Phone companies ordered to block words like Egypt, Tunisia
By John Stephen Katende
18th Feb 2011
The Egyptian scenes govt is trying to prevent
The government has ordered all mobile phone companies operating in Uganda to intercept key words like ‘Egypt’, ‘People Power’, and ‘Bullet’ from all their short message services or SMS, Reuters News Agency has reported.
An internal email from the state-run Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) with the order was leaked to the opposition
coalition Inter-Party Cooperation (IPC) on Thursday. Patrick Mwesigwa, head of UCC, confirmed to Reuters that it was genuine. “…We had a meeting with content providers on Tuesday and we decided that a list of key words should not be transmitted,” he said.
He added that, “…Messages containing such words, when encountered by the network or facility owner or operator, should be scrutinised and, if deemed to be controversial or advanced to incite the public, should be stopped or blocked,” Mwesigwa confirmed.
The other banned English words or phrases are: “Tunisia”, “Mubarak”, “dictator”, “teargas”, “army”, “police”, “gun”, “Ben Ali” and “UPDF”. Several words from Uganda’s local languages are listed too.
At his final election rally on Wednesday, Dr. Kizza Besigye warned that his supporters will take to the streets if the IPC concludes that the election have been rigged by the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM).
“…In the last two elections we were cheated and all the Supreme Court judges agreed with us but still failed do their duty (and) annul the election. We’re not going to the courts again. If our results don’t tally with those of the electoral commission, I will ask the people themselves to deal with the situation directly,” Besigye said.
President Museveni has however threatened to arrest to Dr. Besigye if he asks his supporters to take to the streets to protest election theft. END. Please log into www.ugandacorrespondent.com every Monday to read our top stories and anytime mid-week for our news updates.
