FALSE: Uganda has not deployed 500,000 troops to Burkina Faso

UPDF says the claim is false.

This post on X (formerly Twitter) claiming that Uganda has deployed 500,000 troops to Burkina Faso is FALSE.

The post claims that Uganda’s army was deployed to assist the western African country in fending off the US invasion.

The text accompanying the video reads, “Let’s go Afrika. Makunyiwe once! Hand off Traore!!! (sic)”

The post emerged a week after Burkina Faso authorities said they had foiled an attempt to overthrow military leader Ibrahim Traoré.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an invasion as “an act of invading especially: incursion of an army for conquest or plunder.”

Uganda’s entire military, the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF), has about 45,000 active personnel, according to statistics published on the Ministry of Defence and Veteran Affairs website.

To further verify the claim, PesaCheck performed a Google reverse image search on the video’s screenshots. The results revealed that the video is from November 2022 and shows a UPDF training in Kabamba, Uganda.

PesaCheck contacted Brigadier-General Felix Kulayigye, the army spokesperson, who said in a WhatsApp message that the claim of Uganda deploying in Burkina Faso is fake.

“That’s fake. Please ignore it,” Brigadier-General Kulayigy wrote.

To verify the authenticity of the claims about a US invasion of Burkina Faso, PesaCheck performed a search using the keywords “United States invasion of Burkina Faso 2025” and found reports suggesting that the US had threatened to invade the country.

Uganda’s Constitution, specifically chapter twelve, requires parliamentary approval before it can deploy its military to a foreign mission. By the time this post was made, parliament was in recess.

PesaCheck nevertheless contacted Chris Obore, the director communications and public relations at parliament, who referred to the claim as ‘imaginary”.

“As far as I know there is no discussion in parliament, formal or informal, about deployment of troops in Burkina Faso. We have a Minister of Defence who would have notified parliament but I do not think he would be drawn to respond to imaginary issues,” Obore wrote in a WhatsApp message.

Available information shows that Uganda has deployed in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Somalia.

PesaCheck looked into a post on X claiming that Uganda has sent 500,000 troops to Burkina Faso to help confront a purported US invasion, and found it to be FALSE.

This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.

By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.

Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.

This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Flavia Nassaka and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Mary Mutisya and chief copy editor Stephen Ndegwa.

The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editor Doreen Wainainah.

PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.

PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.