‘Humour is powerful’: Cartoons take on Uganda’s repressive government

Huge potholes and rundown hospitals are actually getting fixed – thanks to online satirical campaigns

Ugandan cartoonist Jim Spire Ssentongo didn’t know what he was starting last April when he sent out a tweet encouraging people to post photos of the ubiquitous potholes across the country’s capital.

“A friend of mine is organising a mega KAMPALA POTHOLE PHOTO EXHIBITION” he wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on April 15 last year. “Share here photos of potholes in Kampala city, with: location, depth, circumference, and estimated age of the pothole.” He asked his followers to tag the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) and their counterpart responsible for the country’s roads.

Back in 2005, there were efforts to stage physical exhibitions of the country’s infamous potholes – what locals call “ponds” in the roads because of their size. But these attempts were thwarted by the police, recalls Ssentongo.

So the idea to hold an exhibition online came to mind, says Ssentongo, 45. He comes across as a deep thinker, taking time to consider his responses before speaking. Ssentongo admits that the tweet calling for pothole photos was “partly joking, partly sounding out how it would be received”, adding that he didn’t “plan to turn it into a grand initiative”.

But that’s exactly what happened. Ugandans started uploading their photos immediately. In response, Joshua Mutabazi, added at least five photos to the thread, including one that shows a 30-centimetre (12-inch) pothole with a 3.5-metre (11.5-foot) circumference that he estimated was two years old. By the end of the day, there were more than 13,000 tweets with the hashtag the #KampalaPotholeExhibition, posted by fed-up citizens in the pothole-plagued country.