Ugandan cartoonist Jim Spire Ssentongo didn’t know what he was beginning final April when he despatched out a tweet encouraging folks to submit images of the ever present potholes throughout the nation’s capital.
“A pal of mine is organising a mega KAMPALA POTHOLE PHOTO EXHIBITION” he wrote on X, the platform previously often called Twitter, on April 15 final yr. “Share right here images of potholes in Kampala metropolis, with: location, depth, circumference, and estimated age of the pothole.” He requested his followers to tag the Kampala Capital Metropolis Authority (KCCA) and their counterpart chargeable for the nation’s roads.
Again in 2005, there have been efforts to stage bodily exhibitions of the nation’s notorious potholes – what locals name “ponds” within the roads due to their measurement. However these makes an attempt had been thwarted by the police, remembers Ssentongo.
So the concept to carry an exhibition on-line got here to thoughts, says Ssentongo, 45. He comes throughout as a deep thinker, taking time to think about his responses earlier than talking. Ssentongo admits that the tweet calling for pothole images was “partly joking, partly sounding out how it will be acquired”, including that he didn’t “plan to show it right into a grand initiative”.
However that’s precisely what occurred. Ugandans began importing their images instantly. In response, Joshua Mutabazi, added at the least 5 images to the thread, together with one which exhibits a 30-centimetre (12-inch) pothole with a 3.5-metre (11.5-foot) circumference that he estimated was two years previous. By the tip of the day, there have been greater than 13,000 tweets with the hashtag the #KampalaPotholeExhibition, posted by fed-up residents within the pothole-plagued nation.
With bodily protests all however barred within the nation, this was a possibility to carry the federal government accountable. And, to Ugandans’ shock, there have been outcomes. Inside a day, KCCA’s government director, Dorothy Kisaka, made a public assertion concerning the pothole scenario, saying that the authority was constrained by insufficient authorities funding.
The identical day in Parliament the deputy speaker, Thomas Tabeywa, requested the minister of Kampala capital metropolis and metropolitan affairs concerning the state of the roads. Lower than every week after the net outrage started, ageing President Yoweri Museveni, 79, ordered the nation’s Ministry of Finance to right away launch six billion shillings ($1,538,784) to restore the roads. The following month his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba inspected a few of them.
This was the start of a brand new type of protest within the East African nation, the place those that have taken to the streets to exhibit are inclined to languish in jail.
Practically a yr since that first exhibition name, Ssentonga has been concerned in six extra: about hospital situations, overseas recruitment scandals, corruption and nepotism inside non-governmental organisations (NGOs), human rights abuses, and extra. Every marketing campaign has used a particular hashtag equivalent to #UgandaHealthExhibition and requested folks to submit “proof” – images, movies, audio, paperwork – of neglect or abuse by authorities. Some Ugandans have likened the protests to the Arab Spring.
What’s exceptional is that the soft-spoken and unassuming cartoonist has been in a position to proceed demonstrating on-line when different bodily occasions, equivalent to local weather protests and what was dubbed the Stroll to Work marketing campaign in opposition to skyrocketing meals costs, have been shut down by police or fizzled out.
Different on-line protests have been tried. In 2020, Endurance Ahumuza, a digital communications skilled, began the “Put on that Mini” marketing campaign, aimed toward combating on-line physique shaming. She posted a photograph of herself in a miniskirt and invited different Ugandan girls to do the identical. Tons of of images had been uploaded.
Although it died out, feminist actions like this laid the inspiration for Ssentongo’s campaigns, notes human rights lawyer Gowdin Toko, who now helps spearhead the net exhibitions.
A well-drawn historical past
Ssentongo says that he’s motivated by “the need and keenness to see issues finished higher within the nation or [have] issues finished extra justly.” He explains that this “caring for the opposite, being aware” displays his coaching in two non secular seminaries – though he was expelled from one establishment and dropped out of one other as a result of he “didn’t have the calling”.
Nevertheless, Ssentonga did discover a calling as a political cartoonist whereas he was instructing ethics at an area college.
Ugandan newspapers started printing political cartoons within the Nineteen Sixties. Throughout the Seventies, within the period of the late dictator Idi Amin, they had been used to parody social points, Ssentongo says. “They averted political discussions however by the ’80s had moved to cowl political issues,” he explains. Nevertheless, there hadn’t but been teachers, philosophers or writers who had been additionally cartoonists, says Ssentongo. This was a bonus for them in “increasing modes of speech, particularly on uncomfortable points, plus triggering public debate by way of the hard-to-ignore vessel of humour”, he says.
Regardless of no formal coaching, he tried his hand at it – taking inspiration from Ugandan cartoonists equivalent to Fred Senoga Makubuya (“Snoggie”), well-known for an illustration within the late Nineties portraying a military main common as a hen and the president as a hen proprietor deciding what to do along with his animals.
In 2005, Ssentongo walked into the workplace of native newspaper The Observer and handed then-Deputy Managing Editor Pius Katunzi a portfolio of labor. Katunzi was impressed with one among his illustrations mocking the ability cuts that had been going down in Uganda. Within the cartoon, one native marabou stork is poking his beak immediately within the face of one other as they dangle on an influence line. “I let you know it was fairly harmful to face on these wires,” the primary stork says. “Hmm,” replies his pal.
Ssentongo has been working for the paper on a contract foundation ever since.
“He’s not somebody given to pleasure, however he cares,” says Katunzi, now managing editor of The Observer. “Typically, he’s a quiet particular person. You don’t suppose all these sorts of issues will come out of him. However he’s a deep thinker.”
Ssentongo, who can also be a columnist and has revealed a number of books, is understood for his satirical writing. Folks due to this fact simply relate to the crossover between his cartoon topics and his different work, says the cartoonist. “However I’m additionally facilitated by my philosophy background,” Ssentongo provides.
Nonetheless, he didn’t count on his on-line campaigns to resonate with so many. “The deployment of humour within the exhibitions has been disarming – particularly within the pothole exhibition,” says Ssentongo.
“What may they [the government] do about folks merely making enjoyable of the horrible capital metropolis roads? They’d have regarded silly had they tried to make use of violence on us. Humour is highly effective in repressive environments.”
Triumphs and tragedies
Social media is unsure terrain in Uganda, the place President Yoweri Museveni has dominated since 1986. In 2021, he banned Fb within the lead-up to elections, which pushed many Ugandans to Twitter, now X.
The president and his son are prolific customers of the platform, making it onerous to dam it, Ssentongo factors out. That is one cause why his digital protests survived. “Partly it’s as a result of they can’t shut down all of the channels and so they know from the expertise of shutting down Fb that you simply simply shut the door and folks use the opposite,” he says.
However there have been extreme repercussions for some who used social media to criticise the federal government. Practically two years in the past, satirical novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija was detained, tortured and arrested for “offensive communication” after calling the president’s son Kainerugaba “an incompetent pig-headed curmudgeon” and “overweight” on X. Activist and educational Stella Nyanzi was jailed for labelling the president a “pair of buttocks” on Fb and convicted of cyber-harassment in 2017. Each sought refuge in Germany.
Many in Uganda now use a pseudonym on social media, says Isaac Tibasiima, an assistant lecturer within the Division of Literature at Makerere College, who has taught with Ssentonga. “However Jimmy was the type of man that stated, ‘No, I’ll use my deal with and I don’t care what’s going to come back out.’”
Social media made him so well-liked that whereas as soon as reluctant to name himself a political activist, he now embraces the time period. Right now, some need Ssentongo to run for president, however he humbly shrugs it off.
He thinks the net exhibitions have been well-liked as a result of they function a type of remedy – “just a few avenue to vent, to get some momentary reduction”, says Ssentongo. “Nevertheless it’s actually encouraging that it has made so many extra folks energetic, even these which have been quiet.”
Many voices – greater than 10 million throughout YouTube, Twitter and Reddit – spoke to the #UgandaHealthExhibition marketing campaign, launched simply after the pothole protest. A few of the responses, that are nonetheless being posted, present sufferers sleeping on hospital flooring and flag medical and provide shortages and rundown tools.
The newest protest, the #UgandaParliamentExhibition, which has been working since late February and highlights problems with suspect authorities, stands out as the most contentious but. It has to date led to the nation’s Inspector Common of Authorities (IGG), the Ugandan authorities arm that investigates corruption, to open a probe into Parliament after allegations of misuse of public funds. Nationwide police spokesperson Fred Enanga and Kampala metropolitan police spokesperson Patrick Onyango referred Al Jazeera to the IGG, which didn’t reply to requests for remark.)
That is uncommon in Uganda. Well being ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Ainebyoona — whom many journalists accuse of dodging their questions — responded on to among the posts on the Uganda well being exhibition final yr. He tells Al Jazeera that lots of the points flagged on X “have been addressed” and so they’ve tackled well being employee shortages, amongst different measures.
The protests have been profitable in exposing nepotism and corruption in Uganda, the place the media are restricted, intimidated and bribed, says Agather Atuhaire, a Ugandan journalist and activist who was not too long ago recognised with the Worldwide Girls of Braveness award. She can also be co-founder of Agora, an area platform for citizen engagement. Impressed by the pothole marketing campaign, she approached Ssentongo in June about main an exhibition “concerning the rotten NGOs”.
“The digital activism revolution has been large,” says Atuhaire. “It’s a brand new factor. I believe that’s why the authorities should be nervous about it – there’s nothing they will do about it.”
‘Smear campaigns’ and threats
Amid the success of the general public exhibitions, there have additionally been worries. The primary time that Ssentongo realised his campaigns is perhaps placing his life in peril was final April, after a second healthcare system protest.
An acquaintance alerted him to a potential risk to his life and suggested Ssentongo to go away the nation quickly. He didn’t after which tweeted, “Ought to they arrest me, proceed with the exhibition. They’ll’t arrest the exhibition.”
Quickly afterwards, he was summoned to a police station for cyberstalking. Nevertheless, the case was dropped.
Atuhaire says that she has additionally been threatened “immediately and not directly;” she’s been adopted and was warned that her telephone had been tapped.
There’s additionally been what Ssentongo calls a “smear marketing campaign” with tabloids working tales about alleged affairs with college college students and claims of sexual harassment – all “clearly geared in direction of silencing me”, he says.
Rukirabashaija says, “It’s troublesome to foretell with certainty whether or not he can find yourself like me – tortured and exiled – however typically, I pity and fear about him”.
“Given the unpredictability of authoritarian regimes like this one in Uganda, their responses to dissent typically come not directly within the type of monetary harassment, unexplained knockdown or assassinations, poisoning, trumped up costs amongst different brutal issues,” he says.
Nyanzi expects that Ssentongo will probably be arrested quickly. “The threats [have] already began,” she says. “That’s the way it began with me.”
Ssentongo has evaded the authorities to date, says Toko, as a result of he has “a critical profile with the academia, within the diplomatic circles and even with a number of strange Ugandans now … From what occurred with Rukirabashaija [the government] is aware of that touching him may cause critical points.”
Nevertheless it’s too early to declare Ssentongo protected, the lawyer stresses. “He’s been an outright activist for lower than a yr,” says Toko. “Nevertheless, his profile retains rising so this will imply it’s onerous now and will probably be even tougher with time.”
Ssentongo says he can’t clarify why he hasn’t been arrested but, nor the motivation and strategies of the federal government. “Hybrid regimes don’t simply render themselves to prediction and rationalization,” he says. “How they select their targets you’ll be able to’t inform. You solely pray that you simply survive.”
For now, he needs to stay in Uganda. “If I’ve a tipping level … there are particular issues I wouldn’t wish to occur. I wouldn’t wish to lose my life, definitely, my job, be harmed in any method bodily or mentally, psychologically, by the stuff you undergo whenever you undergo character assassination. However … it’s the present scenario that’s taking place on the time that determines your psychological state.”
Does he have an escape plan? “Perhaps I’m naive or foolhardy, however I wish to inform myself that I received’t need to run,” he says thoughtfully. “I’ll cross that river once I get to it. I don’t suppose Stella or Kakwenze deliberate earlier to flee.”
Lately, Ssentonga’s cartoons keep away from topics like folks’s private issues, together with these of presidency figures — except their privateness is entangled with accountability. “There are some folks you must critique rigorously and sure matters that you must be very cautious … about equivalent to LGBTQI associated points,” says Ssentongo, referring to an anti-gay legislation that Uganda permitted a yr in the past. However he has broached even this topic, drawing a number of cartoons concerning the new act and even a number of of the president’s son.
Ssentongo can’t say how lengthy the exhibitions will final. And for all of their success, he finds it unsettling that digital protests might change into the norm in Uganda as a result of the liberty to take to the streets doesn’t exist. “I discover it uncomfortable that many individuals wish to take a look at that as the brand new resolution,” says Ssentongo.
“They wish to take a look at that as an method that we must always use to run away from different conventional strategies. These completely different approaches ought to solely be reinforcing one another however not be seen as options or substitute the opposite.”