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By Mulengera Reporters
On Friday, hundreds of broadcasters and media owners operating in the Greater Kampala region converged at Imperial Royale Hotel Kampala where the UCC Executive Director convened them for a stakeholders’ engagement meeting. Similar meetings had been held in other parts or regions of Uganda.
Speaking on behalf of fellow broadcasters, Next Media CEO Dr. Kin Karisa vigorously pushed back against demands that no media house should have a tally centre nor announce any elections results unless the same has been authenticated and given to them by the EC.
Karisa asserted that gagging the media and preventing them from reading out provisional results, would increase, as opposed to diminishing, suspicion and speculation. He demanded that the state instead works with the media closely and permits credible media houses like his NBS to keep reading out provisional results.
He also faulted the Electoral Commission for not investing enough money into media adverts aimed at amplifying voter education yet this is a very important election which happens only once every five years.
His fellow leader in the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), Dr. Innocent Nahabwe, who is also the CEO for Galaxy Media (Radio and TV), corroborated on this claim against the EC when he got the microphone to speak during the plenary session.
Nahabwe spoke even very specifically by asserting that between April and June this year alone, the EC had Shs5bn to spend on voter education-and wondered how, where and on whom this was all spent. Nahabwe claimed that EC had resorted to over paying an agency, leaving some media houses out.
He castigated EC for excluding many broadcasters, which he said would hurt voter education. He contrasted this with the Chris Baryomunsi’s ICT Ministry (those days under Judith Nabakooba and Vincent Bagire), whose officials he said had only Shs2.5bn but efficiently used it to involve all media house-and thereby effectively contributing to the success of the country’s overall COVID response.
Julius Mucunguzi, the Communications Chief at EC, was in the house and naturally felt obliged to push back against Dr. Nahabwe. First of all, Mucunguzi dismissed Nahabwe’s joke that 2026 had so far turned out to be the most ‘boring’ election campaigns because of absence of images and videos of police and other security operatives clobbering opposition supporters.
Nahabwe’s was a joke which he even went on to qualify with broader illustrations but for Mucunguzi, the need to have peaceful elections is a red line which no one should ever be permitted cracking such a joke about. He demanded that Nahabwe, who he registered his respect for as a NAB leader, should be doing much better than wishing to see a violent election simply because he wants to get trending videos and images for his news outlets.
On the issue of EC spending so many billions while leaving out many media houses at the same time, Mucunguzi dismissed it as untrue and demanded that Nahabwe speaks with maximum honesty next time. Mucunguzi explained how the agency, the NAB boss had complained about, had only been engaged to handle the small component of content development. “I know there are many media outlets even in this room who we have been working with on voter education and continue to though some of them may not be comfortable putting up their hands.”
He went on to say that the EC approach had been one of directly dealing with each media broadcasting outlet including the print (newspapers), radios, TVs and online platforms. He dismissed as untrue claims that media service providers had been required to go through the agency. He said they aren’t prepared to accept the chauvinism of some few media houses coming together and conniving to totally exclude all the others while portraying themselves as too big and the rest too small to be had on board.
“Let’s not come here and speak dishonestly. We have engaged more than 200 media houses in the ongoing voter education and the budget we have has been evenly shared out to make sure that we work with as many media partners as possible. What Dr. Nahabwe has said is simply not true because even his Galaxy has been getting business from us at EC about voter education. I challenge him to say that I’m lying if what I’m saying isn’t true. We have insisted to engage each of the media houses directly and the next time the NAB Chairman speaks, he must tell the full story and not small bits of what it is,” said Mucunguzi who declared EC’s support for the UCC ban prohibiting media houses from having tally centers and going on to announce their own results as opposed to waiting for the Electoral Commission.
“Elections is a civil activity and not a military operation. It’s not war and dear colleagues from the media, let’s avoid that framing of war because we are all losers in case this case blows up because of elections. There will be no winner should our country burn because of elections.” (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
