The Press and Political Repression in Uganda: Back to the Future?

Abstract

Since ‘liberating’ Uganda in 1986 the government of Yoweri Museveni has professed support for freedom of expression. Print and other media have flourished and grown dramatically in the country over the past twenty years. This article examines press freedom in Museveni's Uganda in greater detail, comparing the experience since 1986 with that under the first regime of Milton Obote in the 1960s. Both these periods are presented as moments of liberal politics in Uganda's troubled past, yet both are periods in which political repression of the press has persisted. The article focuses first upon the Transition affair of 1967–69, when the Obote regime clamped down upon what was then Africa's leading literary magazine for its criticism of government policy, before turning to the Museveni government's harassment of the print media, especially the Daily Monitor, from 1989 to the present. The concluding section draws parallels between the behaviour of the Obote and Museveni governments toward the press, suggesting that press freedoms need to be vigorously protected at all times, and perhaps especially at moments of liberal and democratic rule.

‘The democratisation of society demands that democratisation of information should be paramount’ – Zie Gariyo, ‘The Media’

In February 2004, the Supreme Court of Uganda passed judgement in a case of monumental importance for press freedom. The case arose from an original prosecution in the magistrate's court of two journalists from The Monitor (now Daily Monitor), charged by the government with the promulgation of ‘false news’. The law under which this charge was made, Section 50 of the Ugandan Penal Code (Cap. 120), criminalises publication of ‘any false statement, rumour or report which is likely to cause fear and alarm to the public or to disturb the public peace’ – in effect outlawing the publication of anything that might be judged to be ‘false news’. Those convicted are liable to imprisonment for periods of up to two years. The case was part of a long-running struggle by Uganda's print media to retain its independence under the government of Yoweri Museveni. Although the charge against the two Monitor journalists was thrown out of court by the presiding magistrate, the case led to a legal challenge being mounted by the two journalists to have Section 50 of the Penal Code declared as unconstitutional. It was this challenge that the judges of the Supreme Court finally adjudicated in February 2004. The judgement read before the court declared that Section 50 was open to misinterpretation and abuse on political grounds, and therefore was not ‘acceptable and demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society’. They thus declared that ‘section 50 of the Penal Code Act (Cap. 120) is inconsistent with Article 29 (l) (a) of the Constitution and is consequently void’.1

Coming some 42 years after the country's independence from colonial rule in 1962, this judgement promises to be a watershed in the continuing struggle for freedom of the press in Uganda. Since the 1960s – that tragic first decade of independence – charges of sedition, criminal libel and false news have been frequently used in the efforts of Uganda's governments to muzzle a free press.2 In 1968, for example, the government detained and later charged Rajat Neogy and Abu Mayanja with sedition. Neogy was the founder and editor of Transition magazine, for which the lawyer and politician Mayanja was a regular contributor. As we shall see, there was no collective challenge to this interference with press freedoms in the 1960s. By examining the events of the 1960s surrounding the Transition affair, and setting this in the broader context of the fight for press freedoms from then until the present, this paper explores the evolving relationship between the state and the press in post-independent Uganda.

To do this we will focus on the first Ugandan independent government of Milton Obote (commonly known as Obote I, to differentiate it from the period of his second turn as president from 1981 to 1985), in comparison with the present era under Yoweri Museveni, who first came to power in 1986. Looked at in the longer term, these two eras appear as periods of relatively liberal attitudes toward freedom of the press in Uganda, corresponding with what Hyden and Okigbo have characterised as the ‘two waves of democracy’. The years in between saw Idi Amin kill journalists and nationalise newspapers, ‘a reversal that … significantly limited the role that the media could play’3 in political life, while on his return to government in the early 1980s the Obote II era saw the detention of journalists and the banning of critical newspapers.

While the regimes of Obote I and Museveni may seem liberal in comparison to Amin, it is important to recognise that very real struggles for press freedom took place under these governments. Museveni's government has consistently harassed the independent press in Uganda, especially the Daily Monitor – the newspaper through which we will primarily examine the current government's approach. That approach, to be discussed below, aims to force the press to self-censor through a mixture of tactics designed to intimidate journalists. In 1993, for example, a year after the Monitor was founded by a group of seven independent journalists, the government barred its departments from placing advertisements in the paper. The aim was to deny revenue to a newspaper that was already perceived as too critical of government. Despite losing around 70 per cent of its advertising revenue, the Monitor survived until the government reversed this policy in 1997.4 Since then, the government has adopted other tactics, harassing the paper through public condemnation5 and occasional court summonses. Monitor journalists have accordingly found themselves regularly making statements before police detectives, fighting court injunctions, and standing trial for various supposed misdemeanours. While the government has lost all cases brought against the Monitor, other journalists have not been so fortunate: in December 1995, Haruna Kanaabi of The Shariat was fined and jailed for five months on sedition and publication of false news charges, thus becoming the first and so far the only journalist in post-independent Uganda to be convicted on the sedition charge.6 But nor has the Museveni government always felt the need to use the courts: On 10 October 2002, the government simply shut down the Daily Monitor for a week for publishing a story alleging that a military helicopter had come down while pursuing rebels in northern Uganda. Then, on the night of 17 November 2005, state security operatives raided the newspaper's presses and stopped work because they suspected the newspaper was printing posters appealing to well-wishers for money to defend the then remanded leading presidential challenger, Kizza Besigye, and other political prisoners. The newspaper was not printing any such posters.7

Similar struggles occurred under Obote I. The inclination of the Obote I government, in that age of modernisation thinking, was that the press had to ‘talk development’, not politics; and if it had to talk politics at all, then the criticism had to be ‘constructive’. As one commentator said of Obote I in the 1960s, the state's position was constructed around a syllogism:

• nation building is the goal

• criticism (euphemism: subversion or division) interferes with nation building

• the goal cannot tolerate criticism8

Although Obote's officials never said it directly, the implication was that it should be they who determined what is constructive criticism and what is not. This conceit was challenged in many ways, but it was most directly and (arguably) most effectively exposed in the pages of the literary magazine Transition.9 Emerging just before independence in 1961, first as a monthly then after overcoming some financial difficulties settled into coming out six times a year, Transition at first thrived in the freedom euphoria wrought by independence. But as euphoria gave way to political realism, Transition and the Obote government came increasingly and openly into conflict. Our analysis of press freedom in Uganda begins by reviewing the history of this conflict from the 1960s, before returning to the experience of the press under Museveni since 1986.

The Transition Affair

‘Arrest warrants for editors who point to the gaps between words and deeds expose frightened rulers’ – John Tusa, ‘Fourth Estate or Fifth Column’

In 1956, the Uganda Express and Uganda Post were banned by the British colonial authorities for alleged sedition and the publisher, J.W. (Jolly ‘Joe’) Kiwanuka, was jailed. The ban and charge arose from the publication of a letter by Abu Mayanja critical of colonialists for their approach toward a proposed East African federation. At the time, Mayanja commented on Kiwanuka's plight in terms he must have had cause to remember twelve years later. He wrote: ‘Only a law that goes against the concepts of common morality could send the editor to jail and suspend the newspapers while leaving the author of the offending article at large.’10 Then, on Friday, 18 October 1968, heavily armed elements of the Special Force, an elite military unit, arrested Mayanja at his home in Kampala at 5 a.m. as a consequence of the publication in Transition of a letter from him to Neogy, the editor of the literary magazine. Mayanja was driven to army headquarters, hands tied together behind his back. Then it was Neogy's turn. Half a dozen agents from the Criminal Investigations Department of the Uganda Police Force, impeccably dressed in black suits, picked him up from the magazine's editorial offices in the city. Both men were apparently arrested under the Emergency Powers Act. By noon, both Neogy and Mayanja were held in solitary confinement in different sections of Luzira Upper Prison, then Uganda's maximum security jailhouse just as it is now.

Some seven months after his release, Neogy published an account of these events that gave some of the background:

we were jointly charged with sedition arising out of a couple of paragraphs from a Letter to the Editor in Transition 37, in which Mayanja argued against an ‘ideologically committed’ judiciary. The trial was held on January 9, 1969. Judgment was given on February 1 acquitting us on all six counts of sedition. We went back to prison under Uganda's detention laws.

Under Uganda's Emergency Regulations any person can be detained without trial for up to six months. The Emergency Regulations were first introduced in early 1966 and have to be renewed by Parliament at the end of every six months. Uganda's legislators have obliged by routinely extending them ever since. There are, as a result, political detainees who have been held without trial for more than 3 years.

A few days before the trial another writer of a letter to Transition, Davis Sebukima, a final-year student at Makerere University College, was detained. His letter appeared under the pen name of ‘Steve Lino’ in Transition 34 …

On March 27 of this year [i.e. 1969], together with Davis Sebukima and 24 others I was released from Luzira Upper Prison … Abu Mayanja is still there.11

This extract points to a tense political atmosphere obtaining in the country at the time. Ironically, this was a state of affairs at variance with international perceptions of Uganda. As the 1960s drew to a close, many observers thought Uganda to be one of the few newly independent African countries that was economically successful. In an important sense, the international profile of Transition was part of that success. The reality, though, was that an internal contest was raging between ‘liberalism and repression’ in Uganda. Repression would triumph, and in the process Transition would be consumed.

To understand why this came to be, we must examine the kind of publication Transition was and the broader socio-political milieu in which it operated. Our interest is in what Ali Mazrui, a one-time associate editor at the magazine, has called ‘the Uganda phase of Transition’, covering the first 37 issues from 1961 to 1968. We are especially interested in the writing on politics that was to prove the source of the magazine's troubles. Following Neogy's release from detention, Transition moved its publishing house to Accra, Ghana, in mid-1971. The next year, the military overthrew K. A. Busia, ‘an old friend of the magazine’12 whom Neogy had interviewed for Transition 28. Weary of militarism, Neogy gave up the editorship of the magazine having published only seven issues in Ghana. Wole Soyinka, who had occasionally written for the magazine and (of course) been much written about, then took over as editor. It is Soyinka who would famously reflect that Transition was ‘Africa's first forum of intellectual and artistic eclecticism.’13 Soyinka changed Transition's name to Ch'indaba (‘let the great palaver begin’), in a bid to ‘put to rest the controversies that had plagued Transition's mature life’.14 Nothing came of it. The magazine folded in 1976, only to be resurrected in 1991 at Harvard University under the editorship of academics Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah with Soyinka as chairman of the editorial board.15 Transition now bills itself as ‘an international review of politics, culture and ethnicity from Beijing to Bujumbura’.16

The Transition story starts in hilly and once very leafy Kampala, rather more Bujumbura than Beijing, at a particular historical moment. ‘It was the dawn of the 1960s’, wrote an editor of the new Transition in a recent issue commemorating the founding of the magazine:

a time of transition: an era of youth and hope, of deferred dreams finally coming true, or starting to. John F. Kennedy was in the White House; Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Birmingham; and Africa was on the move. Decolonisation was proceeding apace: in 1960 alone, seventeen new African states were admitted to the United Nations.

It was also a good time for the press. Energetic new writing filled the pages of little magazines like Commentary, Encounter, Ramparts, Dissent, the Evergreen Review, and the Olympia Review. Esquire was pioneering a new kind of journalism; Playboy was serving up its powerful cocktail of style and sex. In South Africa, Drum magazine was a kind of feisty African Life, marrying daring photography and brisk, irreverent journalism. In Nigeria, Black Orpheus was documenting and promoting the new African literature, battering down language barriers, translating French, Spanish, and Portuguese writings into English.17

It was in this environment that Neogy, a graduate of the University of London recently returned home to Uganda after a stint writing scripts for the BBC, decided to make his contribution in the founding of Transition – a journal of the arts, culture and society, as it trumpeted itself. The presence of an array of academics and intellectuals of quality at Makerere – the Harvard of Africa as it was known at the time – and a vibrant Ugandan economy gave the enterprise its impetus, along with Neogy's own sense of mission. Introducing the first issue of Transition in November 1961 as independence approached, Neogy, who would turn 23 the next month, proclaimed his agenda:

This journal appears when East Africa is undergoing various and exciting changes. It is a time when idealism and action merge with various degrees of success. It is also a time for testing intellectual and other preconceptions and for thoughtful and creative contributions in all spheres. One of the questions this journal will address itself to is: ‘What is an East African culture?’18

One of the two principal features of this manifesto would change over time, the other not. The regional focus, which had the second issue dedicated to Tanganyika's independence with Julius Nyerere batting for a one-party government as being African and democratic, would expand to embrace the whole continent. The second feature, about ‘testing intellectual and other preconceptions’, has always remained at the magazine's heart.

Transition's first issue carried poetry, prose, criticism, a main article on race relations in East Africa, and a provocative piece by Sir Ivor Jennings, master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in which he asked ‘Is a party system possible in Africa?’ It would take a lot of hard work and goodwill, he suggested. And so Transition kicked off its interesting and varied life. A perceptive reviewer of the first 32 issues (up to 1967) noted the prevailing eclectic quality of the publication:

This regional emphasis dominated the first few numbers, although articles of a more general nature were published from the very beginning. Even then, one was not quite sure what kind of magazine Transition wanted to be. Such a multitude of subjects and interests were represented, and such a diversity of styles appeared in its pages – the range covered pure literature, academic economics, missionary religion and even touched abstract philosophy – that the magazine ran a real risk of being stifled less by the lack of response from the ‘discriminatory public’ it was trying to reach than by its own incoherent eclecticism. One sensed the pull towards a restricted university periodical that the Makerere lecturers, thrilled at the appearance of an ‘intellectual’ magazine on their doorstep, were exerting upon these early numbers. Discouraging subscription figures must have awakened the editor to the realisation that, clearly, an African version of Encounter was not what an informed public in Africa hankered after; since then, Transition has not only found its feet, but also its proper key and tone of address, and thus in less than six years has gone on to establish itself as one of the leading periodicals appearing in Africa.

By force of circumstance, resulting from the fact that more western commentators on African affairs are at hand than Africans willing to give expression to the ideas and preoccupations of the continent, this magazine has been preserved from being a medium of mere self-reflection and self-contemplation for the African intellectual. Rather, it has been able to provide a forum for the kind of wide-ranging, cross-current debate on immediate problems and basic issues, so often lacking in its western counterparts, which are almost invariably confined to a closed-circuit communication between initiates or partisans.19

The themes that emerge from Transition at this time certainly reflected that ‘wide-ranging, cross-current debate on immediate problems’ – foreign aid and its implications, African literature and its features, political accountability, human rights, freedom of expression, the East African federation, education, and even the idea of love.

Transition's editor had an acute sense of just what he wanted the literary periodical to be about – Neogy once wrote that literary magazines must constantly plumb the depths where true cultural activity, being a subterranean process, takes place and show the world the real picture:20 but without a readership the magazine would have sunk. At the time, increasing numbers of Africans were attaining higher education qualifications both inside and outside of the continent. These men and women not only offered Transition the readership it needed, some amongst them also wrote for it. As the sixties wore on, more and more African contributors appeared in the pages. Having just cast aside colonialism, these men and women were eager to make their views known on the questions of the day. The Obote government, too, was initially tolerant of dissent: the nationalist struggle was potent and had wide support precisely because it made the commonsense case for respect of human rights and overall human dignity.21 Indeed, two months before independence, Obote addressed his party's delegates at a conference saying ‘that every human being is free to seek the truth and to express the truth as he may understand it’, and that ‘science, the arts of expression, and learning must be free and their products freely exchangeable’.22

The quality and vibrancy of Transition soon gained the magazine influence among key intellectuals, especially in the English-speaking world.23 Future literary giants such as the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer wrote for it, as did Chinua Achebe. The famed American literary critic Lionel Trilling gushed over the magazine, describing it as ‘remarkably intelligent’.24 The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a subscriber. And future Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa was an associate editor and contributor right at the start. ‘Everybody was talking about it and, therefore, it received much greater audience than even its circulation would indicate. It generated comments in newspapers, politicians responded. It did what a magazine should do: excite debate on issues,’ said Nelson Kasfir, who wrote for Transition while a young academic at Makerere University College.25 The magazine grew to garner institutional praises in bucketfuls from around the world. The New York Times led the way pronouncing Transition ‘Africa's slickest, sprightliest, and occasionally sexiest magazine … A questing irreverence breathes out of the pages … For erotic interest, Mr. Neogy has published discussions of the importance of orgasm, as well as scholarly translations of Sanskrit love poetry’.26

There were critics, too, of course, but the editor was unperturbed. Neogy dismissed the criticisms by writing that ‘Transition has been accused of taking things too seriously, not taking things seriously enough, being political, puritanical, unnecessarily licentious … anti-African, CIA-inspired … and just plain boring.’27 In all, the founding editor was happy with his effort, crowing to The New York Times, ‘I know ours is the single most important magazine on the continent.’28

Transition's troubles, when they came, would partly have to do with its international reach. When the magazine ran hard-hitting criticisms about political goings-on at home, the powers that be, eager to project an image of tranquillity to the international community, took note. The magazine's criticisms were damaging the country's image abroad, they would argue.29 The problem for Transition would not be what it told Ugandans about the world, but what it told the world about Uganda. The Obote government's real discomfiture with the magazine started with the 32nd issue, published in August–September 1967, in which debate surfaced about proposals for a new constitution. Two months earlier, in June 1967, Obote had presented the constitutional proposals for public debate, but he had not bargained for the ferocity of the critiques that emerged.30 Abu Mayanja, a clever Cambridge-educated lawyer, veteran nationalist and ruling party MP for Kyagwe North-East constituency, fired the first major salvo in Transition 32. Mayanja did not mince his words:

The key-note of the Government proposals is the concentration of all powers of government – legislative, executive, administrative and judiciary – into the central Government institutions and the subjection of those institutions to the control of one man – the President. The result is the creation – not of a republic, but of a one-man dictatorship …31

In the next issue, the government returned fire. Akena Adoko, head of the security service known as the General Service Unit, ‘ideological alter ego’, closest confidant and cousin of the president, defended the proposals. He insinuated bad faith in Mayanja's criticisms, before arguing that failure to give the presidency more powers could hamper national progress as a result of power struggles as the different centres vied for supremacy. Besides, he added, executive powers are ‘delegated and distributed’, although responsibility must ultimately rest with the president so that people know who is directly accountable for governmental activities.32

As this debate began, there were already anxieties about the character of the government's likely response toward journalists and the media.33 Also in Transition 32, the poet and academic Okot p'Bitek wrote that ‘The most striking and frightening characteristic of all African governments is this, that without an exception, all of them are dictatorships, and practice such ruthless discriminations as make the South African apartheid look tame.’34 Soon p'Bitek was fired as director of the Uganda National Cultural Centre, although the official reasons had nothing to do with his various criticisms of the government. A year earlier, in 1966, the government had deported Ted Jones, the Uganda correspondent for the Kenya Weekly News and the Reporter (a fortnightly political magazine published in Nairobi), for his coverage of an alleged plot against Obote involving the kabaka of Buganda and the army commander Shaban Opolot. Obote later recalled these events in one of his writings:

All these events and happenings could not have been completely hidden from Ted Jones, but both in the Kenya Weekly News and The Reporter he advanced the theory that troops moved into Kampala by Opolot were for the purpose of safeguarding the Constitution. Evidence, even that part of it which was known to the general public in Kampala, pointed otherwise. This led us to think that Ted Jones was more than a sympathiser of the plotters. He had, therefore, to be deported.35

Billy Chibber, a Daily Nation reporter, was also bundled out. And Ssekanyolya, a feisty Luganda-language daily promoting Buganda interests, was banned. These occurrences led Daniel Nelson, editor of the ruling Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) weekly newspaper, The People, to comment that it is ‘a brave man, indeed a reckless one, who will publicly doubt what Government says, even if he knows it is wrong and is designed as a cover-up operation. Government's word is becoming infallible, and that is disturbing’.36

These incidents indicated that the Obote government was becoming irritated by its critics, and for Transition the final provocation was to be a further article by Mayanja in issue 37. This issue carried several political pieces criticising an earlier article by Picho Ali of the president's office. Ali, a Moscow University-trained lawyer, had argued in issue 36 that the judiciary must be ideologically committed to the government's policies and so toe the party line.37 In a trenchantly argued response, Mayanja dismissed the UPC as a party with no ideology whatsoever (contrary to Obote's claim that it was leftist) and used his piece as the vehicle for a general swipe at the government's policies in relation to the judiciary. Two paragraphs in particular provoked the government to respond: the first referred to the delays in appointing black Ugandan judges to the High Court, alleging that this was because of ‘tribal considerations’;38 the second offending paragraph accused the Obote government of being ‘quite happy in retaining … and utilising … laws designed by the colonial regime to suppress freedom of association and expression’.39 As a consequence of the article, the government brought six charges of sedition against Mayanja, his editor Neogy and Transition printers Consolidated Printers.

After spending nearly three months in their prison cells, the trial of Mayanja and Neogy opened in the Chief Magistrate's Court in Kampala on 9 January 1969. Mayanja was represented by Sir Dingle Foot, QC, Britain's one-time solicitor-general; Neogy by Byron Georgiadis; and Consolidated Printers by M. Patel. Crowds thronged the court premises each day of the three weeks of the trial. Returning his verdict on 1 February, the Chief Magistrate scolded Mayanja and the government in almost equal measure but came to a firm view all the same: It was obvious, he said, the High Court bench was not African, and thus it was a matter of public interest and a legitimate subject for inquiry. While he considered Mayanja's mention of tribalism to be intemperate and defamatory, it was not seditious and nor was it likely to arouse disaffection against the president. Besides, the Chief Magistrate continued, the country's laws allowed Ugandans to say or write what they wished. He accordingly acquitted the three accused parties on all six counts of sedition.40 But when relatives and well-wishers inside the courtroom erupted in ululations, their excitement was quickly cut short when Neogy and Mayanja were immediately rearrested, handcuffed, and returned to solitary confinement under Uganda's detention and emergency laws. Neogy was finally freed on 27 March 1969, but Mayanja would spend almost two more years in confinement.41

By the time of the Transition affair, the Obote government had committed several ills. These had begun about 1965, just three years after independence. Obote had detained without trial five of his ministers (Grace Ibingira, Mathias Ngobi, Emmanuel Lumu, George Magezi and Balaki Kirya); and ordered the army under Idi Amin to storm the kabaka's palace resulting in the monarch being deposed following a power struggle; he had declared a state of emergency over the Buganda region, which he later extended to cover the whole country (and that would not be lifted by the time of his overthrow in January 1971); he had abrogated the 1962 Independence Constitution; abolished kingdoms, and with them the semi-federal type of government that obtained; and dissolved the National Assembly. To legitimate his actions, Obote had forced through what Ugandans call the ‘pigeonhole’ constitution of 1966 – so-called because he ordered the National Assembly to pass it without members having read it and told them to read only after the fact when they would find their copies in their mailboxes or pigeon holes. To ensure compliance, the National Assembly buildings were surrounded by soldiers with an army helicopter hovering above. Obote had then introduced the 1967 Constitution to replace that of 1966. This constitution, though it was publicly debated, simply allowed the president to not hold elections scheduled the same year. These should have been the first general elections since Uganda's independence, but they were never to take place under Obote.42

These actions attracted criticisms from academics at Makerere, among them Ali Mazrui. The government consequently came to view intellectuals of whatever sort as enemies, and planted informers in their midst on the university campus. The General Service Unit, under Adoko, ran a spy ring that operated ‘through paid informants amongst formally registered students’ to report ‘upon the political opinions of their fellow students and upon lecturers’.43 This partly explains why, when the Transition detentions occurred, Makerere academics, several of whom wrote for the magazine, did not speak out. Some feared being denounced as having ‘a colonial mentality’, while the many foreigners among their number were liable to sacking and deportation. Divisions between expatriate and indigenous academic staff did not help matters either.44 It was left to Mazrui,45 already an internationally distinguished Professor of Political Science and Dean of Makerere's Faculty of Social Science, to issue a ‘personal statement’ three days after the Mayanja and Neogy detentions challenging the government's commitment to intellectual freedom.46 Mazrui's bold stand heralded a series of ringing denunciations of intellectuals by Obote and Adoko.47

If the academics were fearful, one might have expected the Uganda Argus, the major daily newspaper of the day, to stand by Transition and freedom of the press. It did not. Owned by Tiny Rowland's Lonhro East Africa Group, the Uganda Argus had its own commercial interests to defend, and had already had its own run-in with Obote – as another commentator has noted:

The Argus’ problems began just four weeks after Independence when they published a story from ‘our London correspondent’ about Prime Minister Obote's problems. Obote immediately reacted with a statement that he did not believe the story was by a genuine correspondent but was written at the direction of the British Government, and John Kakonge hinted that Government might take action against the paper. With a start like that, the Argus can be forgiven for possessing a little trepidation.48

With no local opposition to speak of and international protestations having been waved aside contemptuously – Amnesty International adopted Neogy as a prisoner of conscience – the Obote government proceeded to teach Transition a lesson. Revelations of another kind added fuel to the fires: it had emerged during 1967 that Transition had been partly funded by CIA money funnelled through the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom. Neither Neogy nor Ezekiel Mphahlele – who was in charge of the Congress's Africa programme – had any idea that the money came from this source, but it did not spare them from the taint of political influence.49 This was especially potent in Uganda, where Obote's avowed left leanings made this seem as if Transition had been used by his international opponents for their own political ends. Detentions became increasingly commonplace after the Transition affair. Those detained without trial included top politicians such as Benedicto Kiwanuka and Paul Ssemogerere of the DP; politician and former pressman Jolly ‘Joe’ Kiwanuka; Princess Nnalinya Mpologoma, sister of the exiled kabaka and embodiment of Buganda resistance to Obote; Prince Badru Kakungulu, uncle of the kabaka; Sir William Wilberforce Nadiope, the former traditional head of Busoga; prominent lawyer Dani Nabudere; and former ministers Cuthbert Obwangor, and Amos Sempa. Estimates of those detained under Obote vary. Neogy has himself reported that from the time of the emergency in 1966 to the coup of 1971 the numbers of political detainees swung between 120 and 2,000.50 Gukiina claims for all the eight-plus years he was in power, Obote detained up to 4,000 people on political grounds compared to 35 detained during the 70 years of colonialism.51 Obote would eventually be hoisted on his own petard, removed from power by a coup led by commanders he had personally brought to prominence, but at no time after the Transition affair did Uganda's media present a challenge to his rule.

The Press Under Museveni

‘But to make a single mistake or even several, does not undermine the argument for independent journalism. It merely shows that the participant is human, not that what they are trying to do is invalid. Repeated errors of a pre-ordained and deliberate kind are very different … it is the process of honest inquiry that matters. For the process itself, if honestly undertaken and honestly maintained, will produce a decent result, despite the errors, the moments off balance, the nit-picking. The process is far greater than the challenge which calls it into question.’ – John Tusa, ‘Fourth Estate or Fifth Column’

Before discussing the fortunes of the press under the current long-running presidency of Yoweri Museveni, we need to take a side-glance at the period between the Obote I ouster and the assumption of power by Museveni.

On 25 January 1971, Army Commander Idi Amin overthrew his mentor Milton Obote – he who had boasted in 1968 that he was ‘perhaps the only African leader who is not afraid of a military take-over’.52 The sense of public relief was palpable. People poured into the streets of Kampala to honk car horns, to wave tree branches, to sing, to drink beer, to collapse into each other's arms. All were ecstatic that a government they had slowly grown to detest had been flushed out. The first three of Amin's 18 reasons for staging the coup d'etat fit neatly within the context of this paper. The three were: unwarranted detention without trial; the indefinite continuation of a state of emergency in the country; and lack of freedom to air views. Although he suspended the constitution to rule by decree, Amin left the section on freedom of expression intact. Even Transition expressed ‘joyousness’53 at the coup from its new home in Accra, and in Kampala hard-hitting columns started appearing in the newspapers like they had never before. In a showy and – with hindsight – menacing gesture, Amin donated a bull each to journalists at Taifa Empya and Munno newspapers because they had printed a statement during the former regime in which he had said he feared only God.54 It seemed like fun at the time, but within a year Amin was murdering those to whom he had given the bulls: Munno editor Father Clement Kiggundu was burnt alive inside his car; news photographer Jimmy Parma was shot; Munno journalist John Serwaniko was found dead in his police cell; television journalist James Bwogi was murdered. Many more were jailed. Others chose exile. The news business as we know it died. So did Uganda.

A combined force of Tanzanian troops together with Ugandan exiles kicked out Amin in April 1979. There followed three short-lived governments over a 20-month period. As Maja-Pearce has noted, the press ‘took advantage of the space afforded by the absence of a strong, central authority’, and by the beginning of 1980 ‘an estimated 30 newspapers and 40 journals appeared on the streets of Kampala’.55 In the midst of this turmoil, Obote returned to power through a rigged election in December 1980. He stayed until his army elbowed him out yet again in July 1985. During this second stint in power, Obote simply picked up from where he had left off in January 1971. In the month of March 1981 alone, his government banned five of the main newspapers, including the influential Weekly Topic. He banned two more in September. When the government-owned Uganda Times carried a report on the military killing civilians and perpetrating other atrocities in the north-west of the country, the editor got the sack.56

After a five-year campaign in central Uganda, Museveni's fighters received a most cheerful welcome from a war-weary and deprived population when they removed the military junta that had overthrown Obote II. A man with a keen sense of history, Museveni took the oath of office on 29 January 1986 promising that the occasion did not simply amount to another ‘mere change of guard’ but a ‘fundamental change’. In the spirit of this statement, Museveni's NRM government has indeed allowed freedom of expression to a greater extent than previous Ugandan governments.57 At any time since the NRM came to power there has been an average of a dozen publications available in Kampala. The FM radio world is also booming, thanks to the liberalisation of the communications sector early in the 1990s. Internet usage, although hampered by the lack of broadband technology, is picking up. Ugandans too are beginning to blog. The new constitution has positive language on freedom of expression. Unlike the earlier constitutions that shied away from mentioning the word ‘press’, the current constitution, which took effect in 1995, says each Ugandan has the right to ‘freedom of speech and expression, which shall include freedom of the press and other media’.58 While the claw-back clauses in the earlier constitutions were so extensive as to render meaningless the freedom of expression guarantee, the limiting clauses of the current document are tame. Essentially, any curtailment of a fundamental right such as speech must not go ‘beyond what is acceptable and demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society’. Despite concerns expressed by Ugandan journalists about the impact of intimidation and government pressure,59 Museveni has received international praise for cultivating a ‘relatively liberal media climate’.60

But the real position is not as rosy as it may seem. Uganda's journalists have expressed their concerns about the impact of intimidation and government pressure,61 and at times the Museveni government has cracked down on publications that dissent too radically. For example, the Weekend Digest was banned by Museveni within six months of taking power. The newspaper had carried a story claiming the opposition Democratic Party was planning to oust the government with the support of the West Germans and Italians. The government declared the paper a front being used by its enemies to ‘destabilise the country’. Then, starting in March 1986 through to 1992, the government hauled before the courts at least a journalist a year. Sedition was the charge of choice, although there was a sprinkling of criminal libel and defamation.62 The sedition charges most often stemmed from reports on military matters relating to the insurgency in northern Uganda. Keen to stem a growing flood of critical reports, the government amended the penal code in 1988 to prevent journalists from publishing information about military installations, equipment, supplies, or soldiers. Journalists convicted under this act would be liable to a sentence of seven years in prison.63 In the previous year, the president had promised to use the Detention Act – well before the 1995 Constitution got rid of it – against any journalist impudent enough to malign the good name of the army.64

The contradiction between external perceptions of Uganda's press freedoms and the experience of the print media within the country is a product of the international and regional politics that have marked Museveni's period in power since 1986. Issues of freedom of expression have necessarily become part of the ‘new world order’ since the ending of the Cold War, and Museveni has skilfully played himself into the role of regional defender of the world order in eastern Africa. For example, Uganda was quick to sign the Windhoek Declaration on Press Freedom, which was formulated in 1991.65 International instruments of this kind hold ‘governments directly accountable for their human rights record’,66 and Museveni appreciates the importance of supporting such initiatives in order to maintain a positive reputation with Uganda's international friends. However, in terms of domestic politics this is a strategy that carries risks for Museveni, and so he has been quick to clamp down on the press when the need arises. But, unlike the Obote I period when the press retreated in the face of government intimidation, under Museveni the Ugandan media have organised and campaigned to protect their own freedoms. As early as 1988, the country's journalists realised that they needed to fight back. Here is a typical editorial from 1989:

One honourable member of the NRC [the parliament of the day] Mr. William Naburi has gone to the extent of suggesting that newspapers should be banned in order to achieve peace … We have always stated that we appreciate the difficulties under which our government is working … we do not enjoy painting a gloomy picture of the country. But at the same time we would be doing injustice to ourselves to see the danger signals and keep quiet … Talking about gagging the press cannot be an alternative solution to this reality … Papers may be banned, journalists may be imprisoned but even that will do nothing to alleviate the situation.67

It was opposition to the muzzling of press freedom led by the press itself that culminated in the victory over the ‘false news’ law in 2004.

Ugandan journalists, however, are not in the clear just yet. Every year for the last 21 years that Museveni has been in power there has been at least one reported case of media harassment. Between 1986 and 2004, more than 24 journalists were arraigned before the courts of law on criminal publication offences. 68 To capture just how the current government operates, here is a rather lengthy but revealing account from journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo. He was regularly on the receiving end of the state's wrath after publishing a story in the Sunday Monitor of 21 September 1997 that claimed the DR Congo had paid Uganda in gold for its help to oust Mobutu Sese Seko the previous year. Here, written in 1999, is Onyango-Obbo's own account:

My fears about being sent to jail were realized a week later [end of September 1997]. President Yoweri Museveni, speaking at a military parade, went ballistic. He swore that The Monitor would pay for the story and that we must go to jail for it. Uganda is not a conventional democracy. The president still has the powers of an 18th century king. And what he asks for, he gets.

Two days later, the police came to our offices to take statements. On October 24, [the story's writer Andrew] Mwenda and I were served with criminal summons to appear in the chief magistrate's court. Though we drove ourselves to court, immediately upon our arrival we were bundled off to filthy holding cells near the court, which were overcrowded with common criminals.

After about an hour, we were taken out to a rather bizarre court session. We were charged with ‘publication of false news’ under Section 50 (1) of the Penal Code. This is punishable upon conviction by two years in jail. Our lawyer was the city's most well-known ‘new breed’ of lawyer, but nevertheless the magistrate asked him to produce his law certificate. Thirty minutes went by before the certificate was brought from our counsel's office. The hours were ticking perilously close to 5 o'clock, when the courts closed.

We pleaded innocent. Among other things, the magistrate slapped a record bail of $2,000 on each of us. That is a lot of money in a country where the per capita income is $300. More significantly, it was the highest bail ever demanded for a misdemeanor, and the prosecution hadn't even ‘opposed’ bail. (In Uganda, the accused applies for bail and the prosecution can either oppose the application or choose not to contest it. It is extremely rare for a magistrate to impose a cash bail in instances where the prosecution hasn't raised objections.) Our $2,000 bail was even higher than had been set for anyone who had been granted bail for rape, defilement, theft and, in a few cases, murder. The magistrate must also have known that hardly anyone carries that amount of money in cash. And though The Monitor could raise $4,000 for the two of us, the banks had closed three hours earlier.

In a strange request, the magistrate ordered that the people who stood as our sureties produce legal documents indicating that they were residents at the addresses they had given. As it was a Friday, it seemed a common trick pulled by the government was working itself through this partisan magistrate. The conditions of the bail were so stiff that it was unlikely that we would meet them in the 30 minutes that were left before the court closed. The result would then have been a weekend in jail before we appeared in court Monday morning. When courts close, the prisoners and all people like us whose cases are not concluded for the day are herded under heavy security into buses and vans and driven off to a sprawling ‘maximum’ [security] prison in the suburbs of the city.

Our magistrate was, however, foiled by a piece of modern technology and the wiliness of journalists. We had been escorted out of court and were sitting in the cells waiting for the guards to come. It was nearly 6 p.m., and the bus should have left an hour back. Everyone was puzzled about the delay. It turned out that dozens of journalists had come to the court and, through means that we are bound never to reveal, caused the delay of the bus's departure. And as soon as we had left the courtroom, our colleagues and lawyers went to work on their cell phones to contact bank managers. The $4,000 in cash was brought to the court just after five and paid into the cash office …

Between October 24, 1998 and February 16, 1999, when the case before these magistrates ended, we made 33 trips to the court. We therefore had to get 33 bail extensions. Going through that made our lives very difficult. I found that we watched every story we published and every action we did very carefully, lest it lead to an application by the state to cancel our bail or to pile on new charges.

We could not travel outside the city without discussing it with our lawyers. All our travels abroad during that period were built around the next trial. We had to be careful to build in several days to provide for various flight cancellations, just to ensure that we didn't miss court dates. We lost control of our schedules.69

This extract highlights two points about the present government's strategy in dealing with the independent press: (i) use of the courts of law to pile pressure on nosy journalists and force them to self-censor; (ii) the targeting of the Daily Monitor as a salutary ‘lesson’ to other publications and to the government's political opponents. For nearly 20 years, the Museveni government barred political parties from organising in Uganda. By the time the Daily Monitor was founded in July 1992, parties had been banned nearly seven years. Without parties, the Daily Monitor, which ‘largely dominates the media landscape’,70 found itself by default playing the role of the opposition. Labelled by Museveni and his supporters as an ‘oppositionist’ newspaper, the Daily Monitor has continued to be stigmatised in this way even after political parties have returned and there are other independent newspapers. As Onyango-Obbo has explained, in these circumstances a simple newspaper mistake is perceived in government circles as conscious misinformation ‘by an organized opponent. Criticism is then equated to an act of hostility by an opposition bent on bringing the government down’.71

Thus far, the Daily Monitor has weathered the storm that kicked off with the 1993–97 advertising ban. Nearly every year for the last 10 years, the government has found reason to quarrel with the newspaper. The government also still maintains the sedition and criminal libel laws on the statute books. The anti-terrorism law, although not yet invoked against journalists, contains further restrictions on the reporting of terrorist organisations, including the Lord's Resistance Army. In the first decade of the new millennium, as in the 1960s:

Scissors and blue pencils are not the only reason for a muted press. The main factor is the threat of action, backed in Uganda by the knowledge that the continued implicit threat will be carried out if necessary …72

Conclusion: Two of a Kind?

‘The media are inconvenient; they get in the way. But they do so not just because they are congenitally members of the awkward squad but because national leaders need to have their claims to unquestioning legitimacy, to be the sole arbiters of their nation's destiny, subjected to test.’ – John Tusa, ‘Fourth Estate or Fifth Column’

Uganda's presidents have always been aware of the dangers of a ‘hostile’ press. In the 1960s, Milton Obote told the nation that:

Since the Constitution purposely provided for press freedom – in order that this freedom could serve the interests of the people as a whole, if any newspaper adopted an anti-Ugandan attitude [and] created division – all in the name of press freedom – such publications were unconstitutional.73

Two decades later, Yoweri Museveni declared the ‘liberal’ views of his government shortly after coming to power: ‘We want freedom of the press, but we cannot have enemy agents working against us here.’74

The rendering of the press as an enemy of Uganda, as unpatriotic, and the whole notion of criminalisation of dissent, characterises not only the Obote I and the Museveni governments but the attitudes of the presidents themselves. What these men were saying is that the press was being critical of their governments. They did not want that. They wanted a free reign. They wanted their voice to be the ‘sole, unchallenged national voice’.75 To what end? The ultimate aim, in both cases, was the imperative need to retain political power.

There have been more recent manifestations of this tendency. Uganda's journalists recently reported and commented on the arrest of presidential challenger Kizza Besigye on charges of rape and treason some three months before election day. This culminated in the denial of re-entry into Uganda of a Canadian freelance journalist just after the 23 February 2006 general election. Blake Lambert wrote for The Christian Science Monitor and The Economist from Uganda, where he had lived for three years. Declared by the government as an ‘unwanted person’ for not providing a ‘balanced outlook’ on Uganda, Lambert was prevented from re-entering the country from South Africa on 9 March 2006 and put on the next plane out. He landed in Nairobi without his passport, which the Ugandan authorities had confiscated. The media rights group Reporters Without Borders saw it this way:

In Uganda, at the start of the year [2006], Yoweri Museveni's government was prompted by the fight to hold on to power to maintain tight control of news during the election period, going so far as to expel a foreign correspondent, [whom it] saw as nothing less than a ‘threat to the state’.76

Consequently, Uganda's ranking on the Worldwide Press Freedom Index slid from position 80 out of 167 countries in 2005 to 116 out of 168 countries in 2006.77

Beyond the naked pursuit and retention of political power, however, could there be other reasons why Obote I and Museveni have tended to view the press, and civil liberties in general, with undisguised disgust? Museveni has said his government derives legitimacy from the ‘mandate of liberation’ and the ‘mandate of the people’.78 By mandate of the people he means he has been elected three times since 1996 (though this after a decade as an unelected president). By mandate of liberation he means that he led a guerrilla campaign leading to his assumption of power and the beginning of the turn-around in Uganda's fortunes. In a sense, this mandate of liberation, which in Ugandan parlance is rendered as ‘we fought’, entitles the Museveni government to behave more or less as it wills. The feeling is that Ugandans owe the Museveni government everything because its leaders sacrificed, shed blood and lost comrades to ‘liberate’ Uganda. Those who did not go to the bush are simply told they have no right to criticise ills in government. There is a parallel here with the government of Obote I. For Obote, the idea was that Ugandans owed him because he led the country to independence. His was the mandate of independence and nationalism. He viewed himself as a hero struggling for the masses of Uganda; he knew best, and the Ugandan people were expected to accept his judgement without criticism or question.

There are, however, differences between the Obote I era and the still-unfolding Museveni one. While Obote was only wary of Transition's international reach, Museveni fears the Internet which now carries websites of Ugandan newspapers and some FM radio stations plus the blogs of individuals. Criticism, once compressed in the voice of a single publication, now swirls around the globe through a myriad of outlets. In these conditions, can media ever again be turned to the role of fostering ‘national unity and development’?79 Only a much more democratic Uganda will ensure a freer press. And if they are to help bring that about, Uganda's journalists may yet need the courage of their convictions. As Abu Mayanja wrote, though maybe not with particular originality, ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. If we want to be free men, we must be prepared to undertake some reasonable risks.’80 The media have transformed beyond recognition since the 1960s, but if there was a time when a Transition-like magazine was needed in Uganda, it is now, so it might give focus to political debate and unstintingly record, to use Rajat Neogy's phrase, ‘the lyricisms and laments’81 of our time.

Notes

1. Onyango-Obbo and Mwenda v Attorney General, Constitutional Appeal No. 2 of 2002, Supreme Court of Uganda, 11 Feb. 2004.

2. Gariyo, ‘The Media’, 1.

3. Hyden and Okigbo, ‘The Media and the Two Waves of Democracy’, 31.

4. Mwesige, ‘Can You Hear Me Now?’

5. Most recently, Bogere and Muhumuza, ‘We Are Still in Charge’, 1.

6. The State of Media Freedom in Uganda, 12–20.

7. The edition being printed carried an advert paid for by Besigye's party, the Forum for Democratic Change. The advert was similar in design and content to the posters pinned up in Kampala that night. The writer was on the premises at the time of the raid, at about 11 p.m.

8. ‘A Matter of Transition’, 43.

9. Neogy, ‘Do Magazines’, 31.

10. Quoted in Gariyo, ‘The Press’, 72.

11. Neogy, Letter, 6.

12. Vazquez, ‘An African Dilemma’, 12.

13. Soyinka, ‘On the Trail of Transition’, 414.

14. Vazquez, ‘An African Dilemma’, 14.

15. Abiola Irele and Tommie Shelby have now assumed editorship, with Gates and Appiah becoming publishers.

16. Vazquez, ‘An African Dilemma’, 14.

17. Vazquez, ‘An African Dilemma’, 6.

18. ‘Culture in Transition’, 2.

19. Irele, ‘Transition, Nos. 1–32 by Rajat Neogy’, 443.

20. Neogy, ‘Do Magazines’, 30–31.

21. Gariyo, ‘The Press’.

22. Obote, ‘A Plan for Nationhood’, 18.

23. The initial print-run in 1961 was 2,000 copies. It had jumped to 12,000 by 1968. See Friendly Jr., ‘Slick African Magazine’, 3.

24. Trilling, ‘Trilling on Transition’, 6.

25. Nelson Kasfir, Personal interview, 4 Dec. 2006.

26. Friendly, ‘Slick African Magazine’, 3.

27. ‘Slickest, Sprightliest, Sexiest’, 41–42.

28. Friendly, ‘Slick African Magazine’, 3.

29. ‘Tribalism Issue in Sedition Case’, 43–49.

30. Obote, Myths and Realities, 16.

31. Mayanja, ‘The Government's Proposals’, 20.

32. Adoko, ‘The Constitution’, 10–12.

33. Mutibwa, Uganda Since Independence, 59. See also Oloka-Onyango, ‘Governance’, 34.

34. p'Bitek, ‘Indigenous Ills’, 47.

35. Obote, Myths and Realities, 19–27.

36. Nelson, ‘Newspapers’, 30.

37. Ali, ‘Ideological Commitment’, 47–49.

38. Mayanja, ‘The Fact’, 15. (In March 1969, President Obote named four Ugandans – Saulo Musoke, W.W. Wambuzi, Aloysious Mukasa and Emmanuel Oteng – as puisne judges of the High Court. See Uganda Argus 28 Mar. 1968. None of the four men was Obote's tribesman).

39. Mayanja, ‘The Fact’, 15.

40. ‘Sedition Charges Dismissed’, 1–2.

41. Neogy, born to Indian Brahman parents in Uganda, was a committed man of culture. Jail broke his spirit forever – and he was only 30 when he was released in March 1969. See Soyinka, ‘Memories of Rajat’, 10–12, and in the same issue Mazrui, ‘The Day I Stopped’, 8–9, and Theroux, ‘Rajat Neogy Remembered’, 4–7. Mayanja lived to serve in various cabinet positions, including information, and justice, under Yoweri Museveni.

42. Mutibwa, Uganda Since Independence, for a full history of these events.

43. Langlands, ‘Students and Politics’, 6. See also Ryan, ‘Uganda: A Balance Sheet’, 47.

44. Bazaara, ‘Contemporary Civil Society’, 27–28.

45. Mazrui's association with Transition first as contributor and then as associate editor, added to the magazine's lustre in the West. Said to be a social constructivist, it was during this period that Mazrui wrote what some consider his most influential article on African Affairs. That article, ‘Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar’, dealt with the thought and politics of Ghana's founding president Kwame Nkrumah, then newly deposed.

46. ‘Mazrui Comments on Detentions’. Another Makerere scholar and regular Transition contributor M.M. Carlin added his voice challenging the government to say publicly whether free speech was dead in Uganda. See Uganda Argus, 24 Oct. 1968, 5.

47. ‘Emergency Extended’, 1. See also ‘Dr Obote’, 2., and ‘Criminals Must Not’, 2.

48. Nelson, ‘Newspapers’, 31.

49. Hall, ‘Rajat Neogy on the CIA’, 44–47. See also Mphahlele, ‘Mphahlele on the CIA’, 5.

50. Neogy, ‘It Only Happens’, 378.

51. Gukiina, Uganda, 170.

52. Obote, Myths and Realities, 30.

53. Editorial, Transition no. 38 (June–July 1971): 5.

54. Barton, The Press of Africa, 99.

55. Maja-Pearce, ‘The Press in East Africa’, 62.

56. Munnansi (or Citizen), the opposition Democratic Party mouthpiece, was left unscathed. This appears to have been deliberate because the government wanted to demonstrate to the international community particularly that an independent press was tolerated. See Maja-Pearce, ‘The Press in East Africa’, 62.

57. Munnansi (or Citizen), the opposition Democratic Party mouthpiece, was left unscathed. This appears to have been deliberate because the government wanted to demonstrate to the international community particularly that an independent press was tolerated. See Maja-Pearce, ‘The Press in East Africa’, 63.

58. Constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995, 28.

59. Mwesige, ‘A Profile’, 213.

60. Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), ‘Attacks on the Press 2003’.

61. Mwesige, ‘A Profile’, 213.

62. For a catalogue of these cases, see Maja-Pearce, ‘The Press in East Africa’, 63.

63. Gariyo, ‘The Media’, 38–39.

64. Gariyo, ‘The Media’, 38–, 38.

65. Kupe, ‘The Role of the Media’, 2.

66. Maja-Pearce, ‘The Press in East Africa’, 63.

67. Editorial, The Citizen, week ending 20 Sept. 1989, quoted. in Gariyo, ‘The Media’, 39.

68. Mwesige, ‘Can You Hear Me Now?’ Mwesige estimates that number rose to about 30 by the end of 2006, personal interview, 22 March 2007.

69. Onyango-Obbo, ‘A Ugandan Journalist’.

70. Reporters Without Borders, Uganda – Annual Report 2006.

71. Mwesige, ‘Can You Hear Me Now?’

72. Nelson, ‘Newspapers’, 30.

73. ‘A Matter of Transition’, 44.

74. The Guardian [London] 20 Nov. 1986, 12, quoted. in Maja-Pearce, ‘The Press in East Africa’, 63.

75. Tusa, ‘Fourth Estate or Fifth Column’, 4.

76. Reporters Without Borders, ‘Introduction Africa – Annual Report 2007’.

77. Reporters Without Borders, ‘North Korea, Turkmenistan and Eritrea’.

78. Gyezaho and Luggya, ‘Opposition Too Weak’.

79. Nassanga, ‘Local Considerations’, 117.

80. Mayanja, ‘The Government's Proposals’, 24.

81. Neogy, ‘Do Magazines’, 32.