A recent TikTok post has been flagged as PARTLY FALSE by PesaCheck, a fact-checking initiative based in East Africa. The post features footage of military personnel boarding an aircraft, accompanied by a screenshot of a post by General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Chief of Defence Forces, announcing the withdrawal of Uganda People’s Defence Forces troops from Somalia.
However, PesaCheck's investigation revealed that the video is misleading. A reverse image search traced the footage to Malawi, where it was filmed during the official closing ceremony of a paratrooper training course at the Malawi Defence Force Parachute Battalion in Salima. The course involved 95 paratroopers from Malawi and Zambia conducting two sky jumps: 1,500-feet and 6,000-feet landings.
While it is true that General Kainerugaba announced the withdrawal of UPDF troops from Somalia, the video accompanying the post does not show Ugandan soldiers. Chris Magezi, the army’s acting director defence public information, confirmed that the UPDF embarked on the drawdown of troops deployed in Somalia shortly after the CDF declared the same.
PesaCheck is part of an ongoing series of 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.
The fact-check was written by senior PesaCheck fact-checker Pius Enywaru and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Mary Mutisya and Cédrick Irakoze. The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck’s managing editor Doreen Wainainah. PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative, co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein.
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. The initiative seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world.
The goal of PesaCheck is to provide the public with deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds, especially those related to public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation.
Key points
- The video accompanying the TikTok post does not show Ugandan soldiers withdrawing from Somalia.
- The footage is from a paratrooper training course in Malawi, involving military personnel from Malawi and Zambia.
- PesaCheck is a fact-checking initiative that helps to sort fact from fiction in public pronouncements about public finances in East Africa.
