FALSE HEADLINE: Entebbe International Airport is not yet open for scheduled passenger flights
While the airport has received a number of repatriation flights, it is not yet open to commercial passenger flights
An article claiming that Entebbe International Airport has reopened has a FALSE HEADLINE.
While the article correctly reports that 32 Ugandans who had been stranded in Khartoum, Sudan, returned home through Entebbe International Airport, the claim that the facility has reopened is untrue.
On Saturday, March 21, 2020, President Yoweri Museveni announced the closure of Uganda’s international borders and Entebbe International Airport, as part of preventive measures to counter the spread of COVID-19. These restrictions on the movement of people became effective at midnight on March 22, 2020.
Subsequently, Uganda suspended all incoming and outbound commercial passenger flights, only allowing cargo flights into the country.
However, on June 23, 2020, the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in charge of International Cooperation, Mr Okello Oryem announced that Uganda would allow flights repatriating its citizens to enter the country.
The minister said that Ugandans in South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, the United States, and India were expected to arrive in the country in subsequent weeks.
On the same day, 32 Ugandans who had been stranded in Khartoum arrived at Entebbe International Airport and were received by Minister Oryem.
A statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Uganda’s embassies are making special arrangements for the repatriation exercise. The Ministry, however, noted that despite the ongoing repatriation exercise, Entebbe airport is not open to commercial passenger flights.
The statement said the ministry is taking advantage of flights coming into Uganda to evacuate nationals of other countries in the repatriation exercise while some of the returnees are also arranging for their own flights.
PesaCheck has looked into an article claiming that Entebbe International Airport has been reopened for passenger flights and finds it to have a FALSE HEADLINE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck Fact-Checker Pius Enywaru and edited by PesaCheck Deputy Editor Enock Nyariki.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck Managing Editor Eric Mugendi.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.
