FALSE: Ugandan political commentator Frank Gashumba hasn’t been gunned down
PesaCheck spoke with Gashumba by phone and he confirmed he is well.
A video shared on YouTube claiming Frank Gashumba, a Ugandan regular media panellist, has been shot and is in critical condition, has a FALSE HEADLINE.
The 44:11-minute video starts with a commentator making claims about Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
In Luganda, the commentator talks about the recent attacks in Uganda on security personnel, in which the assailants took away their guns. The panellist further says the attack was planned by the president.
Unrelated to the title, the narrator says Museveni was behind the war in northern Uganda, and not Joseph Kony, the Lord Resistance Army leader.
This video is titled, “Emilanga Frank Gasumba akubidwa Amasasi e Kilo kya leero. Aliko kikuba mukono”, which loosely translates to, “Frank Gasumba was shot last night. He is in critical condition”.
However, in the eighth minute of the video, the commentator talks about Gashumba, claiming that he is in a bad state as he is being haunted by the ghost of Jakana Nadduli, a politician who died in October 2022.
The commentator claims Gashumba killed Jakana, son of Abdul Nadduli, an ex-bush war fighter in Uganda. Other claims about Gashumba are made, but not the alleged shooting.
The alleged incident is also posted on Facebook.
However, the headline is just clickbait as PesaCheck talked to Gashumba by telephone and he said he was in good health.
PesaCheck looked into a video posted on YouTube claiming that popular Ugandan political commentator Frank Gashumba is in critical condition after being shot, and found 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 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 Flavia Nassaka and PesaCheck Senior Copy Editor Cédrick Irakoze and acting chief copy editor Francis Mwaniki.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck Managing Editor Doreen Wainainah.
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.
