Get a grip, Madame Speaker; Let parliamentary reporters be

For Speaker of Parliament Kadaga, power seems to be doing things to her. Her suspension of two Observer reporters from covering Parliament just because they wrote two stories she says were incorrect is total overreach. It is unnecessary.

Two of the more popular politicians in the Daily Monitor newsroom in the mid-to-late 1990s were Ms Rebecca Kadaga and Mr Amama Mbabazi. They returned reporters’ phone calls. That means a great deal to journalists.

Both politicians have since gone on to bigger things. They can now only be reached, if at all, through a battery of aides. They are shielded, even from reporters. The results are not good.
For Speaker of Parliament Kadaga, power seems to be doing things to her. Her suspension of two Observer reporters from covering Parliament just because they wrote two stories she says were incorrect is total overreach. It is unnecessary.

What enlightened public officials do in the circumstances is write the newspaper to correct any falsehoods or misreporting. Or better still complain to the statutory Media Council or the Independent Media Council of Uganda. In this case the Speaker could also have brought in the association that unites parliamentary reporters.

It is not helpful, as The Observer noted in a statement, for the Speaker to complain, decide the case and execute the punishment. The irony must surely not be lost on her as the leader of the third arm of the State who also as a lawyer knows something about separation of powers, rule of law, and all that due process stuff.

It appears Ms Kadaga has bought into the widespread but exaggerated praises of her stewardship of Parliament. She has not done anything extraordinary. It is just that her fairness – a basic quality a Speaker of a divided legislature should possess – in conducting parliamentary business stands out because she took over from an ineffectual predecessor who was widely viewed to be under the thumb of the Executive.

The ends to which the Speaker is putting her sense of self-importance have sometimes raised eyebrows, the suspension of the journalists being only the latest. She offered a powerful riposte last October to the smug Canadian foreign minister when he chose to lecture Uganda on the rights of sexual minorities at a meeting of world parliamentarians in Quebec.

Then she gets back home, is received as a heroine at the airport by a bunch of homophobes and proceeds to announce that she was going to drive through Parliament the Anti-Homosexuality Bill as a Christmas gift to Ugandans. One wonders who asked her to give Ugandans such a poisoned gift. Even if she were just posturing as a way to stick it to the Canadians some more, the very fact of the threat was decidedly not statesmanlike.

I have written here before noting that it was rich that the Speaker, the number three person in national hierarchy, would stand before the charged funeral of MP Cerinah Nebanda and trash the government’s report on probable cause of death. The cheap populism she exhibited was beneath the person of the Speaker.

In the present case of the reporters, something else seems afoot. In the letter of suspension to The Observer, according to the newspaper, it is noted that the motives of the two articles are “questionable and unfortunate”.

As is the case with tenuous charges, the questionable motives and who is behind them are not stated. Somehow we should take it on trust that there are indeed dark motives, someone sinister is behind those motives, and that someone is using The Observer reporters. Well, that frees us to speculate.

There is no question the Speaker has had fights with some politicians from her backyard of Busoga. There is also no question that since becoming Speaker she has had a touchy relationship with Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi. Who of these may have “used” the journalists, we do not know. But like some wise soul observed, just because you are paranoid does not mean you have no enemies out to get you.

In any event, all free speech and free press advocates, including MPs, must stand up to the Speaker’s bullying of The Observer and demand an immediate and unconditional lifting of the suspension of the newspaper’s two reporters. This, of course, does not stop Ms Kadaga from pointing out exactly the inaccuracies in the two stories and, if she pleases, proceeding with action in civil court against the newspaper. Her draconian handling of the situation, however, cannot, and must not, be tolerated.

Mr Tabaire is a media consultant with the African Centre for Media Excellence. bentab@hotmail.com