Museveni baptism records trigger fake news on social media

It’s not clear how it started. But by mid-day afternoon yesterday Monday 7/8/17, many people’s social media accounts were awash with a lie that Ankole Diocese leadership had found a new birth date for President Museveni.

The Museveni birthday gaffe also got some respectable media such as CBS FM to falsely claim that the events in Kinoni had altered debate at many political rallies on Monday morning.

Besides the shock that would be associated with such a discovery concerning a person as prominent as the President, as the news supposed, the false claim benefited from the would-be implications on the proposed lifting of the age—limit provision from the Constitution of Uganda to allow Museveni to contest in the 2021 presidential elections.

Kampala Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago spent close to an hour debating on CBS the implications of ‘adjusting one’s birth date’.

Thanks to follow up reports by Vision and Monitor, today, the events in Kinoni, were simply a celebration of baptism and not a birth day party. The record showed Museveni was baptized on Aug 3, 1947.

The dailies further clarified the matter by quoting the president insisting that he was born in September 1944 in Mbarara hospital.

“I will make 73 years next month. I was born at Mbarara Hospital…..I tried to look for documents and I could not trace them, but later I asked and got the exact month when I was born, I was born in the middle of the month of Nyakanga (September) in 1944,” New Vision of Aug 8, 2017 reportedly quotes Museveni as saying on Page 13

Contrary to the erroneous view that the Kinoni events had dealt a death blow to the age-limit debate Alas. It seems well alive.

If this was Trump’s America, the president would be tweeting about Fake News.

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