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THE EAST AFRICAN-NAIROBI-KENYA
Opinion
Monday, December 16, 2002
M-7 Wants to Talk, But Who's Listening?
BY CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
There was a time when "listening to the radio" meant you were tuned to the BBC. That was when leaders like India�s Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi ruled the airwaves.
The BBC programme "From Our Correspondents" was then, as now, a favourite. And my man was the Indian correspondent Mark Tully.
I remember an election was coming up, and Tully was picking through the fortunes of Gandhi. The signs were not good. He had been following the campaigns, he reported, and come to a ramshackle town. In what went for the local square, a television sat on a stool on a shop verandah.
It was tuned to state TV, and Gandhi was saying her piece. No one sat in front of the TV.
The only living presence was a village dog. But even it had fallen asleep and wasn�t watching.
It is an unforgettable story, but even if I had forgotten it, events in Uganda last week would have brought it back in all its freshness.
Minister of Information Basoga Nsadhu gave notice in parliament that he was going to introduce a by-law to force private radios and TVs to give the president time to speak to the nation on matters of public importance.
The broadcasters who didn�t cooperate would have their licenses cancelled. Strong stuff.
Basoga also bemoaned the conditions at the state radio and TV. The place so rundown, equipment is decrepit, and it has only two cameras. It has no functioning toilets either. Not surprisingly, except in the remote villages where none of the dozens of private FM stations that litter the country can reach , hardly any educated person listens to government radio. And that means very few people listen to President Yoweri Museveni.
Broadcasters cannot deny that without Museveni, they perhaps would be making a living selling used clothes. In what now seems to have been a short-lived bout of enlightenment, the Museveni government was one of the first African countries to end state monopoly of broadcasting and free the airwaves.
Unlike its heavy-handed approach to the print media, the government has given the private radios freedom to run riot. For example, after midnight, some two or three stations have been caught airing live sex � or at least Mr Nsadhu swears that is what he heard with his own ears. So it should be understandable that when the president wants to get on air, many FM stations would be only too obliging.
However, this law wouldn�t have been necessary if two things hadn�t happened. One, if government radio had remained able to attract large audiences. Second, if President Museveni had remained popular. Because the state broadcaster never tires of putting on the president, his ministers, district chairmen, and ambassadors rambling or giving out petty donations (bicycles, water pumps, cows, goats, plastic jerricans), the people got fed up and tuned out.
And to make it worse, state broadcasters never give opposition politicians and ordinary people airtime the way the private stations do.
Up to three years ago, if a station landed an interview with President Museveni, it would advertise it heavily and its ratings would go through the roof. The requests to interview the president from media houses were endless.
And he kept the lucky few waiting for months � but for most, the president�s press office didn�t even waste the ink to tell them to forget it.
That we have arrived at the spectacle of a minister seeking a law to get Museveni on some of these private radios and TV on pain of punishment, is an important insight into where officialdom thinks the president stands in the opinion polls.
There is a Ugandan proverb that says long life allowed the rat to eat the cat�s hide. The irony will not be lost on many a broadcaster that, as President Museveni has said a couple of times in the past, it�s one of his favourite proverbs.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is managing editor in charge of convergence at the Nation Media Group.
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