My
attention has been drawn to your article in Sunday Monitor of
August 20, 2006 under the headline: “Isn’t The First
Family Fleecing Us?”
Sometime in 1993, in my last undergraduate year at university,
I was an intern helping Uganda Think Tank Foundation establish
an office. This group was led by Mr Elly Karuhanga, Mr Augustine
Ruzindana, Mr John Ndyabagye and Mr Wafula Oguttu, the Monitor’s
former editor-in-chief.
Two months into this, I was called for an interview for the
position of Administrative Officer to formalise my relationship
with the group. I was later told by Karuhanga that I had won
but Oguttu who had been a panelist had told his colleagues that
he would not have another Munyankore in the organisation.
He preferred a fellow easterner who had come second in the interview.
I have been told that in politics, that might probably be a
clever way of doing things but for me, I knew then that you
could not have a head of a newspaper that claims high moral
ground on profession and ethics, run by such a person who puts
tribe before merit.
You (Mwenda) don’t seem to appreciate that even if you
have a problem with President Museveni, governments come and
go but a nation remains. One of your colleagues approached our
firm at the end of 2005, asking for advertising and public relations
representation with the government.
He told me he had gotten approval to approach us, from your
top management. Your leadership has not the slightest remorse
that your paper has been at the forefront of fighting our firm
simply because me as an individual, in a firm of 20 people,
has a relationship with President Museveni.
He didn’t care that what your paper had done affected
many families of our employees and directors who have nothing
to do with President Museveni. I guess he came to us not out
of respect but wanted to use us for influence peddling, something
that I see your paper claiming to abhor. I guess you have the
proverbial nine lives of a cat. It just shows that even the
government you fight during the day, you make overtures for
attention and benefit in the night. The name for that kind of
behaviour is immorality.
In 2000, I remember I met with you and Mr Onyango Obbo at Speke
Hotel. I tried to raise these ethical and value judgement issues
that bedevil your organisation. You told me: “Mr Onyango
Obbo does not regard you highly”. I did not understand
that remark then, but as I later found out your group horned
all your political tricks from Obbo and Oguttu whom you all
regard as role models.
I was worried at the manner in which you were putting your faith
in people whose cause is nothing other than political advocacy
dressed in a journalism jacket. Six years later today, I see
that you have learned nothing and forgotten nothing like the
Bourbons in France who ruled the country before the French Revolution
and sought power 40 years later to rule in a similar fashion.
Instead you have thrown all caution to the wind and fully joined
a group that is debasing journalism and reducing the role of
media to political activism. I see you have even shifted the
centre of your political advocacy from the institution of government
to individuals you perceive to be associated with anyone in
government. The name for that kind of work is political witchhunt
and not journalism.
Ten years of Oguttu and Obbo tutoring have produced a rabid
and reckless politician not a professional journalist that I
thought you wanted to be. That, unfortunately, is the sad tale
of many of the kids like you who feed us with garbage everyday
on airwaves and in print and expect the nation to sit and listen.
The name for that is “crying-for-attention” and
not reporting.
As you would expect, that is so straining for people who have
other things to do and they just shut off the radios. I hear
you once in a while on air in a shouting match with everybody,
copying the style of show hosts on some international media
right from the naming of your programme to how it is structured
and I wonder what happened to originality and creativity in
our media houses.
What makes you think that Ugandans really enjoy this arrogance
born of a sense of some complex that you need to be heard? You
have a highly inflated sense of self exaltation. I guess that
is the reason you are a presenter, debater, judge and everything
else on your talk show.
Someone needs to tell you that there is a different and better
way things are done. It is the small things that are done by
private citizens, who you lampoon with government and whose
businesses your reportage seeks to ‘kill’, that
build a nation not the daily noise that pollutes air on radio.
Media houses like other businesses I suppose are founded on
strong ethical and professional tenets for them to create an
impact and establish respect from their clients. This is not
to say that good journalism is about avoiding political analysis.
Good journalism, in my opinion, is about respecting the principle
of balance and fairness for what you do as reporters and editors
has a deep impact on people’s lives and relationships.
Since in Africa people seem to eat and live politics, those
of you who have an opportunity to analyse politics, need to
be impartial and not divisive and anarchical, like the politicians
you criticise. Good journalism is about separating your opinions
and perceptions from the facts of a story or a feature so you
let your readers decide based on the information you have given
them.
Many times I have seen you and your colleagues’ allusions
and inferences which are highly opinionated and meant to drive
your readership to a certain conclusion, placed in the middle
of stories with no explanation. I have also seen stories regurgitated
many times just because they are associated with some of your
major advertisers and political sponsors.
I have seen stories that seek to ‘kill’ or curtail
growth of certain businesses whose leaders you perceive as associated
with government and you have no single comment from those businesses
or their leaders. I have also personally walked into your editors’
offices to clarify stories run without my comment and all you
do is pick those comments that you judge important from your
political stand point and re-write the previous day’s
negative story as a backgrounder.
In one case I could see that the reporter was untrained even
in the way he sought my answers to his questions but I let it
pass because I thought we as a nation needed a learning curve
to grow professions. What is shameful is that all this is presented
as ‘independent and truth everyday’ to your readers.
What is the difference between your paper and politicians who
shoot their mouth off about other people just to catch attention?
What is the difference between you, for example, and Beti Kamya
who goes on air and says I introduced the television tax, when
she clearly should know as an MP that a private citizen like
me does not raise motions in Parliament?
If a paper is not in business to build a strong foundation for
professionalism and ethical judgement of stories they run, they
are gutter press and should be seen as nothing more than that.
Let us take an example of the feature you ran on August 20,
2006. You claim that my shamba boy and my cook are all paid
by the State and my wife drives a Shs400m Mercedes Benz from
government. I know you had your usual emotional overruns because
if you had crosschecked this information with anyone you would
never have printed it.
You even had no courtesy of calling me since you knew that this
kind of story hurts my family. For your information, my wife
drives a car which we got on hire purchase from Cooper Motors
and have been paying from my salary since July 2004. Mr Mwenda,
I pay my cook too and there are signatures to this every month
both in my office and at home. You need some sense of humility
and to give people some respect If you want to be respected.
We work in the same country like you and we wake up every day
to make our homes and nation better. We don’t deserve
this kind of biased press. Other than emotional imposition of
yourself in the stories and features you run and your attempt
to project yourself as knowledgeable on family matters of private
citizens who you know nothing about, I cannot see the basis
for your wild, unprovoked and hateful allegations.
The author is Founder of TERP Group, Kampala and a son-in-law
to the President
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