The Yale Globalist - Paving the Road for Press Freedom

Paving the Road for Press Freedom
One dissident Ugandan editor's fight to protect media freedoms has landed him in the limelight.

Thursday, 30 October 2008 | Rachel Wolf

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These developments prompted Mwenda to resign from his job at the Daily Monitor, one of Kampala’s two major newspapers. “The news at the Monitor was increasingly being censored, and I said, ‘Me, I can’t do propaganda,’” he explained. “‘I can only do journalism.’” The Independent was launched in December of that year. The Ugandan government expressly forbade major printers in Kampala to produce the magazine, which is printed clandestinely. The Independent’s offices have been raided twice this year in response to the magazine’s attacks on Museveni’s administration.

This spirit of defiance has been ingrained in Mwenda since childhood. At age six, during Uganda’s 1978 war with Tanzania, Mwenda would sit with his father, an official high up in Uganda’s government, and listen to radio stations forbidden by Ugandan President Idi Amin: BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and Radio South Africa. Mwenda would then carry the forbidden fruit of uncensored coverage to his classmates. “My primary school was next to the residence of the president. So you can imagine, as a child of the state, the risk that I was putting my father in,” he explained.

Indeed, it was his family that taught him how to take risks within reason. Carefully straddling Uganda’s political fissures, Mwenda’s family became close to two-time Ugandan president Milton Obote while also retaining strong social ties to Museveni, who overthrew him. Despite his controversial writings, Mwenda has managed to maintain those relationships: When he was briefly imprisoned for sedition in 2005, Museveni’s son visited him at the station.

By now, such arrests have become commonplace for Mwenda. “I have been arrested—I can’t count! Possibly twenty, thirty times,” he said, gesticulating gleefully. To Mwenda, this personal burden is evidence of a nationwide success. “When people hear about the arrests, they think that is a sign of retrogression. They don’t understand that it is a sign of progress,” Mwenda said. “If the frontiers of freedom stop here,” he said, sketching out a battle map in bold pen strokes, “we hold this front and want to extend it and cover things that previously were untouchable subjects.” Mwenda claimed that the press corps is gaining ground. “There was a time when you could not write about ministers,” he recalled. “Now you can. There was a time when you could not criticize the president. Now we criticize him.”

Heartened by this progress, Mwenda continues to weather the arrests and brazenly cast stones at Uganda’s elite from within their corridors of power. After Sudanese Vice President John Garang’s fatal helicopter crash in July 2005, Mwenda received a call from Museveni. Fending off potential accusations of government recklessness, Museveni insisted that the helicopter’s pilot had assured him that the risky flight could be completed safely and that Garang himself had made the final call to fly despite bad conditions.

Without revealing that he spoke with the president, Mwenda took the issue public on Andrew Mwenda Live, his radio show that rocketed to nationwide popularity after its launch in 2001. He recalled: “I said, look—this guy was put on a plane late in the evening, knowing they were flying into bad weather over a mountainous area filled with stinger-wielding rebels. Even a child of six years would have exercised caution and not have allowed him to go.” Mwenda concluded that the Ugandan government should take political responsibility for Garang’s death: “They are the ones who failed to calculate the risks.”

Museveni shut down the radio station, and, on August 12, 2005, police arrested Mwenda on charges of sedition. Though he was soon released, that was the last time Museveni called Mwenda with information.

Mwenda does not restrict his criticism to Museveni and his government—he is also a leading critic of foreign aid to African nations. “I think that aid is both a cause and a consequence of corruption,” he explained. Mwenda argues that foreign aid provides the Ugandan government with a revenue source unconditioned by accountability to its citizens. Accountability to foreign donors, however, may be the one thing ensuring Mwenda’s safety. Windfall revenue from recently uncovered oil reserves could keep the government from being ac- countable to anyone. “Just you wait until Museveni gets oil money,” Mwenda joked at a staff meeting in June. “Once he doesn’t have to rely on the donor community, he won’t have any use for silly things like press freedom.”

For now, Museveni’s regime remains more disappointing than menacing, both sustained and bridled by international aid. One gets the sense that, for all his rhetoric, Mwenda faces no physical danger, since his vocality ensures that any injury would become an international scandal—the BBC reported both his 2005 arrest and the 2008 raids of The Independent.

At the moment, the NRM is even willing to take steps to appease Mwenda. The journalist’s driveway glistens with a new asphalt surface: the government quickly repaved it after Mwenda proved that it was technically a public road, implicitly threatening to expose its dilapidated condition if it was not immediately improved. The exposé on the state of Uganda’s roads ran in Issue 21 of The Independent—after his driveway was finished.

Rachel Wolf is a sophomore Political Science major in Saybrook College.

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