC dropped the sledgehammer five years later by suspending all Internet gateways for a little over 100 hours. That’s nearly five days.
Drop the hammer
The scars of the sledgehammer of a complete blackout are, evidently, still fresh. As a matter of fact, many observers are convinced that the UCC, the regulatory body of the communications sector in Uganda, will continue to finesse a continuing desire for an election-related shutdown. Uganda deserves, Thembo disclosed in a 6 January 2026 social media post, “connectivity, not shutdowns.” Amid the public’s melancholy view of “the government[’s] responsibility to monitor national security”, being pummelled by reminders of its past is, reckons the UCC’s top official, counterproductive. Accordingly, and to avoid an outcome couched in digital authoritarianism, Thembo advises that digital tools be used to “build up our country rather than tear it down.”
And to do that, the Government of Uganda (GoU) has been proactive. At a 5 January 2026 media briefing, Thembo provided an update on the licensing of Starlink Global Internet Services Ltd in Uganda that showed the scale of the proactivity. A pin had been put in place to use the satellite Internet constellation’s digital architecture to blunt any attempts to switch off access to Internet services. This was after the entity indicated in a 2 January 2026 letter to the UCC that “there are no Starlink terminals operating in Uganda” because it, on 1 January 2026, “implemented a new service restriction tool for Uganda.”
If Thembo’s tone had previously been certain and prescriptive, it morphed into a conciliatory one at the media briefing. He appreciated “Starlink’s recent efforts in deactivating illegal terminals”, adding that “the licensing process […] is still ongoing until all regulatory conditions are fulfilled.” It would not take long for another gear to be found, though. Thembo would also speak out forcefully against those who question the disciplinary state’s enforcement of rules through surveillance and correction. State actors like the UCC will continue to show little patience with those who are unable to see the wisdom in maintaining public order, he warned.
A surprise awaits?
To which end, there will be no, warned the UCC top honcho, “live streaming of riots or unlawful processions.” A “zero tolerance for hate speech or incitement” means that Bitchat Mesh, a Bluetooth-based messaging app that has witnessed a significant spike in downloads after Bobi Wine endorsed it as a contingency plan against a potential Internet outage, is not in the good graces of the disciplinary state. Thembo told journalists that if Ugandans who have downloaded the app preemptively think it will allow them to “break the law,” a surprise awaits.
Bitchat, created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, works without the Internet. It essentially does this by allowing nearby users to communicate when other networks fail. Thembo reduced the app to a “small thing”, adding that “we know how it can be made not to work.” To which Dorsey responded tersely: “Interesting.”
While Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), the technology used to enforce shutdowns, is the same type that is typically used for surveillance and content inspection, disabling an app that works via Bluetooth mesh networks through peer-to-peer transactions is no small feat. At the 5 January 2026 media briefing, Thembo showed that he has a working knowledge of Bitchat, albeit a tenuous one. The app, he correctly noted, uses short-range radio waves “which we have not licensed” to connect one device to another. Messages are transmitted across a Bluetooth connectivity distance that averages slightly over 30 feet. The aforesaid messages are sent in encrypted form, with only the intended recipient able to decrypt and read them.
Lessons of the past
Parallels have been drawn with how FireChat had such a galvanising effect with protesters in Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement. With the Internet vulnerable to state intervention in Hong Kong, protesters used the app to send messages from phone to phone without mobile reception or the Internet. FireChat had previously been only fitfully impressive during protests in Taiwan, Iran, and Iraq. The Hong Kong experience offered conclusive proof, if any was required, that the app could be a resounding success on an industrial scale. Bobi Wine has urged his followers to, he wrote in a 2 January 2026 X (formerly Twitter) post, “use [Bitchat] for communication in case the regime disables [the] Internet ahead of #ProtestVote2026.”
The so-called protest vote speaks to the resolve of Bobi Wine’s party—the National Unity Platform (NUP)—to take a methodical approach to its ambitions of mobilising grassroots political consciousness domestically. It also sets out to, adds Grace Kiboneka of NUP’s Washington Chapter-Diaspora Wing, inspire “collective activism within the Ugandan diaspora.” The UCC says these ambitions, despite Bitchat’s best efforts, will “easily” be short-circuited.
If Thembo’s veiled threat to Bitchat is to be most generously understood as the disciplinary state’s ability to surgically deal with software that bypasses traditional internet infrastructure, the destructive impulses mined merit a deeper reading. It shows the extraordinary lengths that the GoU is willing to go to, with the aid of surveillance tools like DPI, monitor, track, and intercept specific digital communications and data in the country. It also demonstrates how surveillance activities and Internet shutdowns often occur in tandem within a context of digital authoritarianism. As one IT expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Vox Populi, the tools as well as legal frameworks used to implement shutdowns and extensive surveillance measures to monitor citizens when connectivity is available are nearly, if not entirely, identical.
“What we tend to see is the citing of national security or public order justifications either when an Internet shutdown occurs or when surveillance is used as a tool for information gathering and monitoring,” the IT expert noted.
The odds predict that it will be a case of the former—an Internet shutdown—when Ugandans go to the polls on 15 January 2026.