The Monitor/ NTV are living in terror, threatened with punishment, torture, and banning in fits of fiery fury from powerful forces at the top like they have never seen before.
The threats against The Monitor show a new and worrying form of decentralisation and, worse, dissipation of the state’s coercive power, against not just The Monitor, but the independent press, civil society, and the Opposition.
However, it could also be part of a wider malaise fracturing the state itself.
This article is an introduction to how the present attacks against The Monitor would have been totally ‘un-Museveni-like’ just a few years ago, but also about the President Yoweri Museveni I miss.
When I was managing editor of The Monitor, I saw a Museveni who was an iron-fisted strongman when he needed to be.
However, when he was good, he was good. He was intellectually arrogant and felt he could take on anyone, so he rarely descended into pettiness.
He relished a philosophical debate. Because he knew Wafula Oguttu, who was the MD, having been in the same study group (today it would be a WhatsApp group) with him in exile in Tanzania, most of his calls to The Monitor were to Waf.
Many of these calls were to complain about stories he didn’t like, but sometimes he subtly offered leads.
One morning, Museveni called Wafula early, even before he set off for work. When he was told the President wanted to talk to him, Wafula became anxious, thinking something awful had been published in the paper.
But no, Museveni was complaining about an innocuous short science story tucked away inside the paper, which he said had got wrong the melting point of a certain mineral! That was it.
Or was it? I, for one, thought Museveni had a tactical and strategic use for The Monitor.
With the no-party/Movement system labelled a one-party state, he used The Monitor as his democracy alibi.
His attacks on The Monitor were sometimes necessary to remind donor critics that a ‘dictatorship wouldn’t allow a paper like The Monitor to operate’.
Some of the attacks (and arrests and endless prosecutions) were to keep us off balance. But, primarily, it was manipulative for more strategic purposes.
Thus, if the ‘enemy paper’ published a positive story on the economy, for example, it had to be true.
In fact, Museveni would add, if we weren’t the enemy, we would have done an even more glowing report.
We were critical of Uganda’s role in the DR Congo war, and Andrew Mwenda and I were arrested and tried over the ‘Congo gold story’ in 1997.
The story alleged Uganda had been paid in gold by the Laurent Kabila government for supporting the ouster of the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
But despite the state’s anger, we continued to cover the DRC war.
And guess how our journalists continued to shuttle between Entebbe and the DRC and back. On UPDF transport planes! Can you imagine that happening today?
Which brings me to the main point about the thing Museveni did that many didn’t realise.
Nothing we ever got into trouble for arose from criticism of him as a person or president.
He was personally thick-skinned. We figured out most of his red lines. One, don’t attack his family unfairly, especially those who weren’t in public office.
For those who were public figures (like Gen Salim Saleh), they were fair game. The second touchy thing for him was national security.
The third, and this became an issue only much later, was the economy.
Here, it was the kind of reporting that he subjectively deemed was likely to discourage funders/investors. Everything else was there for the taking.
Then things changed. In the next article, I will examine the tragedy of what happened.
In my view at least, Museveni performed his last vintage Kaguta intellectual act in December 2013.
South African anti-apartheid hero and statesman Nelson Mandela passed away on December 5, 2013, at the age of 95.
On December 6, 2013, Museveni released a condolence statement titled “Mandela’s Life of Sacrifice,” where he traced the roots of African colonisation and apartheid back to a massive geopolitical shift in the 15th century.
Museveni argued that the “sad and heroic story of Mzee Mandela” actually began in 1453 AD when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), blocking the traditional overland trade routes between Europe and Asia (the silk and spice routes used by Marco Polo).
Because a direct maritime shortcut through Egypt did not exist as the Suez Canal hadn’t yet been built (and the land route was blocked by the Ottoman Empire), the Europeans had no choice but to circumnavigate the entire African continent.
It was this geographic necessity that placed South Africa in the crosshairs of European maritime strategy, leading the Dutch to firmly establish a Cape colony by 1652, followed by the British, planting the seeds of apartheid.
Without the Ottomans, Mandela would never have happened.
Even as a critic, there was still a joy in reading Museveni when he was in that groove.
That is the Museveni I miss. He has never really been a happy president since. We will return to that, but the cocky Museveni of that time wouldn’t be a man who would choose terror as the response to a story he didn’t like.