Internet giant, Wikipedia yesterday (Tuesday) shocked Ugandans when it declared that the current speaker of the Ugandan Parliament had passed on.
Clear in bold letters, the Wikimedia owned website indicated that the honorable speaker had died on 14th March 2022 in a hospital in Seattle, Washington in the United States of America.
As more and more Ugandans Googled up to see if this was true, the team at Wikipedia hurriedly edited the article hosted on their website and removed all the past tense that had been accorded to Jacob Oulanyah.
As it normally is with deceased people on the Internet, Wikipedia changes the tense of a personality's article to past tense when that person passes away and it's clear that for a period of 2 days, Oulanyah's biography was indicating "was"(past tense) instead of "is".
How did Wikipedia, a well established company make such a mistake
First of all, for those Ugandans who are still new to the Internet and think uncle Google tasobya(Doesn't make mistakes), it makes mistakes and does this oftenly.
Google and Wiki are two different things but one (Google) leads you to the other. So Wikipedia to make this mistake all comes down to the fact that it's content is edited by fellow human beings known as contributors.
These contributors have been feeding it with articles since 2001 when it opened shop and regularly edit them to ensure that the content therein is correct.
Communications director at Parliament of Uganda, Chris Obore said that malicious Ugandans were behind the wrong information fed to Wikipedia on Jacob Oulanyah's profile and that they made use of VPN to hide their true identity.
Is the current Speaker of Uganda's Parliament dead
According to people close to him such as the deputy speaker, Anita Among, Nobert Mao and others the speaker is not dead but it is true he went outside Uganda for specialised treatment.
He was flown out of Uganda on 3rd Feb and arrived in Seattle, Washington (USA) on 4th Feb aboard a chartered flight on Uganda Airlines.
The flying of Oulanyah to USA caused quite a stir in the Parliament of Uganda after members of the opposition especially those of NUP political party lashed out how the country was wasting resources instead of taking the speaker to a Ugandan hospital.
Democratic Party (DP) president Norbert Mao who is Oulanyah's close friend came out to defend him at that time and called the NUP people hypocrites. This was because, no one made noise when their party president, Bobi Wine was flown out of the country on government funds for specialised treatment in 2018 after the ugly events of the Arua by-election.
WATCH VIDEO: Nobert Mao blasts opposition politicians over Jacob Oulanyah
However, NUP's secretary General,David Lewis Rubongoya denied this and said it is on record that Bobi Wine used his own funds to access medical health care outside Uganda in 2018.
