Doom awaits the Uganda media

All journalists must get worried.According to Uganda's Independent Daily, The Daily Monitor Cabinet is devising measures on how to clamp down the media. The government says that any radio/TV presenter must have training in journalism. The measures are purportedly intended to make the media professional.

It’s just laughable for government to claim it intends to make the media professional. It’s has never been the desire of the State especially in developing countries to make the media professional.

Because to make it professional is to make it hard for such governments to abuse their powers with impunity. A professional media and the state have never been friends for the former exposes what the latter has concealed.

Therefore it cannot be in the interest of the government to have a professional media, which is independent, critical of state excesses, corruption, abuse of office etc. To entrust the government with professionalising the media, especially in struggling democracies such as Uganda, is like asking the Pope to spread Islam.

When the NRM came to power in 1986, it was received with a lot of hope for political freedom, press freedom, and human liberties. But the first casualty among these was political freedom.

Those who did not subscribe to the Movement political thinking-- the political parties-- were not allowed to assemble, mobilise or associate around common interests.

But Ugandans had been so brutalised by the past regimes that they accorded NRM dogmatic hospitality. Even restrictions on such basic human rights of freedom of association were overlooked by the masses.

Having suffocated political freedom, the NRM cunningly allowed relative press freedom, with occasional arrests of ‘errant’ journalists.

However, with time, what started as mere occasional occurrences, degenerated into regular and systematic arrests of journalists. Today many journalists are in court for stories that relate to exposing excesses of the state. Many media houses have been closed or threatened with closure over the same reasons.

Having virtually killed political freedom in the country, the remaining symbol of freedom under the NRM has been the relatively free press.

Now with the new plans to gag the press, there will be no more platform for the voiceless. However this curiosity to close all avenues for expression may turn counterproductive. What kills a man starts as an appetite.