The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
COMMENT | IRENE BEST NYAPENDI | Uganda’s online public is fast, opinionated and unforgiving of silence; that’s the bitter fact. A single bad experience, a delayed refund, a rude call centre agent, a product that failed – used to stay between the customer and the company. Now it becomes a thread, a viral post, a trending topic, sometimes within hours. What determines whether a brand survives that moment is rarely the original mistake. It is what the brand does, or fails to do, in the minutes and hours that follow.
I have watched this pattern repeat itself across sectors: telecoms, banks, airlines, and retail chains. The initial complaint is often manageable. A network outage. A transaction that failed. A flight delay. These things happen everywhere in the world, and the public generally accepts that no company is perfect. What the Ugandan public does not accept is silence, and it especially does not accept defensiveness dressed up as an official statement.
Many corporate communication teams still operate on a 9:00am to 5:00pm mindset in a 24-hour online environment. A complaint that goes viral on a Friday evening can sit unanswered until Monday morning because nobody is monitoring the brand’s mentions over the weekend. By Monday, the narrative has already hardened. Customers have already decided the company does not care. No apology at that point, however well written, undoes three days of perceived indifference.
Then there is the instinct to get legalistic too quickly.
I have seen brands respond to public frustration with statements that read like they were drafted by a lawyer defending a court case rather than a company talking to its own customers. Phrases like “we categorically deny” or “the claims are baseless” might protect a company legally, but they alienate the very public whose trust the company needs to survive. People do not want to be lectured about their misunderstanding of the situation. They want to be heard, and they want to see a human being, not a legal disclaimer, respond to their frustration.
Contrast that with brands that get it right. The ones that respond quickly, acknowledge the frustration honestly, and give a clear next step earn credibility. Even when the original problem was serious, a fast and sincere response can flip public sentiment within hours. Ugandans are quick to criticize but equally quick to give credit when a company shows genuine accountability. “At least they responded” is a sentence that saves reputations.
The deeper issue is that many Ugandan organizations still treat social media monitoring and crisis communication as optional extras rather than core business functions. There is often no dedicated team watching conversations in real time, no pre-agreed escalation process for when a complaint starts gaining traction, and no clear internal chain of who is authorized to respond publicly without waiting for three levels of approval. By the time approval finally comes, the moment for an effective response has passed, and the brand is now playing catch-up in a conversation it should have led.
Crisis communication in this environment is not about having a perfect statement ready for every possible scenario. It is about speed, honesty and empowering someone within the organization to respond like a person rather than a press release. It is about building the internal muscle to detect a brewing storm before it becomes a full-blown trend and responding while there is still room to shape the story rather than merely react to it.
Ugandan companies do not lose public trust because bad things happen to them. Bad things happen to every organization eventually. They lose trust because of what they do or fail to do in the hours immediately after. In an online environment that moves this fast, silence is never neutral. It is always read as guilt, and by the time a brand finds the words to respond, the public has usually already decided the story without them.
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The writer is Nyapendi Irene Best, a Public Relations practitioner with Capital One Group EA Ltd and a Master of Arts candidate in Journalism and Strategic Communication at Uganda Christian University. Email: bestnyapendi@gmail.com
