Huawei’s 5G Gamble: Security Risks Lurking in Uganda’s Next-Gen Network Rollout
Kampala’s neon-lit streets pulse with promise. Matatus weave through traffic, vendors hawk cheap SIM cards, and MTN Uganda’s billboards boast lightning-fast 5G. The first commercial 5G network went live in April 2023 at HIMA Cement’s Kasese plant, followed by Airtel’s 5G-ready core upgrades in the capital. MTN has poured $25 million into Huawei’s cloud-native infrastructure, while regulators prepare to auction spectrum for nationwide rollout. Officials speak of “Digital Uganda Vision 2040”: 20,000 government entities connected, e-services for 90% of citizens, factories run by drones with near-zero latency. At Huawei Connect 2025, commissioners praised the Chinese giant for slashing last-mile configuration times to one minute.
Yet beneath the hype lies a chilling gamble. Huawei already dominates Uganda’s telecom backbone. Its $126 million Safe City CCTV network, complete with facial recognition and biometric links to NIRA, has been used to track and arrest hundreds of protesters since 2020. Whistleblowers and international investigations have repeatedly shown Huawei technicians embedded with police cyber units, training officers on predictive targeting and, in 2018-2019, allegedly helping crack Bobi Wine’s encrypted opposition chats.
5G changes everything. Thousands of new small-cell antennas, massive IoT connectivity, and ultra-low latency create a surveillance superhighway. Global intelligence agencies — from the Five Eyes to the European Union — warn that Huawei equipment, bound by China’s National Intelligence Law, can be compelled to open backdoors or hand over data. The U.S. has blacklisted the company entirely. In Africa, where Huawei supplies 70% of 5G infrastructure, Belt and Road loans often come with the gear attached, locking nations into long-term dependency.
In Uganda, the risks are acute. The same company that helped police hunt protesters in 2021 is now wiring the country’s next-generation network. With the January 2026 general elections fast approaching, Bobi Wine’s youth-driven campaign is mobilising millions on TikTok and X. A Huawei-powered 5G grid could enable real-time monitoring of social media sentiment, geofencing of rallies, instant data exfiltration, and AI-flagged “high-risk” individuals — all without independent oversight from the Uganda Communications Commission.
Unwanted Witness’s June 2025 cyber-surveillance report describes the landscape as “worsening.” Youth unemployment remains stuck above 20%, police brutality is rampant, and the regime has already shown willingness to weaponise technology against its own citizens. As one exiled activist told Watchdog: “They used Huawei cameras to find us in 2021. With 5G they won’t even need to look — the network will tell them where we are before we move.”
Huawei insists it poses no greater risk than any other vendor and points to its global transparency centres. Government officials dismiss spying allegations as foreign propaganda. But with elections just weeks away and Gen Z anger boiling over, Uganda stands at a crossroads: embrace a future of blistering speed and economic promise, or wake up to discover the fastest network in East Africa has become the regime’s most powerful tool of control.
The choice is not technical. It is political — and the stakes have never been higher.
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