Uganda police fire tear gas on inflation protesters

• Police in Uganda use tear gas to disperse protests over rising fuel and food prices in three towns.
• In Jinja, demonstrators set fire to tyres and blocked roads before police dispersed them with tear gas.
• Similar scenes played out in the towns of Kamuli and Luuka, witnesses said.

Police in Uganda used tear gas to disperse protests over rising fuel and food prices in three towns on Monday, according to police and witnesses. Several people were arrested.

It was the second time in a month that protesters took to the streets to express their outrage at the rising cost of living in a country whose economy has been severely harmed by the Covid-19 pandemic and, more recently, the Ukraine war.

In Jinja, an industrial city lying on the shores of Lake Victoria in southeastern Uganda, demonstrators set fire to tyres and blocked roads before police dispersed them with tear gas, witnesses said.

Similar scenes played out in the towns of Kamuli and Luuka to the north of Jinja, they said.

Ugandan police spokesman Fred Enanga told reporters in the capital Kampala that the protests were quickly subdued.

Several people have been arrested and will face the “full force of the law”, he said, without giving further details.

He claimed the demonstrators “want to use fear to promote violence, and it will lead to a vicious cycle of violence across the country if not stopped”.

Fruit seller Moses Lukwanga, 59, told AFP that the protesters in Jinja burnt tyres and set up barricades to stop the deployment of police.

“The protesters forced people to close business and by the time police came to disperse them with tear gas, the whole street was deserted.”

Richard Mukose, a 35-year-old taxi driver from Kamuli, said a section of road linking the town to Jinja had been made impassable by protesters before police fired volleys of tear gas and cleared the area.

In Kampala, traffic and business continued as normal, but there was a heavy deployment of police backed by the military.

For a week, messages have been splashed on social media calling on Ugandans to stay home and stop paying taxes in a bid to compel the government to take action over the rising prices.

But President Yoweri Museveni has said that cutting taxes or creating subsidies to try to resolve the crisis would only make the situation worse by giving people “artificial comfort”.

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