ugnet_: TAMALE MIRUNDI'S POISON

[Mulindwa Edward]

The National Political Commissar, Dr Crispus Kiyonga, has warned that Mr. Tamale Mirundi�s hate propaganda against the Banyankole, which is aired on the CBS FM Radio, is inflaming genocide. We want to amplify Dr Kiyonga�s important message. It is really laughable for people like Tamale Mirundi to self-style themselves into the Biblical Moses who see themselves as the right people to guide Ugandans. Uganda Confidential finds it intriguing that a man who cannot successfully manage even a kiosk, a journalist whose vernacular paper, Lipoota died long ago and whose management of The Voice newspaper also failed, a man who failed to convince just one constituency (Kyotera) to elect him to the seventh parliament, can now stand up and assign himself the role of a founding father, the overseer, the visionary, and so on. To Uganda Confidential, the problem is not Mr Tamale Mirundi. He is just a small part of the larger problem. The problem is the Government failure to put in place a technical and nationalistic information policy. This is the problem that has never been addressed right from the colonial days. When the colonialists come to Uganda, they deliberately refused to develop two important areas: the army and the media. During the colonial days, what should have been a fully fledged ministry of information was reduced to a mere desk, manned by one man in the office of the Colonial Governor. This person�s job was to write about Ugandans with a lot of emphasis on tribal differences: the Northerners were known as the brave and barbaric people; the Baganda were cunning and white collar thieves; the Banyankole were portrayed as lazy people; while the Asians were seen as �coolies�. Mr Tamale Mirundi�s emphasis that the Banyankole are looters of state wealth is just a continuation of the destructive colonial media distortion. In the absence of a solid media base, at the time of independence, the media, mainly Radio Uganda, was synonymous with entertainment. Indeed, one of the main agreements in the merger between Kabaka Yekka Party (KY) and UPC was that since the Baganda had the richest cultural industry, it was agreed that Radio Uganda be given to KY. Indeed, Radio Uganda was known more for its Kadongo Kamu music of the day. But that was not bad. The turning point where the Tamale Mirundis of this world have roots was when the KY-UPC alliance collapsed in 1966. For unclear reasons, The first Milton Obote regime and the successive savage regimes of Idi Amin and Okello Lutwa (RIP) turned the ministry of information to be a cover for state security operatives. The late J. Namakajjo and group were coughing up in this mess, and journalism became synonymous with intelligence. Radios were turned into instruments of hate campaigns. Instead of developing specialised media, Radio Uganda was turned into a spring board for dwarf politicians, with their savage political announcements. Mr Tamale Mirundi�s hot political air is rooted in this recent distorted media history, where political failures assigned themselves the role addressing the nation from a safe radio station, which was at that time, even guarded by the military. Radio propaganda was an easy way to use in poisoning of the colonial peasants. It was successfully used in Rwanda and Burundi. In fact, the French colonialists, the savage of the whole lot, deliberately refused to develop the print media in their colonies. The print media appeals to serious people. A written word is like an egg, once broken can never mended. One can take you on word per word in the print media, not so with the radio where Mr Tamale Mirundi will counter by denying or modifying his statement. It is therefore easy for an entertainment house to take a little licence into political gossiping in lazy and casual manner. You don�t do that in political writing. You must be ready to defend your self even after many years, if you ever make a political blunder in writing. It is precisely because of this scientific law of the media that cheap political blunders in the print media cannot be sustained. The Citizen, Munno and The Exposure, which were the voice of the Democratic Party collapsed, because the readers voted against their line. The Focus and The Shariat, which stood for the Muslim fanatics, collapsed because the readers voted them off the streets. The People of the UPC folded because the readers also voted them out of Uganda House. So when Dr Rwanyarare turns to The Monitor and wants it to play the role which The People used to play, the writing on the wall is very clear. Dr Rwanyarare�s poison will soon make the readers vote The Monitor out of the Monitor House. Mr Tamale Mirundi�s own paper Lipoota was voted off the streets precisely because not even one hundred readers agreed with his political views. Mr Tamale Mirundi is thriving at CBS because the management of CBS does not seem to realise that if Government woke up today and set up a solid information policy, Mr Tamale Mirundi�s mountain of cheap political propaganda would be reduced to sea level. Even the wonderful CBS would find it hard to take a gamble in political areas which they cannot scientifically defend. Our advise is simple: Entertainment Radios should stick to entertainment. If they want to adventure into political and economic areas, they should get political journalists, not a political failure who is taking his revenge on society for having rejected him twice, as an editor and as a politician. If Mr Tamale Mirundi want to be a political journalist let him start his own political paper. Uganda Confidential, which is now more than 12 years, has succeeded because we scientifically analysed the readership in Uganda. We have a small class of the most important people, which will grow with time. The famous Economist did this in 1848. It started off with only 3,500 copies. But as the capitalist class grew in UK, now The Economist prints more than 500,000 copies a week. CHEEYE T.S.        The Mulindwas communication group "With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy"