Minister Tumwebaze told local media that the proposed is not necessarily meant to boost revenue but also to promote local content by giving local innovators a chance to produce their apps for mass consumption.

He also said that the proposed social media tax will help in indirectly taxing the developers of these social media platforms who earn a lot of their users.

Read Also: Why Ugandans will have to pay UGX100 tax to use social media

“What the president is saying is, let's put a tax on consumption of imported content. If we are innovating and we are also pushing it and take it online, we export. This tax proposal is not for boosting revenue collection. We want to tax those applications so that even our local technology innovators can have a chance to produce their own apps,” he said.

Social media tax proposal

The tax on social media platforms was proposed by President Museveni in a letter addressed to the Minister of Finance Matia Kasaija where he expressed dissatisfaction in the failure of identifying alternative sources of revenue.

President Museveni argued that charging a small fee of about UGX100 on sim-cards using social media platforms would generate about UGX400bn in additional revenue for the country.

“On the issue of the so called "over-the-top" platforms (OTT), such as Whatsapp, Skype, Viber, Twitter, etc, if we were to introduce a small fee of UGX100 per day from sim-cards that are used by these OTT's, that would generate about UGX400bn additional revenue,” he said.

His proposal sent shockwaves through a section of Ugandans, especially those who use these social media platforms on a daily.