The Uganda Police over the past 24 hours was forced into frantic damage control, after details emerged of a Kenyan national, who was hired to manage social media for the Police Force.
The woman by the names of Cynthia Nyamai stumbled into negative light last evening following her efforts to introduce the newly appointed Inspector General of Police (IGP) Martins Okoth Ochola to social media.
Ms Nyamai was brought in from Kenya as a social media consultant, and her primary job for the last four years or so, was to manage the former IGP Kale Kayihura’s social media.
Ever since, she had successfully avoided publicity, until when she attempted days ago, to create a new Twitter account for the new IGP Ochola.
Instead of opening a new account, she blundered by trying to turn an old Uhuru Kenyatta Twitter bot account that she presumably used to run back home in Kenya, into Ochola’s account.
She apparently changed the bot account from @_UKenyatta to @IGPUganda.
Until last week, @IGPUganda was the official account handle of Gen Kayihura and had exceeded 50,000 followers.
After being fired from the Police, the account was personalized and the handle changed from @IGPUganda to @KayihuraKale.
Ms Nyamai, perhaps in an effort to avoid having to open a new account with zero followers for the new IGP, she decided to give him her old bot account, changing its handle from @_UKenyatta to @IGPUganda.
She forgot however, to delete the scores of old tweets that the account had posted in past.
This slip up was first dug up by a twitter user named Jeff Hardy, who exposed it to the shock of the Ugandan twitterverse.
“Kenyan PR guru Cynthia Nyamai and team were running Office of IGP account and when Kayihura got fired, they changed IGP account into Kale Kayihura’s personal account then modified a Uhuru Kenyatta bot account they were running as (@_Ukenyatta) and gave it to the new IGP Ochola,” he wrote
https://twitter.com/andsjeff/status/1029085589600055302
The official account of Uganda’s IGP had tweets about the Kenyan elections, attacking the Kenyan and Rwandan Opposition politicians, and a wide range of silly banter!
Story Courtesy of CHIMPREPORTS
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