The media and why ‘useless’ corruption stories matter

We once had a long discussion with an editor regarding the worth of corruption and governance stories run in the media. The editor’s take was that these stories no longer add much value because they barely push up copy sales. In fact if possible, they should no longer make front page news. It is easy to see where the editor was coming from.
There was a time in the late 1980s and the early 1990s when a headline of corruption or a bad governance story would grab the attention of almost everyone and be the topic in bars, on the streets and in homes and offices. These stories sold newspapers like The Weekly Topic and the Daily Monitor, and made them a fortune.

They made the careers of several people such as the late Teddy Ssezi Cheeye of the defunct Uganda Confidential, Andrew Mwenda, then of the Daily Monitor now of The Independent, who broke several stories. Many times these stories led them to courts of law and sometimes behind the prison gates. The way the corruption story has dated the media is very interesting. Initially when the NRM was fresh from the bush, armed with the 10-Point Programme and full of puritan revolutionary fervour, it seemed very risky for anyone to play outside the rules.
The argument here was that women and men had risked their lives and careers to go to the bush for five bloody years to depose “politically bankrupt” and corrupt regimes. There was no way they would do what the past regimes that they had in their words “thrown onto the garbage heap of history.”

So if a story exposing corruption was published everyone followed with bated breath hoping there would definitely be some kind of reprimand so as not to spoil the gains of the revolution. For this reason, media houses made them the main staple. But time has a way of doing things.
Even with corruption watchdogs like the IGG, commissions of inquiry and ‘strong’ laws being instituted, the returns in terms of prosecution and convictions was and has been very low or even negligible. Instead impunity has been quite alarming.

Many journalists reporting on such stories about government and even private citizens have done so at the risk of their lives and those of their families.
So with time, things cooled down a bit and the corruption story lost the wind beneath its wings. The main reason was that there was barely any action taken against the big fish in high places whose names appeared in the media. Instead, many were promoted or rewarded for having been instrumental at some point in the revolution that “ushered in sanity,” way back in 1986.
So we started having cases of public officials with a misguided sense of entitlement and busting at the seams with arrogance telling journalists who approached them for their side of the story to “go and write what you want.”

The editor “resignedly” told me that from then on, the media was no longer running corruption stories to alert the powers that be to take action or to change society. They had simply decided to record history for a later date when those who have abused office and power may be investigated and may be brought to book – which I highly doubt.
Unbeknown to the editor is the fact that the corruption story has inadvertently served another purpose. It happens this way.
Even if nothing is done to those in power when they grab land, or steal from, what hurts and concerns them most are the people they hold very dear in their lives.

Deep down in their minds are their parents, wives, children, friends, relatives and in-laws. To especially their children, they fear that they are seen as people who on the dinner table preach water, but go out to the office and drink wine instead. They have a feeling that at family gatherings, people look and quietly despise them as thieves. They know that at school, their children will be teased by their colleagues who watched the news on Tv the previous day. It is well within their understanding that most of the friends quietly back bite them.

I witnessed an occurrence one day at the National Mental Referral Hospital Butabikka. A big man who has made several corruption headlines and rides with a menacing convoy, came in quietly. He humbled himself in front of the nurses and was seriously concerned. His son admitted there was afflicted by drug addiction.
When big man left, a nurse was overheard pitying him. She casually told her colleague that three sons of the big man took to drugs after many of his friends ostracised them for being “the sons of a thief!”
Corruption stories may be worthless on the streets, but they are taken seriously in the homes of big people.

Mr Sengoba is a commentator on political and social issues. [email protected].
Twitter:@nsengoba