[UAH] Fwd: The Amin they don’t want you to know

The Amin they don't want you to know

By YAHYA SSEREMBA

ARTICLE SUMMARY: Senior editors played a key role in stopping the Daily Monitor from publishing articles that questioned some of Idi Amin's alleged atrocities. The worst enemy of media freedom is within the media.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Yahya Sseremba is the publisher of The Campus Journal current affairs website.

In February 2008 I inquired from journalist Timothy Kalyegira why his articles that challenged part of the prevalent narrative of former President Idi Amin's history no longer appeared in the Daily Monitor, a local newspaper whose claim to independence is clamorous. With resolute clarity he replied:

Hello Yahya, Thanks for your email. Yes, I was stopped I gather by order from State House to the Nation Media Group, which passed it on to the Daily Monitor. I find it hypocritical that, having banned that subject, I am stopped but the paper keeps publishing the views of others and I am not allowed to reply to them.

Mr. Kalyegira, however, did not seem to know that even within the Monitor, some senior editors spared no effort to have his views – and by extension every positive reference to Amin – totally suppressed. One such close-minded editor was Joachim Buwembo, the executive editor then.

Equally hostile to Kalyegira's freedom of expression was Charles Onyango-Obbo, a senior editor stationed at the Nairobi-based Nation Media Group, which owns Monitor. Click here to read more:

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