In the 2012/2013 budget speech, finance minister Maria Kiwanuka proposed to increase the PAYE threshold from Shs130,000 to Shs235,000 per month. She added that the “tax bands would be adjusted accordingly” and details would be contained in the Income Tax (Amendment Bill) 2012. The minister also proposed “an additional 10%” to be imposed on individuals with “chargeable income of Shs.120 million and above per year”. It appears most journalists (and probably MPs) didn’t understand the…

The executive editor of Monitor Publications Ltd, Mr. David Sseppuuya, has been forced to resign from the multi-media company, sources in Kampala and at the Nairobi-based parent company, Nation Media Group, confirmed on Monday.   Mr. Sseppuuya, who has been at the helm of the media group that publishes Daily Monitor and the Saturday and Sunday Monitor since April 2010, told ACME on Tuesday he had resigned and was looking at “early retirement”. He added,…

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story   Tired of the complaints that African stories are not being told by Africans? I am.   Had enough of the bellyaching on how little original content from Uganda there is on the World Wide Web? Join the band and let us sing the…

Uganda police on Monday grilled a prominent talk show host for over three hours over a political programme he moderated last month, the Human Rights Network for Journalists-Uganda has reported.   Meddie Nsereko Ssebuliba who works for the Central Broadcasting Services (CBS) appeared before the police’s media crimes department at the CID headquarters at Kibuli- a Kampala suburb.   Nsereko is accused of allegedly failing to moderate a talk show he hosted on Thursday June…

The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva passed its first resolution on Internet freedom on Thursday with a call for all states to support individuals' rights online as much as offline.   Despite opposition on the issue from countries including China, Russia and India, countries promoting the resolution hailed the support of dozens of nations ahead of its adoption.   "This outcome is momentous for the Human Rights Council," US ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe…

Report of the committee on defence and internal affairs on the inquiry into the procurement of equipment for the controversial national id project.   The committee was directed to probe the project after a Germany company contracted in March 2010 and given billions of tax payer’s money failed to produce national identity cards for Ugandans.   Click here to download a copy

High Court in Kampala has granted bail to a journalist suspected of treason after a year in jail, the Human Rights Network for Journalists has reported.   Augustine Okello, a radio presenter at Rhino FM in Lira district however was remanded to prison after failing to pay the shs8 million cash bail.   This was the third bail application after the previous two attempts were rejected.   He was granted bail due to his worsening…

The Internal Security minister and the police will have powers to tap private communication, seize any property and get access to bank account details of terrorism suspects if the draft Prevention of Terrorism Bill, 2012 becomes law. The bill which is expected to be discussed by Cabinet will also curtail certain rights and freedoms of suspected terrorists and their sponsors, as well as media freedom.   The limitation of rights and freedoms relates to privacy,…

Nigerian writer Rotimi Babatunde has won this year's prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing.   The £10,000 ($15,700) prize was given for his story Bombay's Republic about Nigerian soldiers who fought in the Burma campaign during World War II.   "It is about liberation and how a character can have his world widened," Mr Babatunde told the BBC.   He was among five writers short-listed for the prize, regarded as Africa's leading literary award.  …

As the world’s governments sat down in Rio last week for the Earth Summit on sustainable development, the future of the planet once again made it into the newspapers. Sadly, it’s quite likely that the newspapers were getting plenty of their coverage wrong.   Research at Oxford University has shown that the world’s media, especially in the English-speaking world, routinely misrepresents the state of scientific consensus on climate change, giving greater weight to sceptics than…

This editorial was published in The Observer newspaper after a failed attempt by a news source to bribe a journalist.     A few weeks back, this newspaper received an early morning phone call from a woman named Sharon Byaba.   She complained that someone claiming to be working for us had demanded money in order not to publish a story. Ms Byaba had just been forced out of the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) after…

When I last held a fulltime job in a newsroom I was a big campaigner of ‘Day Two journalism.’   My pitch always started with the background that “recent developments in the media landscape have made asking and answering contextual questions more important than ever before”. These developments included the rise of the Internet, digital outlets, 24/7 radio and television stations as breaking news providers; proliferation of media outlets; and the resulting competition.   The…