Ministry of ICT and National Guidance Permanent Secretary, Dr. Aminah Zawedde has maintained that the ban on Facebook was necessary after it was established that the service provider was overstepping her mandate and infringing on Uganda’s sovereign rights.
Speaking in an interview with Daily Monitor, Zawedde said that the re-opening of Facebook will come with new and clear guidelines although she does not divulge the details.
“What I can say is that engagements with Facebook are still ongoing. I cannot disclose right now the parameters of our negotiations, but briefly, it is about the balance; respect for our laws in terms of freedom of speech and usage of these platforms,” said Zawedde in an interview.
For two years now, Facebook in Uganda has remained closed for two years and people have been accessing it via virtual private networks (VPNs).
And according to Zawedde, the government is finding means to close VPNs.
“I know it’s widely used by people using VPN and it’s hard to close VPNs—but we are trying to find a way,” she said.
On the issue of the government starting to tax the big tech companies, Zawedde said,
“As we promote Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), the government is aware that it is happening on a full scale but not regulated and captured in the books. That is why we are saying we need to tap into these entities to rein in the capital flight. Already the two major telecoms, MTN and Airtel, are foreign and are reaping a lot.
So in essence we are discussing how to get the likes of Google, which makes a lot of money from this country, to keep some here. We are developing a BPO policy wherein we are looking at how we can force these foreign tech companies to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.”