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EDITORIAL: Don't shoot the messengers, you need them

Saturday August 18 2018
By The EastAfrican

All through the ages, messengers have always walked a delicate path.

They have often borne the brunt of being the conveyors of bad news. Indeed, in ancient times, some cultures required the bearer of bad news to take their own life.

While a lot has changed since, our modern messengers, journalists, remain targeted.

This past week was a particularly bad one for journalists across East Africa.

In Mombasa, journalists doing their work were attacked by police while in Uganda, television reporters who were running a live feed on a by-election in the western municipality of Arua that turned violent, sustained injuries and spent a night in jail after they were attacked by the military.

Farther east in Karamoja region, the chief administrative officer of Kotido district detained journalists for several hours for entering “his district” without his express permission.

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In Tanzania, journalists are facing harassment and intimidation through spurious charges.

In isolation, these incidents may appear to be nothing more than random failures of law and order. When placed in the wider political context, they show a slow but systematic drift away from constitutionalism.

Over the past two decades, East African countries have written inspiring constitutions. Yet recent years have witnessed a sustained effort to claw back the rights enshrined in these documents, with the fundamental freedoms of expression and association a particular target.

From Kampala to Dar es Salaam, ruling parties have been abusing their majorities in parliament to pass anti-media laws.

In Uganda in particular, some of these laws, such as the Computer Misuse Act are so ambiguous that they are loaded guns in the hands of officials keen to suppress free debate and expression of contrary opinions.

The frequency of assaults on the media by state actors is directly related to the deepening loss of legitimacy by the groups holding power.

Sadly, East African state actors seem to be forgetting that media rights are not sought for the comfort of journalists but are an extension of public’s right to know. To put it in a language the politicians understand better, they are the rights of their voters to be informed.

To hinder a bona fide journalist from doing their work is, therefore, to condemn the public to remain in the dark about their own affairs.

It is also worrying that criminally inclined elements in the public are taking the cue from the state actors and are inflicting mob violence on journalists carrying out their duties of gathering information professionally to inform the public.

In this era of widespread use of digital social media, where anybody can publish and broadcast, the role of the professional journalist cannot be overemphasised.

It is imperative that state managers save the messenger from overzealous operatives whose actions undermine the legitimacy of their masters.

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