Parliament this week blocked journalists from Nation Media Group Uganda, including Daily Monitor, from covering the House. It was done willy-nilly and weaselly, through mealy-mouthed references to obscure investigations by “security” — often a blanket reference designed to both intimidate and deflect accountability.
Whoever called the shot lacked the testicular fortitude to own it, as well as the decorum to subject it, even circumstantially, to due process. Isn’t it ironic when lawmakers act outside the laws they write and pass?
Alas, this unparliamentary behaviour in Parliament has been more than a decade in the making. What was initially a box-ticking accreditation process for journalists to cover the House was slowly but surely weaponised to get rid of pesky journalists. Those that remained faced an impossible choice, of reporting and keeping their places on the perch, or doing journalism and facing the consequences. Tellingly, the most critical coverage of Parliament is increasingly coming from activist outfits like Agora, or super-niche ones like Parliament Watch.
Yet Parliament is not alone in wanting to determine who covers it, and how it is covered. It is merely following the example set by the Presidency and several other public entities that seek to criminalise criticism and weaponise access and advertising.
Public officials choosing who covers them and how is the equivalent of school pupils marking their own homework and awarding themselves grades. The rose crown of occupying public office and being paid off the taxpayer’s purse comes with the thorns of accountability and the discomfort of criticism, including that which the officeholder might find offensive.
A public official who finds themselves on the receiving end of coverage or criticism that they find unfair has three options. The first is to demand the right of reply to counter the unfair or incorrect criticism with facts and allow the truth to emerge.
Any self-respecting media house, aware that it’s engaged in an unending pursuit of the best obtainable version of the truth, should stand corrected and provide a clarification or apology to its audience and the concerned official if needed.
Public officials (and private individuals) also have the right to seek legal redress if they have reason to believe that they have been libelled or defamed. This isn’t always perfect, and there are very recent examples of public officials leaning on judges to find for them in defamation lawsuits, or award them extortionate damages — but this at least allows some due process.
Thin-skinned public officials irritated by constant criticism can also return to private life where, unmoored from the public purse and perks of public office, they can enjoy undisturbed peace and quiet.
What they shouldn’t be allowed to do is to use the political, financial and administrative power of their public offices to insulate themselves from accountability, or reward, from the public purse, the praise-singers who see or hear no evil.
In the early days of the NRM government, President Museveni routinely summoned senior editors to chew the fat. The conversations were off-the-record or on deep background to allow for candid exchanges.
The journalists circled and probed. The President, confident in his ideology and comfortable in his intellect, parried, explained, counterargued. Some of the editors, like Wafula Oguttu, had been activists and active supporters. Others, like William Pike at New Vision, had given the NRA rebel group an imprimatur of credibility and acceptance. The exchanges gave the editors context; it gave the President and his NRM top brass free intelligence.
Two broad takeaways emerge from the rising contemporary attacks on independent media in Uganda in particular, and civil society generally. First, the NRA/M has lost its ideological and intellectual core that was able to debate its inevitable contradictions internally and cogently respond to criticism externally. The NRA/M wasn’t always an advocate of free press as the advertising ban on the Monitor showed, but there were enough insiders to argue back and show the dangers of a one-sided story. Onboarding opponents and dissidents as converts has expanded the NRM church but diluted its religion and the faith of its adherents.
The second is that as the underlying business model of traditional media shifts away from advertising to reader revenue, the premium on credible and independent media is going to become higher, not less. The onus will fall on ordinary citizens to back — with their wallets, attention, and feedback — those media houses that are best aligned to their world views and act in the broader public interest.
It is admittedly a bit of a self-serving argument, but you get the media you deserve, the information you are willing to pay for, and the media houses and spaces you are willing to fight for.