I have written this ‘Majority Report’ column every Saturday for eight straight years. Before, I wrote for The Observer for five years, similarly doing so every week without fail.
Over these combined 13 years as a weekly columnist, I have had nearly unfettered freedom to take on topics I deemed apt and write without undue censorship from my editors, company management or owners.
Only once did my Daily Monitor editors temporarily put on hold an article I filed – it didn’t run until the following week. I had made an assertion, perhaps construed as potentially problematic, so legal clearance was sought.
The piece eventually ran, totally unchanged; no word was edited out. As I waited for word from the legal department, I shared the piece with a highly respected former senior editor. He told me there was not a single word he would take out if he were making the editorial call. I was encouraged. Thus, when the clearance came through and the piece was published, I was not surprised.
When I started writing for The Observer, my editor, Richard Kavuma, was unequivocal – I would have the latitude to take on any topic or subject, including tackling specific political actors (though nothing personal); everything was fair game if my opinions were solid on logic, firm on evidence where necessary.
Someone reading my column in The Observer, and later this ‘Majority Report’, and indeed the many opinion columns that on different days of the week, some consistently and continuously published for more than two decades, would easily hand Uganda an A grade on media freedom!
The opinion pages of Daily Monitor, and the weekend papers – Saturday and Sunday – have long carried some of the most incisive and critical analyses of Uganda under Mr Yoweri Museveni’s rule. What is more, none of the regular columnists, from the Monday paper to Sunday Monitor, has suffered personal harm or harassment by the State. That, though, is only less than half the story.
The company and Daily Monitor, as a newspaper, along with its editors, though have at different times faced unwarranted state repression, including shutting down operations for prolonged durations, as happened in 2005 and 2013, resulting in revenue loss, but especially exacting a chilling impact on journalistic independence.
While writing for The Observer, back then as a graduate student, some of my teachers at Northwestern University in Chicago/Evanston, who knew Uganda’s politics a bit, were often deeply worried every time I took the trip back home. Given what they read in my column, they feared I would be yanked from the airport on arrival and harmed or, at best, incarcerated.
I never felt the same fear because I strongly believed that my column, like many others, posed zero political threat to the rulers. If anything, Mr Museveni and members of his rulership would easily point to relatively free media platforms, like Daily Monitor and The Observer, as evidence of Uganda’s democratic credentials.
Until very recently, I never thought the ‘Majority Report’ can cause me any trouble with Uganda’s autocratic rulership, in part because my professional status and institutional location likely would generate unnecessary bad press for the Ugandan government. But I have always left room for the possibility of some overzealous mid-rank, even lowlife, apparatchiks keen to impress or account for operational funds doing something nefarious.
The worst thrown at me over the years, though, were some nasty emails, some purporting to convey death threats, which I mostly laughed off.
I say until recently because I am now persuaded that Uganda’s political trajectory has taken a decided turn for the dark alleys of unbridled repression and blatant erosion of media freedom. The ‘Faustian bargain’ that Charles Obbo recently wrote about, the unwritten compromise of granting minimal accommodation to critical voices, which entailed allowing caustic columns like this one to run along with different forms of censorship and curtailment of free speech, appears all but shuttered.
The latest glaring infraction of banning the Nation Media Group platforms (Daily Monitor, NTV, KFM, etc.) from Parliament may seem extreme and shocking, but it tracks fully with the overall flow.
The sad irony is that this affront is happening at the behest of individuals ordinarily expected to stand up for and in defence of the media, particularly an outlet like Daily Monitor despite unfavourable reporting.
Today, Parliament is presided over by two former members of an Opposition political party, for what it is worth, both relatively younger and supposed to represent a new direction away from a decaying rulership.
Worse, Parliament’s Director of Communications, a civil servant but who unabashedly wears a badge of partisanship and openly displays unfiltered sycophancy, made his professional name working as a reporter and editor at Daily Monitor!
It is perhaps a sign of the times that individuals expected to stand on the progressive side of society and the public interest are among the most reactionary actors, wallowing in the glory of the positions they occupy today but unable to discern the treachery of power.