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The Political Economy of Radio Speech

UNDERSTANDING THE EMERGENCE OF THE EBIMEEZA AND THE format they took also requires an exploration of the political economy and the sociology of the media within which they were produced. Historically the Ugandan press has been intrinsically linked to religious mobilization, party and faction politics, and of late has been dominated by university-educated intellectuals. By contrast, radio has a very different history. As we will see, the introduction of live political debate on the air was far from being a self-evident or straightforward process. In order to be politically acceptable, professionally valued by media workers, and economically viable, the programming of talk radio needed to take particular formats. Political speech and the opening of new avenues for popular expression cannot be understood in isolation from the ambivalent development of commercial radio within the private realm of the state, the importation of foreign entertainment and news formats, the economy of development and international aid, and the local heritages of a relatively long history of radio culture.

The Liberalization of the Airwaves and the Invention of Private Radio

The involvement of audiences in programming is a rather old phenomenon in Uganda, as in the rest of Africa. Radio clubs were initially launched during late colonialism, with the ambition of teaching “civic values” to colonial subjects.¹ In Uganda, before the creation of a proper, official station in 1954 by the protectorate government, mobile broadcasting units “would shuttle between about twenty political rally venues in Kampala and the neighboring areas many times a week disseminating information. [. . . Then] the same broadcasting team would record questions from the audience and take them to the colonial masters for answering.”² But in contrast with the vibrant and deeply political press of late colonialism, the British aimed at protecting the airwaves against open political controversy and debate.³ In the 1980s, before and after Museveni’s takeover, a program called You and Your Government encouraged people to send in questions by letter, which were then answered on the air.⁴

Interactivity thus did not come with the liberalization of the airwaves, but it changed tremendously because of it, for when the first private radio stations were launched in 1993, and when the airwaves became the terrain of commercial competition, the logics of programming mutated. Before that, the state radio was the realm of teachers, carefully chosen ethnic entrepreneurs, and public servants whose careers oscillated between media production and administrative work in the Ministry of Information.⁵ They were broadcasters who understood their professional ethos as the fulfillment of a duty to report government and state decisions and activities without questioning them, not necessarily only as a result of constraint, terror, or guilty collaboration with violent regimes, but also because such an ethos corresponded to their training and their vision of what a public broadcaster should do.⁶ However, audiences had already developed a taste and habits of interacting with broadcasters ahead of the privatization of the airwaves.

The liberalization of radio in 1993 was not the result of journalists’ liberal demands or a cause for political mobilization. It was the result of a petition from businessmen who considered the airwaves an investment opportunity and who were for the most part close to the Movement leadership.⁷ For the authorities, opening the airwaves was part of a wider policy of further embracing the market economy.⁸ William Pike, at the time editor in chief of the government newspaper the New Vision, was influential in the decision of the government to liberalize. He insists on the fact that it was a business move, and that radio stations were mainly expected to broadcast music and “not engage in political criticism,” or government propaganda for that matter, both considered a nuisance to business.⁹ According to Peter Mwesige, in the first two years after the liberalization, 80 percent of the programs were dedicated to music, not because of political constraint, but because it was profitable.¹⁰ As a journalist from the Monitor recalled:

I think we had not at that time thought about it. . . . I don’t know, there was . . . It is true, a government radio is not enough, but there was no movement to push for opening the airwaves. [. . .] The journalists in the government media were also satisfied with what they were doing. They were not really pro–opening up. [. . .] And there was also the question of training. Because most of the journalists at that time were print journalists. [. . .] Here, [the liberalization] was a donation from the government.¹¹

Radio was not the realm of journalists. From the authorities’ point of view, the first stations were owned by “trustworthy” people who they knew supported the establishment, like Thomas Katto. He was a senior businessman who owned Radio Sanyu, the first private station to be launched, and who had made his fortune with a tissue factory and in clothing.¹² Capital FM was launched next by William Pike, a British journalist at the time strongly supportive of the Movement; and Patrick Quarcoo, a Ghanaian businessman and radio presenter. At the time, Quarcoo was in his thirties. Today he owns several stations in Uganda and Kenya, as well as a tabloid in Nairobi. He left Ghana in 1984 to secure an MBA in Manchester. He specialized in media management and was later hired by Reuters as a business manager for Africa, which is how he met Pike. The Ugandan economic context seemed favorable to him as a media product developer:

We were looking for a country that was liberal enough and at that time, President Museveni was also looking for investors to go into the country. There was a fortuitous mix. [. . .] At that time, some advertisers would look to advertise on national radio and national television and they would be told there’s no space, you have to wait for two or three days. So it was a real business opportunity to be able to come in and say to people, “Hey, if they won’t take the money, we’ll give you advertising.”¹³

Maria Kiwanuka, already mentioned above as a friend of the historicals of Club Obbligato’s Ekimeeza, is a good example of this first generation of radio owners, and of the overlapping nature of the private and public sectors that has proved instrumental in the development of these new venues for political speech. In September 1997, she launched Radio One (followed four years later by a sister station, Radio Two Akaboozi, which broadcasts in Luganda). She comes from an influential Ganda family. Her father was a civil servant. She was born in the 1950s and educated in Kampala, graduating with a degree in commerce from Makerere in 1977. She worked in the banking sector before going to London for her MBA . She was then recruited by the World Bank as an analyst.¹⁴ When she came back to Uganda in the 1990s, she became a board member of the Uganda Development Bank, a nonexecutive director of Stanbic Bank, and a member of the Presidential Economic Commission.¹⁵ Her husband, Mohan Kiwanuka, heads Oscar Industries, a company created in the 1970s that specializes in stationery, and he is regularly cited in the press as one of the wealthiest men in the country.¹⁶ In 2011, her links with the political establishment were publicly acknowledged when Maria Kiwanuka was nominated as minister of finance, a position she held until March 2015.¹⁷

From the mid-1990s, stations started broadcasting in the vernacular. For instance, Radio Simba was launched in 1996 by Aga Sekalala Jr., a Ganda businessman from one of the wealthiest families of Uganda, who made his fortune in real estate, nightclubs, agriculture, and poultry.¹⁸ He told me that he was a specialist in “entertainment for the masses,” and he saw radio as strongly articulated to his clubbing business.¹⁹ However, whereas Pike, Quarcoo, and Katto hired DJs and broadcast European and US music, Simba’s managers had a more local anchorage. They hired comedians and humorists from the dense Kampala Luganda-speaking theater scene. Again, the radio landscape was moving away from journalism, its sociability circles, and its intellectual traditions. The year 1996 also saw the creation of CBS, the radio of the Kingdom of Buganda, as well as Voice of Toro, located in Fort Portal in Western Uganda, which was the first private radio station to be based up-country. Before that, all private stations were broadcasting in a 150-kilometer radius around the capital city. Apart from CBS, whose founders had a more immediate political objective in mind (see chapter 4), these new radio stations were also launched with strictly business objectives. The programs were focused on music and entertainment.

The Difficult Politicization of the Airwaves

In 2000, the private newspaper the Monitor launched its own radio station, Monitor FM. This was the first important investment in broadcast media by intellectuals and professional journalists. The programs were very different from the other stations’, as they were largely dominated by political debate: according to one of its journalists, “We had that Monitor content: ‘seriousness, seriousness.’ [. . .] Our format was radio talk format, from morning to evening: talk, talk, talk.”²⁰ Economically it would prove to be a disastrous operation: after a few months, the station had to be relaunched due to bad audience figures. For most media workers, the failure of Monitor FM clearly demonstrated that if they wanted to talk politics on-air, they would have to respect certain conventions in order to be sustainable. As one said, “The failure of Monitor FM to pick up at the start killed all our hopes that professionals [journalists] can run an FM station better. [. . .] Radio made more money playing music and cracking jokes, something DJs did better.”²¹

This experience raises the question of how many people actually listen to political radio talk shows. Audience research carried out by private companies commissioned by the stations does not give exact figures, only tendencies. However, they clearly show that politics is not what attracts the most listeners.²² Today, as in the 2000s, most stations mainly broadcast entertainment and music, with only a couple of hours a day dedicated to politics. When looking at national figures (mixing Kampala and the rest of the country), evening political shows have very low audiences, except for CBS’s program Kiriza oba gana (Take it or leave it, in Luganda), long hosted by Meddie Nsereko (see chapter 4). However, even in the case of CBS, audience figures always rose after the programs finished. Regarding weekends, even if these shows were not the most popular, there were rises in audience levels for CBS and Radio Simba for their ebimeeza (both in Luganda). But this was not the case for Radio One’s English-speaking Ekimeeza. Figures restricted to Kampala gave a different picture. English-speaking evening shows saw a slight rise, illustrating how they attracted mainly an urban audience. For Kampala only, Radio One’s Ekimeeza was more visible, although it was far from being the most popular show on the station in terms of quantitative listenership. In all cases, according to the available audience research, the radio stations scored their best audience figures with morning entertainment shows and music.

The decision to program political talk shows was not based on the belief that they would attract many listeners. Their existence depended on how much particular people within the station were keen on making them a brand product, and how much influence these people had on management decisions. Indeed, establishing repertoires of political critique in the media depended not only on negotiation between journalists and the authorities, but also on internal dynamics within the radio stations. Some radio owners were hostile to programming “politics,” not necessarily because this might have created conflicts with the state, but because it was not financially attractive.²³

Many were indeed reluctant to program political talk shows.²⁴ On Radio Sanyu, journalists from the newsroom were quite frustrated with this situation: “Most of the time, it was music. [. . .] And he [Katto, the owner] was so strict. He wanted the news [to be] no more than 5 minutes. . . . Usually we used to fight. . . . Whenever you could go like eight minutes, you could see the man come [into the studio].”²⁵ As Radio Simba’s owner told me,

[People] were interested in a bit of politics, talk shows, but one of the things we realized was that there was no fun on radio. Radio was very dull. All the radios sounded like errr . . . RFI . . . boring . . . BC. . . . Everybody believed that was what radio was supposed to be, very serious, and very unexciting and you know, nothing, no fun in radio. We decided we’re gonna be fun, lighthearted. [. . .] We set up a lot of entertainment programs, we got lots of funny guys, entertainment people, comedians on board, people who had been in drama, in theater, and we trained them on how to come on radio. [. . .] We had [only] two people from Mass Communication [department at Makerere University], and only one has remained here.²⁶

At Capital FM, Pike started by hiring employees from the state broadcaster Radio Uganda; however, according to him, “It was very bad actually. After about three weeks we had to sack most of them. They sounded dull.”²⁷ He got in touch with Peter Sematimba,²⁸ who since then has become a celebrity, artistically and politically, and one of the most well-paid DJs in the country: “He was very lively, very American. You know he’s a Muganda who’s been living in Los Angeles, so he came and gave a very lively sound. Then . . . [we also hired] a famous club DJ. [. . .] So basically we switched to club people.”²⁹ Soon, being a radio presenter became something glamorous, fashionable, and well-paid. The sociology of radio presenters was thus very different to that of print journalists.

Talk shows had to be infused with entertainment and accommodated a double heritage, depending on the station. In 1995, Capital FM launched Capital Gang, taking the same name as another show from CNN.³⁰ In Uganda, as in the United States, every Saturday Capital Gang gathered a panel nicknamed “the Gang” or “the Gangsters,” composed of famous or rising members of the political intelligentsia, as well as journalists, to comment on the weekly news. The tone was openly lighthearted, as in a discussion among friends. Similarly, the Andrew Mwenda Live show on KFM was conceptualized in 2000 by Oliver Murray, a Canadian journalist, based on a North American model: it was largely centered on the personality of the host.³¹

On Radio Simba, the People’s Court was inspired by a UK program, but also reflected its producers’ training and experience in local drama. There was already a vibrant tradition of social and political theater in Uganda that had arisen since independence, part of which was broadcast on radio.³² Playwrights suffered a lot under Amin, but after 1986, small troupes flourished across Kampala and were fed by the prestigious Department of Music, Arts and Drama at Makerere.³³ The first producer of the People’s Court, Michael Kisenyi, was originally a comedian. He studied music and theater at Makerere before working for Radio Uganda and later at Radio Simba.³⁴ The Ugandan theater culture thus strongly permeated the airwaves.

Talk shows were not very expensive to produce, but they still required more resources than broadcasting only music. Generally, guests in the studios were not paid, but permanent panelists got an allowance, which could reach USh50,000 (around £10) per show for the most successful ones in Kampala. Ebimeeza required more resources than indoor shows. Some stations rented the space where debates took place, although many organized discussions in their courtyards. Numerous talk shows were sponsored by local companies, especially brewers and real estate agents. In these circumstances, and also when the airtime was bought by NGOs or politicians, stations could make money from political talk shows.³⁵

Elections were a particularly fruitful time in terms of the creation of new shows. Politicians were ready to pay to get exposure and engage with listeners. Station managers were looking for original media products that could be launched in order to gain momentum, bringing advertizing and more listeners to their stations. The heated 2001 electoral campaign, which saw former president Museveni’s close ally, Kizza Besigye, run in the presidential election against him for the first time, also witnessed an upsurge of many new programs, including famous and controversial political editor Andrew Mwenda’s Andrew Mwenda Live on KFM, and Ekimeeza on Radio One. In the 2001 electoral context in particular, many radio journalists took their role as conveners of political debate seriously, and talk shows were a way for them to underline this.

This particular election also occurred at a moment when stations had gained in experience. Individual newspaper journalists and editors became talk show hosts or permanent panelists, which was an opportunity to enhance their status as political commentators and intellectuals, as well as to supplement their incomes. Insisting on their position as spokespersons of the “common people,” some talk show presenters took advantage of these platforms, sometimes assimilating their work with a religious calling to defend the “voiceless,”³⁶ sometimes entering politics more actively by converting this media capital into a more traditional representative position and trying to get elected as MPs.³⁷ Generally speaking, interactive talk radio helped radio journalists to enhance their status compared to political elites, as well as to acquire the self-confidence and credibility to counter politicians in intellectual arguments, acting as self-appointed representatives of the “voice of the people.”

As mentioned earlier, a few months after Radio One launched its Ekimeeza show, other stations followed: CBS produced Mambo Bado from a pub in Mengo;³⁸ and Radio Simba created Simbawo Akatii (in Luganda, “Point of information!”) in another bar, in Kampala’s popular Nakulabye area. Eight other ebimeeza appeared in the capital city between 2004 and 2009. Most were tackling national political topics. As one of the producers explained: “Fundamentally, we take the same topic as those which made the front page during the week.”³⁹ For example, in the corpus I gathered for Radio One’s Ekimeeza (sixty-three topics collected, from 2002 to 2008),⁴⁰ the most-aired themes included: national policies and the political strategies of the executive, inter- and intraparty wrangles, peace negotiations in the North of the country, corruption, human rights, electoral reform, land reform, and more rarely public health (two topics on cholera and Ebola). Issues concerning the kingdom were quite rare (only once, on the fifteenth anniversary of the coronation of Mutebi II). In my sample, there was one topic on economics, and one about the management of the national football federation. Whatever the topic was, speakers quickly shifted the debate toward discussing the decisions and behavior of the state elites, and on making hypotheses about their strategies to get into or remain in office.

TABLE 2.1. Topics of Radio One’s Ekimeeza

Some topics were chosen for their potential to create a heated debate. Nevertheless, their wording also reveals the producers’ preoccupation with avoiding government confrontations. They encouraged a balanced analysis and tried to avoid simple partisan antagonisms. For example, in August 2008, right after several kingdom officials had been brutally arrested by security services, the topic of discussion in Club Obbligato was “The arrest of the Buganda Kingdom officials: What are the implications for the rule of law and lessons for Buganda?” By wording the topic this way, journalists encouraged using this episode as the basis for a more general reflection on what it is to respect the law, a recommendation that seemed to target both the authorities who did not respect the legislation on detention, and the kingdom officials who were accused of violating the constitution by engaging in politics. Generally, topics encouraged making an intellectual analysis.

FIGURE 2.1. Flyer showing Ekimeeza topic at Club Obbligato.

Talk Radio and Transnational Development

The advertizing market increased massively in the 2000s. Radio in urban areas became a profitable business: some Kampala-based stations were among the most important taxpayers in the country.⁴¹ The number of stations soon exploded. As of 2014, there were 257 radio stations officially registered at the Uganda Communications Commission.⁴² Stations have also mushroomed up-country. Nevertheless, the market and thus potential profits have been much smaller outside the capital city; the possibilities of relying on private advertizing have increased but are still limited.⁴³

This market structure affected what could and could not be said on-air. Indeed, the politicization of the airwaves was even more difficult up-country than in the capital. Economic sustainability outside Kampala implied a different positioning toward the state, and also toward NGOs, which were both critical in supporting the local media economy by being the prime buyers of airtime. This financial dependency directly affected working practices. But beyond mere financial considerations, it is important to stress that working in collaboration (however unequally) with local government authorities and international donors was not always viewed negatively by media workers or felt as a constraint.

All this was very apparent on Radio Buddu, a private radio station in Masaka, a small town 150 kilometers west of Kampala in Buganda. It was created in 2001 by a businessman. A former manager recalled of the time when they launched the station,

The government projects that would bring projects like nutrition programs, health programs, even political programs presenting the agenda of the government—they were all at the district level. [. . .] These were the main sources for the radio—sources where we could get money. [. . .] Today [in 2008] the picture has changed, [but] when we went to Masaka [in 2001] there was little business. Masaka had been bombarded in 1979, most people had gone away because there was no business, and when AIDS came it affected the most productive people. [. . .] The town, by six o’clock, all the shops were closed. No one to buy. People were just farmers. [. . .] The only source of advertisement was government.⁴⁴

Stations sold their airtime to local government agencies, NGOs, or local politicians. There were variations according to the region and the station, but generally, a one-hour talk show cost 1 million Ugandan shillings (around £250), in exchange for which the client could choose the topic of the show and even, in some cases, prepare the questions the presenter was going to ask. When I was in Masaka in 2008 and 2012, important clients included UNDP (United Nations Development Programme); USAID (US Agency for International Development); the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS); the Rakai Counselors’ Association (RACA); and Masaka Microfinance Association. A presenter I interviewed estimated that four shows out of ten he hosted were bought.⁴⁵ Of course, as producers told me, it was much more difficult to contradict someone who paid for airtime. Even in between shows, journalists hesitated before running a critical report on a state agency or an organization that was also a client of the station.⁴⁶ A presenter noted:

Since this client has his or her money, and it’s money that will pay your salary, you don’t need to frustrate your client, because he will make reports to your bosses and they will question you! Sometimes you just have to put away the professionalism and then . . . go to his or her choices. You have to keep your job.⁴⁷

More generally speaking, as another staff member noted, a show can be much more “political [. . .] when it’s sponsored by Pepsi than when it’s bought by an NGO.”⁴⁸ In this configuration, the presenter could hope that calls from listeners would provide a contradiction in a situation in which he himself did not feel at ease to do so for fear of retaliation.⁴⁹

Configurations varied according to the politics and history of the region. In Northern Uganda for instance, the local economy has been particularly impacted by the presence of international NGOs. Mega FM is based in Gulu, the main urban center in the North. It is owned by the government, although it was relaunched with the support of the British Department for International Development (DFID) in 2002, in order to support the peace process in the region. On Mega FM, some programs were produced and hosted by employees of the NGOs who purchased airtime, giving a very good example of the overlapping of varied patterns of ownership and influence within the same media company (the state, international agencies, nongovernmental organizations). More generally, because they did not have many resources, journalists in Gulu were often dependent on NGOs’ infrastructures to conduct their reports, to go into the field, and so on, especially when the security situation was difficult.

Nevertheless, that dependency relationship was not unilateral. A station like Mega FM, and some producers individually, managed to negotiate their way within this grid of constraints, and even to turn the situation to their advantage. NGOs and local authorities needed the stations for their communication and consultation activities. Local stations might not have been as dependent on international NGOs as one might have thought, especially when these stations were not many in an area, because they could fix the prices relatively freely. Stations labeled as “community media”⁵⁰ may actually have been more financially secure than commercial stations that relied on only commercial advertizing.⁵¹

Depolitization from Above and Below

The role of international NGOs toward the autonomization of the media was ambivalent. Securing the help of international NGOs may have allowed journalists to be more independent from other patrons such as the state or local politicians. However, collaborating with international NGOs (which were in a better position to afford airtime than local organizations) also implied a whole series of constraints on what could and what could not be said on-air. In addition, a lot of the airtime was actually bought by consortiums of international NGOs and local authorities, who usually, in any case, worked closely together in order to implement health programs or other public services. Generally speaking, many local and international NGOs in Uganda shied away from directly questioning the local or national leaders’ behavior and decisions, as they needed a certain level of cooperation with them in order for their programs to be effective, while also being closely monitored by the state.⁵²

“Communication officers” who hosted programs on Mega FM in Gulu explained during interviews how their position impacted the way they could address political and social issues on the air. As one of them explained:

There are stories that I can get back from the field, like issues about the LRA and government, which I would really love to write, but where [should I] take these stories? [. . .] Taking a job in a nongovernmental organization can make you behave according to the philosophy of this organization. And it can be a contradiction if you are trained as a journalist.⁵³

Generally, radio was an important tool for organizations engaged in pacification programs, and it is crucial to take this dimension into account to understand the situation in Gulu.⁵⁴ After the trauma caused by the “hate media” in Rwanda, numerous “peace stations” were created in Africa, from Sierra Leone and Liberia to Burundi, by the UN and NGOs such as Search for Common Ground. Mega FM was relaunched in this context. A lot of guides, manuals, and gray literature have been produced on the peace media model, many of which attempt to evaluate the effect of such broadcasts on reconciliation. Others give guidance and advice to media practitioners.⁵⁵ What can be called the peace media model actually gathers schools and methods, which have different names: proactive journalism, peace journalism, conflict-sensitive journalism, and the like. All these promote a language discipline that is thought to protect peace negotiations, prevent stereotypes and stigma, and avoid the encouragement of violence.⁵⁶ Talk radio is seen especially as a good tool for pacification and development because of its potential for participation and dialogue. It is believed to favor the development of a culture of forgiveness, very often considered an alternative to judicial and criminal justice, which are regularly accused of jeopardizing peace processes.⁵⁷ Talk radio is also believed to challenge political and social inequalities that influence the opportunities for people to voice their concerns.⁵⁸

But talk radio can also be blamed for being a potential source of mayhem and hate speech. As a result, radio hosts are asked to enforce discipline and encourage listeners’ speech to be deployed according to a particular pattern: people calling in are urged to tell personal stories and testify to what happened to them, instead of pointing to others who might be responsible. They are discouraged from generalizing and relating their personal situation to more structural patterns of political rule.⁵⁹

In Gulu, journalists tended to promote a particular model of transition and pacification through these interactive talk show formats and through their reporting practices. This model valued amnesty and pardon instead of the criminal prosecution and criminal trials promoted by the ICC (International Criminal Court).⁶⁰ A journalist I interviewed explained how he sometimes chose what to write and what not to write in order to be “positive” about the peace process, even though he himself was not totally convinced by the idea that the media should serve peace:

Just a few days ago the government was here consulting people on the peace talks on what should be done. I went to the camps where they were consulting the people. They said the LRA and Kony should be forgiven. Although there was a kid there, a young kid who testified and said, “Me I would want this people to be punished severely, because I’ve lost my arm.” . . . He had one arm. [. . .] “I want when they come they should be punished severely” [the boy said]. But I decided to leave him and focus on what the majority of people had said. But otherwise if I had wanted, I could have written that the IDP [internally displaced persons] stated this people to be punished severely for the suffering they had given them. That is, I think, being positive enough in the reporting.⁶¹

In this context, the objective was to avoid demonizing the rebels to promote alternative reconciliation practices to the International Criminal Court, in accordance, although not necessarily intentionally, with the official line of government at the time.⁶²

The areas in which language discipline was promoted among journalists in the name of protection of the peace process were numerous. According to a Mega FM manager I interviewed in 2007, when the negotiations in Juba were still going on and the LRA had just left Northern Uganda:

Here [in Gulu] you need to be very, very careful when you are doing a reporting, that in certain ways, certain very negative things might not need to be reported. You can have negative effects. We are always very careful about that. [. . .] For example, when I was in Juba there was a meeting and . . . One of the things that came out of the meeting was that . . . that the rebels [. . .] were accused of making money out of the peace process. That they were delaying the process. And you can imagine if that issue came out, the rebels would not be happy, [saying], “So you think we’re just there for making money.” And so you find a way, putting things in such a way that . . . that it has not . . . You see, you see . . . In a situation like this one, you avoid as much as possible pointing fingers. . . . Pointing fingers like “You are the problem.” . . . You do everything with a lot of diplomacy.⁶³

In their professional lives, journalists routinely face dilemmas concerning which they need to deliberate, personally or collectively, about what to do, what to publish or not. These deliberations shape a professional ethos and culture on a daily basis. In Gulu, media workers were making editorial decisions in a context of very strong constraints, from both the rebels and the government. In this environment, many media workers valued a disciplined language protective of “peace.” It was very different from conceptions of professionalism that were valid in other parts of Uganda. For example, in Kampala, this view was often frowned upon. When I asked Peter Mwesige, an academic but also a former journalist from the Monitor and the New Vision, what he thought about the idea of adapting journalism to local specificities and challenges, especially in violent contexts, this is what he answered:

Let me tell you, journalism the way I see it, whether you are in France, or Germany, China, Latin America, you know, South Africa, Africa, there are some fundamentals that you can’t run away from. . . . I mean, accuracy is something that we all cherish, right? Similarly, fairness and some kind of balance, things like relevance; you can’t tell me that there are some cultures, where for some reasons it’s okay for a journalist not to hold power accountable, for example. It’s nonsense. So I don’t like this relativity talk. [. . .] Because they are trying to suggest that you know for us in Africa, because we are developing nations, we should have a journalism that is different. That’s nonsense, I don’t agree with that at all. [. . .] Our experiments in Africa [have] been sooooo pathetic and a disaster. [. . .] I mean, we had so-called New Information Order debates in the 1980s. What did it give us? It gave us media that were serving the interests of ruling parties, media that were incapable of holding power accountable, civil society, business, accountable.⁶⁴

Generally among journalists in Gulu, in the context of the peace process, of increased political control and of NGO financial and ideological influence, “objectivity” strongly sided with “responsibility” as defined in relation to the peace negotiations or socioeconomic development. What was striking in the context of Northern Uganda was the congruence between this media ethos and the objectives of control by the state, although such congruence was not necessarily intentional. The most repressive actions taken against the electronic and print media up to the mid-2000s were generally linked to security issues, in particular the regional balance of powers: Rwanda, DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and John Garang’s death.⁶⁵ The coverage of the war against the LRA was also especially difficult, because of insecurity in the field and political pressures, and regularly led to police summoning journalists for questioning.⁶⁶

Media workers and government officials did not necessarily share the same conceptions of what “protecting peace” involved in terms of language discipline. It happened, however. An example of this coincidence between government objectives of control, the desire by journalists not to jeopardize the peace process, and more classical concerns about accuracy had to do with the publication of casualties.⁶⁷ As the same manager from Mega FM explained:

During the times when the rebels were still fighting and inflicting a lot of casualties on the UPDF [government army; Uganda People’s Defense Force], sometimes cross-checking some information was very difficult, like if there was an ambush, sometimes you hear that they have killed so many UPDF. Some will say no, they’re only a handful. . . . Very few . . . So for us it was so difficult to cross-check that kind of information. [. . .] Putting a story that maybe the rebels have killed so many government troops will definitely encourage the rebels, saying they were doing very well, and it will not contribute towards the resolution of the conflict. So rather than do that, you need to do it in such way that probably they triggered some casualties. . . . You hide the quantity, but you say “some.” Because they were “some,” even two can be “some.”⁶⁸

According to the government, in times of war the media should avoid publicizing losses by the army, transmit any information they have to the state, and, more generally, avoid publishing any information “unfavorable” to ending the war, which was for a long time understood as crushing the rebels, and later on turned to the promotion of amnesty measures.⁶⁹ If they did not comply, journalists risked being qualified as enemies of the state or terrorists. This example shows again the importance of deciphering the ways political control over the media is justified, as these practices of control may appear more or less legitimate among media professionals. In this case, not publicizing the number of casualties not only was the result of coercion and fear of repression; it also corresponded to a particular media ethos supported by international donors, even if media workers and state officials did not always share the same vision as to how the war should end.

Today in Masaka, as in Gulu, private advertizing is available for radio stations paid for by local, national, and international companies (especially for sodas and mobile phones). The market is much more dynamic than it was fifteen years ago. This has decreased the financial dependency of stations on NGOs and local authorities. However, even if doing business with local and international NGOs is no longer a vital necessity, most people inside the stations, beginning with the owners and managers, are not considering giving up selling their airtime to NGOs. This practice is not just a source of profit. Working together with NGOs is part of a professional ethos and has been integrated into a discourse on the “public service” a given station has to pursue, in the same vein as broadcasting information about health, promoting peace, or providing technical advice to farmers. Many radio staff in Masaka and Gulu think their work should benefit “development” and “peace building” and not merely information or political debate. Radio presenters up-country very often repeated how they wanted radio to “talk about development, not politics.” This imaginary division—though actually very blurred—between what belongs to a realm of “development” and what falls into “politics” is very entrenched and influential for both media workers and state officials. In Uganda as elsewhere, politicizing an event or an issue is often likened to the contamination of fundamental collective domains linked to the basics of life and survival by narrow interests.⁷⁰

President Museveni regularly announces that government might shut down “anti-development” radio stations.⁷¹ Resident district commissioners (RDCs), who represent the president at the district level, often exhort journalists to stop meddling in “politics” and focus on “development.” The words of a station manager in the East of the country interviewed by Peter Mwesige illustrate very well this affinity between political control and the promotion of “development”: “When the big bosses come around, we host them and people can [call in and] ask their questions. But we can’t just bring up anything, without backing. We prefer development issues. We don’t entertain hardcore political programmes. Tomorrow, if the Minister says ‘I have closed you,’ where do you run?”⁷²

In this context, many journalists prefer avoiding what they define as “political” issues, in the name of prudence, but also in the name of ethics. They prefer being what they define as “apolitical” and focusing on what they consider to be “more important issues,” assimilating “politics” to “politicking,” and considering that the latter endangers peace and development. Confronted with tragedies such as war, extreme poverty, HIV, and in accordance with the preoccupations of international and local charity and development organizations that buy radio stations’ airtime, journalists formulate models of media excellence that are alternative to those usually followed by journalists in Kampala, and that resonate with old debates on the role of the media in Africa and beyond.⁷³

Concretely, this means that media workers tend to shy away from contradictory debates that tackle national and party politics as they see such debates as counterproductive and because their audiences are supposedly not interested in those. As a former producer from Radio Buddu in Masaka explained:

[Contrary to the ones in Kampala], the ekimeeza in Masaka was not going to be political at all.

Q: Why not?

A: Because the problems of Masaka Region were not political. They were more social and economical problems. There was a lot of poverty, a lot of ignorance. And so we would use that radio to give people the chance to talk about their personal problems. How do they improve . . .

Q: But maybe they wanted to talk about the government and—

A: [He interrupts] Yes, and . . . Tactically, I just avoided that. One, because the political environment in Masaka was very, very volatile.

Q: What do you mean?

A: Was very uncompromising. People were uncompromising. My father, before I really took that job in Masaka, at that time my father was in Masaka, he told me, “My son, you are coming to Masaka, but avoid politics. There is a lot of political intrigue.” Intrigue, it means . . . hmm . . . fighting inside. So you avoid that. [. . .] I wanted Buddu to be a unifying factor, so we tried to avoid politics in the first year, as much as possible.⁷⁴

According to this perspective, the realm of “politics” is or should be limited to the capital city. Politics is defined narrowly, not as the management and discussion of collective issues, or as the power structure, but as national leaders’ decisions and behavior, and viewed in a negative light.⁷⁵ Moreover, national politics is not considered relevant to understanding what happens in a particular locality, and local-scale “politicking” is not considered worth covering (or it is seen as too dangerous both in terms of repression and in terms of inciting people to violence). When I asked the same producer to elaborate on the distinction he was making between development and political shows, he replied:

Political programs would involve political personalities, political topics, and nonpolitical would involve income-generating projects, the social projects, like maybe why in this village don’t we have a bore hole, why do we have children in the streets, so it’s a social problem; it’s our problem.

Q: The children on the street, water, it could become political, if the RDC is here, the councillors. . . . How do you control that?

A: Of course, we would be so clear that it is not a political topic; don’t bring politics to the topic today, we are talking about the children in the streets.⁷⁶

Thus, as a result, problems affecting rural populations were presented as objective and consensual issues, to which technical solutions should be prescribed. They were not linked to general mechanisms of domination or national decision making. They were not supposed to be debated along party lines or with the same political antagonisms observable at the national level. Poverty in particular was detached from the actions of the national (or even local) elites.⁷⁷ This widespread dichotomy between development and politics resulted in restricting the repertoires of critique, to force discussion to be deployed according to a certain pattern that engaged the responsibility of political leaders along a special repertoire.

This reluctance to organize “political” debates up-country (as expressed by media producers) resonated with the NRM “no-party” ideology, but also, in the case of Central Uganda, with a popular and older conception in which party politics was associated with chaos and moral decadence. According to Mikael Karlström, who conducted research in the 1990s, “Twenty years of misrule and civil war had made ‘politics,’ in the popular imagination, nearly equivalent to witchcraft in the classic sense of providing the symbolic vehicle through which a community envisions the standardized collective nightmare of its own dissolution.”⁷⁸ As noted earlier by other authors, the depoliticization of social issues is a strong characteristic of Museveni’s Uganda.⁷⁹ However, and importantly, this depoliticization does not rely only on mere constraint. Instead, it also involves deeper debates and ideas about morality and professional excellence, which makes this depoliticization particularly entrenched.

The programming of political talk on the private airwaves was therefore far from straightforward. But this was not necessarily—or at least not only—because it was seen as risky, in a context characterized by political pressure and repression. It required particular political, economic, and professional configurations, and first and foremost the conviction that politics would indeed be profitable. Entertainment and music were cheaper and attracted bigger audiences. They were the symbols of the rupture with radio models associated with a dusty past. Political talk radio had thus to be packaged in a particular way, making politics funny, entertaining, and relaxing, accompanied by laughter, sexy jingles, popular panelists, and witty oratory. It had to fit with journalists’ professional and political ambitions to make a difference within the political debate and to position themselves as celebrities and as authoritative commentators. And they had to convince hesitant radio station owners to allow them slots on the air. In rural areas or in smaller towns, radio was largely influenced by the political economy of transnational development and its narrow although very consensual and entrenched definition of politics as “politicking,” and thus noxious to “peace” and “development.” In these contexts, talk radio had to adopt specific forms of engaging with collective issues in order to fit with local economic and professional ambitions. As we will see in the next two chapters, the opening of these venues for political expression also thrived because they fitted particular political agendas, especially the transformation of party politics and of royalism in Buganda.