It’s Called “Bullying Media Owners into Editorial Compliance…”

This is how it comes about…and allow me concentrate on media luminary, Andrew Mwenda and his media company, and not Seezi Cheye.

Mwenda was all negative because he worked in other people’s business i.e., the Daily Monitor. Even then, he was a liability to the business possessor, the Agha khan.

A story is told of how Museveni called the Agha Khan, who lives in Paris. He, Museveni, would easily close the former’s businesses in Uganda if he kept funny journalists at the Daily Monitor. The doable shut-down would be as effortless as you close a water tap. Our media possessor had just been awarded the financially thirst-quenching Bujagali dam project.

That is how Mwenda and Timothy Kalyegira reportedly left the Monitor.  Obbo Onyango Charles had earlier left the paper under a comparable situation. (Does this mean the current leadership at Daily Monitor has been bullied into editorial conformity?)

Then, Mwneda and Kalyegira started their own newspapers. Mwenda virtually failed to print and publish the first Issue of his paper, The Independent.  Government had blocked all possibilities. This is when he made the first  known dishonorable concession.  Kalyegira  never compromised, and his online paper is a deceased thing.

There are of-course other factors. Mwenda appears dare-devil because he has secret secure heavens: Museveni’s is a family friend to his parents. Muhozi, the first son, is his fine friend.  Mwenda has numerous siblings who’ve worked at State House.

…and Mzee Boniface Byanyima has before said in published interviews that Museveni should be asked who his earliest wife was and what happened to her.  The answer works to Mwenda’s favour.

Yet me thinks, (as Nobert Mao would say of Museveni), Mwanda qualifies to be a case study of sorts. The ‘boy’ is well read, widely traveled, brave and has key, high-level contacts. These attributes have turned him into a power-broker among the powerful.  

A friend who’s a loose-minded supporter of Mwenda told me thus: ” Mwenda has now grown. He’s securing his future and that of his children (thru’ compromises in his media business and journalism practice). “

…and the future of his children. I smiled. He doesn’t have children (yet). When he was speaking to MUK Mass Communication students on November 17, 2011 on the topic: How the Uganda Media has handled the Oil Debate, (I was there), Mwenda said: “I can bet my dick that the documents implicating ministers over oil bribes are fake.”  

Quite a crusade, I thought. So how would he have children if he lost the bet? Thru’ the non-natural line of attack perhaps? 

I wish myself a blissful research experience on the topic Media Possession and Control soon.