On Uganda’s Crisis of Confidence, Or the End of a Long Dance

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There are few columnists living in Uganda today who, when they pen something, one is forced to drop everything and pay attention. Veteran Charles Onyango Obbo (COO) is one such columnist for me.

This past week I read his ode to the President, “The Museveni we lost – and miss,” about the love-hate relationship between Museveni and the Monitor newspaper. The piece, to me, is one of the most beautiful stories about the evolution of our country’s democracy in the last forty years.

It reminded me of one of the most interesting exchanges between the two (Obbo and Museveni) in recent memory. Writing in his weekly column on May 2, 2012, Obbo had argued, in Somalia the UPDF finally found its freedom and peace because “even if President Yoweri Museveni wanted to promote an officer from his village or a loyalist, he had to find one that was qualified. Appointing an incompetent one would be to condemn him to a quick death at the hands of the Al Shabaab.”

Five days later, Museveni responded in a stinger of an article in the same Monitor pages where he mentioned Obbo’s name a record 28 times! To date, I still recall the feeling reading the president respond to a journalist’s critique with facts, a lesson in military history and strategy, all in one article.

I agree with COO that was Museveni at his intellectual best, but equally, one may argue that was The Monitor at its last best too. With the expansion of social media in the 2010s the traditional media has suffered a slow, steady decline.

In that sense, the story is as much about Museveni’s evolution (or decline) as it is about that of democratic institutions like the press in Uganda.

Elsewhere I have argued that the vibrancy and standards set by Uganda’s media after 1986 until the return of political parties around 2005, I think, was an artificial “bargain” held up by a crop of politician-intellectual types, the likes of Obbo, Wafula Oguttu (BA Pol. Sci. at Dar Es Salaam followed by a stint in Beijing flirting with Marxism), Kevin Aliro (a teacher of geography and one can say student activist), among others. Their bosses too were offshoots of the pro Independence student movement—Bidandi Ssali, Kintu Musoke, and the late Kirunda Kivejinja.

These were not journalists in the strict sense of the word but activists; and they were in the business of news because of their convictions. When they exited, they were replaced by “professional” journalists whose convictions were to make a living out of reporting the news. You can see the outcome of that transition today.

With the first two groups, Museveni was dealing with ideological allies or opponents. And that informed his approach to dealing with the media. Today Museveni the transactional eternal president of Uganda is dealing with a transactional media elite interested in the bottom line and you can see the tools he deploys: lawsuits, intimidation, bribery, etc.

This might be a simplistic theory summarising 40 years of institutional history, but it provides a good framework to begin to understand why that bargain lasted that long and how we have come to the end of that long dance today.

***

When COO was interviewed by Raymond Mujuni⁩ in 2020, asked his views about what Kizza Besigye’s departure from NRM in 2000 meant for Uganda, he said something along the lines… “it was like a monkey had been lifted off our [the press’s] backs”.

Opposition to the Movement and the push for incremental change ceased being the job of a measured and erudite media-political elite and became the job of what John Nagenda, writing of Kizza Besigye’s supporters, called “the great unwashed of the slums”, first in Kampala, and later in the satellite towns.

Propelled by the expansion of social media, the bastard child of this transformation today is Uganda’s leading force for change, NUP.

Written by

Kwezi Tabaro

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