Statement on the New Ugandans On Twitter (UOT) Leadership.

New UOT President - AIGP Asan Kasingye 

As the outgoing UOT President and Vice President prepare to hand over office to the newly democratically elected leadership, it is important to know something about the real beginning of UOT leadership ideas. Three years ago, with a group of friends who shared a deep passion for Twitter as a platform agreed that there was need for us to create points that would always bring us together as individuals using Twitter to drive conversations about personal brands, business brands and social economic issues affecting our communities. In 2017 I agreed to become the first President of UOT after deeply thinking about the benefits of having someone uniting us as Ugandans on social media.

My term as UOT president did not come easy as many people did not understand why Ugandans on Twitter needed leadership and as such many people still spent a lot of time on social media hyping foreign content trends on their timelines than discussing issues regarding our own people and country. This was my first point to tackle where we encouraged more Ugandans to join Twitter but more so to engage in local conversations that address our local social economic issues.

One thing that remains significant to all of us is the rate at which people now use social media to communicate, market their businesses and make new friends, all those aspects are a great avenue when it comes to making our communities better places especially when people can communicate and work together to solve our own issues that most times are a result of communication gaps and ignorance on how some matters should be amicably handled and solved.

New UOT Vice President - Sandra Mwesiga 

As outgoing UOT President I would like to confirm to you that in the three years i have engaged with Ugandans on Twitter I have confirmed that there are hundreds of youths and startups surviving on Twitter and other social media platforms as their source of livelihood and survival. This is a clear case to indicate that whereas some people use social media platforms as platforms to attack and insult others, there are many more people using these platforms as real sources of income and content platforms on which to raise awareness to communities.  During the time I have been UOT president we have done some amazing campaigns where we have helped out in communities and joined hands to fundraise for some of our friends in need of our support. We also pulled off the UOT Night for fur months, an event we carried out weekly to physically bring Ugandans on Twitter together.

I am very excited to see UOT get new leadership that will take us from 2019 t 2020 while they become our rallying points when it comes to issues and causes that affect us as Ugandans on Twitter. The President and the Vice President are rallying points who bring us together to be able to build and support others in our communities. They are also encouraged to show a great way to their followers on how best social media can be used to positively impact lives than dividing and creating trolling content that does not bring growth to the platform users.

As a way of stream lining the social media section especially twitter and other platforms, we also intend through the new leadership of UOT to encourage more government institutions and officials to embrace social media especially Twitter to deliver timely and classified information to Ugandans. Due to the fact that there are hundreds of youths and startups are surviving on these platforms, there is a great need to create an umbrella that brings such individuals together such as the Uganda Digital Marketers Association (UDMA) which we hope will be formed soon.

Congratulations to our incoming UOT President, Ndugu Asan Kasingye and his Vice President - Sandra Mwesiga.  More details on how we intend to become more impactful in our communities through our new leadership will be coming through in the coming few days. I can not forget to thank my out going Vice Preside - Mathias Ssemanda for the job well done.


By Mwebya Fred

mwbyfred@gmail.com