‘It was 10 at night when I shook the dust of Uganda from my feet’

A plump, middle-aged woman appears on the TV screen, seething with anger. She grabs a big stick and starts hitting her teenage daughter with all her might. The daughter does not even bat an eyelid.

You would think she is being hit with a feather. “You are no longer my mother,” the teenager says calmly. “You are my co-wife.”

The woman has just discovered that her husband has been committing incest with his stepdaughter.

This is not a movie. It is fresh news that happened a few hours earlier in the afternoon. Time check: 10.00pm. Welcome to Agataliiko Nfuufu (Dustless News), the popular news programme on the government television station, Bukedde TV.

Ugandans hate dust. But the more they hate it, the more it torments them everywhere they go, and everywhere they stay. There is dust in their city, dust in their homes, dust in their food and dust in their lungs.

An hour after a heavy rainstorm, the sun comes out, the cars run over the unpaved roads and the dust hits you in the face. Promise Ugandans something dust-free and they will eagerly reach out for it.
No wonder the most popular media item today is Dustless News. No soap opera, political talk show or football league broadcast enjoys the quiet but solid popularity of this programme. It started last year after the ruling National Resistance Movement celebrated 25 years in power. Now, a year later, Dustless News is easily the most popular NRM product around.

But 25 years ago, the NRM brought dustless chalk through some donor programme when the world was rushing to assist the young government as the country emerged from years of civil war.

Schoolteachers loved the dustless chalk, which saved them from coughing like smokers and going everywhere with chalk dust on their clothes.

But the school administrators hated it for it was so hard that it scratched blackboards and the dusters could not wipe it off easily.
Eventually dustless chalk lost out and we were back to a fully dusty existence. Over the past 25 years, many commissions of inquiry have been instituted into this and that public affair.

Numerous commission reports have been written and gathered dust on the shelves of dusty government offices. People are so used to reports gathering dust that when Bukedde launched the daily Dustless News report, it became an instant hit.

On an average night, Dustless News shows you police rescuing a few-hours-old baby from down a latrine as neighbours beat up its teenage mum, a small thief being burnt alive, neighbours in a punch-up over one of their wives or a drunken grandma fallen on the roadside, her wrinkled body covered with er… dust.

This past Christmas, Agataliko Nfuufu showed an angry widow with her two kids next to her husband’s corpse still dangling on a rope and asking why he should kill himself over a “small thing” like being denied conjugal rights on the big day after he sold off their mattress to buy booze.

Every day, the most unlikely people, from judges to priests, discuss the previous night’s Dustless News.

If you want to run for public office in Uganda, better position yourself as the dustless candidate.

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com