17 June 2008
Kampala — Some of the most recent international press freedom ratings of Uganda are unimpressive. If you pick out the placement of African countries in this year's Press Freedom Index, which is based on 2007 facts, Uganda is 25th in Africa.
But because Mauritius and Namibia, tie as the African countries with the highest level of press freedom, and Burkina Faso and Zambia also tie at 11, in lay terms Uganda is 27th. Ten or so years ago, Uganda was hovering at between 2nd and 3rd as the country with the freest media environment. Over the years, the Kampala regime has tightened the screws on the media, to a point where there's now a "crack squad" of the cabinet formed to squeeze the media further.
It has been widely reported that, among other things, the cabinet committee is considering scrapping all references to press freedom in the constitution. Why has Uganda come to a point where even Ivory Coast and Angola have a freer media? There are several misconceptions. One of them is that the Uganda media is brave, and has held its own against attacks from the state. That's not true. The independent media in Uganda, especially sections of it like Daily Monitor, Weekly Observer, and some of the FM stations like CBS that are not god-fathered by powerful political figures, have actually toned down in recent years. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the attack that President Museveni made against Daily Monitor a few days ago in Parliament when he flayed the media for being "saboteurs" of his economic miracles. It seems the president couldn't find a recent offensive article from Daily Monitor, so he exhumed a faded 2005 copy of the paper that had the story of his much-touted "$1 sale" of Dairy Corporation, to show as evidence of how irresponsible the paper is.
This episode illustrates another little understood fact. The Museveni government doesn't want a more "responsible and professional" media. It wants a propagandistic and cheering media. For this reason, even deadpan neutrality is considered subversive, and will be punished. This media support is important for the government, or at least the president, because he has embarked on his fourth (in reality sixth) term. With the case for a presidency-for-life discredited by the excesses and failures of the regime (runaway corruption, letting key infrastructure fall into rot, and Stone Age torture "safe houses"), the only way continued rule by Museveni makes sense is if there were to be a new consensus around it. This consensus requires that, among others, the media join in the chorus campaigning for "mzee to carry on the great job." Critical and neutral media, will show that the media, as representative of significant public opinion, are not with the plan. Because this is not fully appreciated, it has led to the next erroneous view that the Museveni government wants to shut down independent newspapers and FM stations.
That is unlikely, because it would take away a lot of the legitimacy that a sixth Museveni term would need. Because there is a wider international constituency that Kampala can't afford to ignore, it needs to be able to say the press is free and independent--and it has freely chosen to support the president. That argument becomes difficult to make if there is no free press at all. Even Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe knows that.
For this reason, the Museveni government actually benefits both when it's hammering the press, because the brave fight by people like The Independent's Andrew Mwenda only shows that there's a free press out there, and if it were to buckle to pressure and become subservient, that is still good because it makes the point that the free press has, of its own free will, decided to back the Big Man. All this then determines how the government is pursuing its anti-media war. The main targets of its bullets will be owners (which is why Mengo is taking a lot of stick for CBS), in the hope that in the wider interests of saving their business, they will either fire or silence the "noisy" journalists. The ownership model in Uganda is mixed though, because you still have Weekly Observer and The Independent that are owned by editors. These will, therefore, have to take a direct hit. Mwenda's scraps with the authorities can therefore be explained by the fact that he's the most outspoken of the owner-editors.
Daily Monitor editors meanwhile have received blows to their heads because it's owned by a big regional media house, which can't be found on Mengo Hill and roughed up the way the government does with the Buganda government. The journalists on the ground, therefore get the stick. But whatever else, the government doesn't want to see the free media dead. It just wants to turn it into a state choir.
The situation is like in the old primitive times when, in some communities, if a man liked a woman and wanted to marry her, he chased, beat her down, and literally raped her as courtship.
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