With just ten days to go before Uganda's presidential election on January 15, a tense atmosphere pervades the streets of the capital, Kampala. Nyombi Thembo, CEO of the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), claimed in a television interview that government engineers "can shut down any application that threatens national security at any time." However, Calle, the anonymous developer of the decentralized communication software Bitchat, responded with a curt statement on the X platform:
"Good luck, buddy. You can't stop Bitchat, and you can't stop us."
The two sides clashed remotely, instantly pushing "who can control the flow of information" to the core of pre-election concerns.
Download Surge Under the Shadow of Internet Disconnection
The fear of internet shutdowns among Ugandans is not unfounded. During the 2016 and 2021 elections, the government twice ordered nationwide internet shutdowns. Although the UCC currently denies plans for another shutdown, social trust has been repeatedly eroded. Opposition leader Bobi Wine therefore urged his supporters to download Bitchat; within weeks, the app's downloads in Uganda surged to 400,000, representing approximately 1% of the population. For many voters, decentralized tools are no longer a technological novelty, but a lifeline to ensure they can stay connected on election day.
Bluetooth mesh networking technology armor
Traditional internet blocking strategies rely on ISPs to implement IP blocking or DNS poisoning, operating like a tollbooth: once the gate is closed, vehicles cannot pass. Bitchat's design overturns this centralized model. It uses a Bluetooth mesh network, allowing messages to be transferred between mobile phones via peer-to-peer (P2P). When the device density is sufficient, the entire city is like being covered with invisible "mini routers," continuously transmitting text, images, and encrypted wallet signatures without the need for SIM cards, central servers, or the internet backbone.
According to the technical specifications , messages are encrypted end-to-end using Curve25519 and AES-GCM, and user registration does not require a phone number or email address. If the government wants to terminate communications, it would need to simultaneously confiscate all smartphones or launch a prolonged nationwide radio jamming campaign; administrative orders alone are clearly insufficient.
Parallel Communication Experiments Amid Global Turmoil
Uganda is not the only battleground testing the resilience of decentralized communications. During the corruption protests in Nepal in 2025, Bitchat saw a sudden increase of 50,000 users; in Jamaica, during Hurricane Melissa, most base stations were down, and the mesh network became the last line of defense for disaster victims. These cases demonstrate that when infrastructure is impacted by political or natural disasters, peer-to-peer protocols can quickly self-organize alternative channels to fill information gaps.
Developer Calle stated frankly:
"We don't need anyone's permission to write code."
Compared to the traditional regulatory power held by Nyombi Thembo, this statement seems to focus on a deeper contradiction—which is more effective, legal directives or mathematical encryption?
The cost of information blocking is rising rapidly.
From a political and market perspective, this standoff sends a clear signal: in 2026, completely blocking the flow of information will be far more difficult and costly than in the past. Whether the government can resort to more radical measures remains to be seen, but as long as any two mobile phones can still "handshake" via Bluetooth, messages can bypass the gateway and continue to circulate. Regardless of the election outcome, the balance of technological power has irreversibly shifted.
Nyombi Thembo emphasizes its "most concentrated" engineering team in the country, but with distributed Bluetooth nodes, traditional intermediary-based control tools are gradually becoming ineffective. The Uganda incident thus serves as a preview for global policymakers: if they insist on relying on gateway thinking, every future "plugging the cable" action may be like trying to stop a wave with a broom, increasing political costs with limited results.
The next step will be whether voters can maintain uninterrupted communication on election day, which will be the most direct field test to verify this technology. To the outside world, Kampala may be staging a modern version of "notes against toll booths," moving humanity's pursuit of information freedom to a new stage that is more invisible and harder to intercept.
