A bucket of cold water for Kigali's overheated press

Here is a sample of typical headlines in Rwandan newspapers: “Ruling party leading the country into darkness”; “The five mental illnesses of Kagame”; “Kagame and Hitler are one and the same”; “Army officers ready to slaughter thousands…”

And that is just on the days when the news is slow for the likes of Umuseso, Umuco, Umuvugizi, Umurabyo and other “U” newspapers that are published mainly in the vernacular Kinyarwanda.

When it really gets hot — like when the government of Burundi arrested a Rwandan fugitive, Deo Mushayidi, and handed him to Rwandan police — you can be sure our “U” sheets will outdo any fringe publication in the quality of alarming headlines generated.

“Rwanda police enter Burundi to kidnap Mushayidi,” says a headline in one of the papers followed by this kicker: “Burundi sovereign space violated by Rwanda.”

And when General Kayumba Nyamwasa, former army chief of staff and former ambassador to India, decided to flee the country rather than submit to questioning in a police investigation of grenade attacks in Kigali, the “U” pubications were almost anonymous in concluding that Kayumba left because “Kagame had ordered the man shot”!
Other media organizations, of course, report differently.

Burundi police arrested the fugitive Mushayidi because he was using a forged Burundian passport. When they questioned him, it turned out he was a wanted man in Rwanda. So the Burundian authorities in co-operation with Rwanda Police drove Mushayidi to the border and handed him over. No Burundian talked of kidnapping or “violation of sovereign space.”

No one knows how Umuvugizi decided that President Kagame would order a general shot like a rabid dog. Or how Umuseso arrived at the conclusion that a country lauded internationally for making an astonishing recovery from the terrible events of the genocide, is actually “being led into the darkness.”

But our “U” papers are not content to peddle only the alarmist or sensational. Incitement is generally part of the mix. Here is the closing paragraph of a typical feature piece in one of the papers: “Without a doubt, Rwandans need to rise up; they need to take up arms and fight this bad regime!”

No, I am not talking about an article in a Rwandan newspaper in 1994, the period that marked the rock bottom for the country’s media. I am talking about issue no. 374 of August 2009 of Umuseso, a Kigali-based newspaper.

People still agonise about the role our media played in inciting the population during the genocide. Apparently we have not made much progress in the quality of our media since 1994.

Of course, publications like our “U” papers can be found anywhere. The difference with Rwanda is that elsewhere such newspapers are on the fringe. Here they are the mainstream. Elsewhere, people’s primary sources of news and opinion are not newspapers with deranged front-page allegations that the head of state has a lot in common with Adolf Hitler.

Rwanda, due to various historical circumstances too many to go into here, has never developed into a big media market. So the sensationalists and charlatans made inroads and captured significant readerships — especially in the Kinyarwanda language.

Every time anyone raises an objection, they cry “persecution” or “media repression,” and raise Reporters Without Borders and other international pressure groups who put pressure on Kigali and talk about the need to respect media freedoms. So Kigali shuts up.

But last week saw the straw that broke the camel’s back — two papers alleged that the army chief of staff and several other officers were in jail. But that very day, the alleged jailbirds were on TV, one of them, James Kabarebe, being made minister of defence and the other, James Kayonga, being promoted to army chief of staff.

The Media High Council slapped a six-month suspension on Umuseso and Umuvugizi for publishing fabrications and violating media ethics.