So, again on Monday the Uganda government sent in security forces, ransacked the Daily Monitor, seized its offices, closed down its presses, and switched its affiliated radios – KFM and Dembe FM – off air. The controversial and saucy Red Pepper also got the same treatment. A court order asking the Police to lift the siege was met with scorn. Instead, more heavily armed police and armored personnel carriers were sent into to enforce the…

Despite mounting condemnation, police on Thursday evening arrested five of several protestors who marched to the Daily Monitor offices in Kampala protesting the newspaper’s continued closure as security agents search for documents written by a senior military officer regarding presidential succession.   Riot police deployed as soon as the protestors from various civil society organisations approached the paper’s offices on the 8th Street carrying a wooden pole symbolising a non-functional pen.   The activists were…

Day is Monday, May 20, 2013. Time check is 11:30 a.m. By then, most of the reporters and photojournalists have gone to the field. The Monitor Publications’ head office on Kampala’s Eighth Street is a strange sight. In the inside parking yard are six or four armed men in blue camouflage police uniform facing the editorial block, away from the commercial block. One is standing at the gate used by administrators and a couple of…

Ugandan police on May 20 raided, cordoned off and eventually shut down two of the East African country’s leading independent media houses, in what some advocates for media freedom have described as the biggest crackdown on the media by the government of President Yoweri Museveni. The police also searched the premises of the affected media houses for a controversial letter and other documents written by a top security official. According to the April 27 letter, Gen.…

The government’s closure of two privately owned Ugandan dailies and two radio stations entered day three today, May 22, with one of the newspapers beating the odds to print what its editors dubbed the “Freedom Issue”.   “Red Pepper is back where it started 12 years ago,” reads a post on the paper’s Facebook wall. “Printing from the ‘bush’. This is the ‘Freedom Issue’ it’s not our normal quality but pliz accept it.”   The…

The Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) is deeply concerned by the actions of police on Monday 20th May 2013 when it cordoned off and searched the premises of The Monitor Publications in Namuwongo, Kampala and The Red pepper Newspaper in Namanve. The sealing off of the Monitor premises was spontaneously followed by the inaccessibility of airwaves of the 93.3 KFM and Dembe radios housed in the said premises. The Uganda Human Rights Commission is constitutionally…

Kampala   The raid and siege of the Daily Monitor and Red Pepper offices by the Uganda Police today, May 20, is an abuse of power and the law, and a blatant violation of the Constitution.   In a press release defending their action, the police have said they were responding to the failure of Daily Monitor journalists to “avail and provide the original copy of a letter and other related documents, purportedly authored by…

A free press is an essential part of a democracy. It is not a luxury. A free press holds the powerful and the wealthy to account. It asks questions. It investigates. It defends the weak. The press is not perfect.   But better an imperfect media than a passive one, which does as it is told by those who have power and money. That is the route to dictatorship.Today the freedom of the press in…

After the amusing story declaring that Ugandan parliamentarians were considering asking President Yoweri Museveni to take over management of Kampala City, The New Vision gathered comments from some of the players in the story.   My favourite came from Rubaga Division Councillor Godfrey Asiimwe who: "…welcomed the idea". He said: "We have failed to deliver. Some of us have tried all the avenues to address the bickering and failed. It is only the President who…

Palace intrigue, egotism, naked ambition, alleged assassination plots in high circles of government.All related to presidential succession or, broadly, politico-military transition.   This is serious raw material for a full-on dramatic production. As a former beloved teacher of drama at Makerere University, Information Minister Karooro Okurut would surely love this.   Instead the minister has joined up with the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) to unfairly accuse the media of sensationalising the Sejusa Affair.   In…