Covid-19 pandemic has seen Museveni’s facebook audience grow by 26%- report

A new report has indicated that President Museveni’s facebook audience has grown by at least 26% mostly because of the current Coronavirus pandemic.

A survey titled “World Leaders on Facebook” done by global communications agency Burson Cohn & Wolfe(BCW)  targeting how governments and world leaders have used social media during the latest Covid-19 pandemic has indicated an increase in his facebook audience over the past two months.

“Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni’s followers on facebook have grown by 26% to 604,000,” the report says.

According to the Senior Presidential Press Secretary, Don Wanyama, the Covid-19 fight has confirmed Museveni’s leadership credentials.

“Where other leaders waited for cases to be confirmed or reach a certain threshold before taking decisive action, President Museveni like the proverbial giraffe that sees where other animals do not was just in time to order the closure of key “breeding” points like schools and places of worship even before Uganda had registered a single case of COVID-19. With hindsight now, and looking at what devastation this pandemic has caused elsewhere, we can say this was a stroke of genius,”Wanyama said.

“The issue, therefore, is not just about having a great health system or qualified medical workers. Just like this pandemic has shown, even the best health systems will be stretched. Leadership becomes key in the preventive struggle, especially in designing the right messages and rallying the public to follow and act as per the messages.”

Uganda currently has 74 confirmed coronavirus cases and 46 recoveries but there has not been any death so far.

Africa

However, despite seeing biggest strides made in regards growth in his facebook audience, Museveni is not the best on the continent in regards the number of followers.

“Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo is the most popular leader in Sub-Saharan Africa with 1.6 million likes, ahead of Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. However, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali has made it into the Top 10 list with 735,000-page likes and he has the best true reach, reaching 35 percent of his Facebook community,” the report says.

The study that analyzed the activity of 721 Facebook pages of heads of state and government, and foreign ministers  using aggregate data from Facebook’s CrowdTangle tool also indicated that  the U.S. President Donald Trump dominates the rankings for the most interactions with 309 million comments, likes and shares on his Facebook page over the past 12 months, ahead of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro with 205 million interactions.

The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has more than four times as many page likes is only in third place with a total of 84 million interactions over the past 12 months.

The report indicates that world leaders have seen their follower numbers grow exponentially in March 2020 as citizens are looking for guidance during the coronavirus pandemic.

Other findings

According to the survey, during the month of March, the 721 pages of world leaders analyzed in the study, part of the Twiplomacy series, have added 13 million new page likes, a 3.7 percent increase, which is almost half of the growth these pages enjoyed overall over the past 12 months.

Notably the pages of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and those of the governments of Austria, Estonia and Italy have more than doubled their page likes in March 2020 alone.

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi according to the survey is still the most popular world leader on Facebook, with more than 44.7 million likes on his personal page and 13.7 million likes on his institutional Prime Minister of India page, which is in fourth position.

U.S. President Donald Trump is the second most popular world leader on Facebook, with more than 26 million likes and Jordan’s Queen Rania is in third position with 16.8 million likes, although she has registered a slight decline over the past 12 months.

“The significant increase in followers of world leaders on Facebook is a logical result of two primary drivers, populations seeking definitive answers on the coronavirus issues and their country’s definitive policy on managing the pandemic, but also the fact that studies are showing   that time online generally has increased in some cases up to 36% and on Facebook more than 20%,” said Chad Latz, the Chief Innovation Office at BCW.