By Mulengera Reporters
Older Persons MP Ofwono Opondo has welcomed suggestions by talk show moderator Oscar Semweya Musoke to have PLU diehard David Kabanda, who is also the PLU Executive Assistant to Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, join the weekly debate on Capital Radio’s Capital Gang program which airs every Saturday (10-12pm).
During the Saturday edition of the Gang, Oscar prompted Ofwono Opondo to respond to the recent attacks Kabanda made towards him after he took to X and questioned the capacity in which Gen MK had instigated the shutting down of NMG’s NTV and Daily Monitor newspaper.
Responding to Andrew Mwenda’s X post showing how the media group would reopen soon after his boss MK meeting its top executives and owners, Opondo also demanded to know whether the NRM, which he believed is the ruling party, had been overthrown. Kabanda, who many fear is these days prepared to use his closeness to Gen MK to viciously destroy real and imaginary enemies of his, seemed prepared for social media war but Opondo de-escalated and didn’t push the matter further.
Indeed, during the Saturday Gang edition, Monitor founder Wafula Ogutu expressed fear that Opondo may one of these days end up at Gen MK’s basement, which in the contemporary Uganda speak depicts torture and dehumanizing treatment at the hands of the CDF’s soldiers. Responding to Oscar, Opondo said Kabanda was ‘a floppy’ politician whose attacks on him shouldn’t surprise many. He implied the number of such ‘floppy’ political leaders was on the rise in today’s Uganda and more so inside the Museveni universe.
As if to show he was never afraid of a full blown up fight with Kabanda, Opondo indicated there was no need to carry on with the fight on X because in the end, David Kabanda acted like the adult he is expected to be by deleting the provocative post he had posted in response to his PLU/NRM-related question in relation to who exactly had closed down the media house.
Opondo, who seemed prepared to become a PLU member some day as he made it clear to Agora’s Toko who was in the studio that there was nothing shameful about being member of the League, went on to say there was nothing personal between him and Kabanda. This prompted Oscar to wonder if Opondo would be okay debating with Kabanda in case he is invited to join the debate and become a panelist on the Capital Gang. Opondo responded by saying this is something he welcomes and that he was more than ready to debate with Kabanda should the radio management find it appropriate to make him a member or panelist of the Capital Gang.
During the same radio program, Ofwono Opondo asserted the NRM government vs. NRM rivalry had continued up to this day, 22 years since the departure of the founding Managing Director because of the widespread paranoia in government that Wafula Ogutu, who currently belongs to Kizza Besigye’s PFF party, was continuing to influence the editorial policy and news content even without directly being the editor-in-chief. Ogutu, who quit his editorial role in 2022, denied this and made it clear what guides whoever gets the job at the newspaper is its editorial policy to which all employees are obliged to strictly adhere.
Opondo said the President always perceives Daily Monitor as hostile to him because of many things including the fact that it has always given a platform to people hostile to the NRM. He gave the example of Conrad Nkutu who was fired from being Vision Group company secretary in the early 2000s only to end up being hired as MD for Monitor Publications Ltd. Nkutu was fired after Opondo and other state operatives had established that he was using his office at Vision to facilitate fundraising for the Elect Besigye taskforce of 2001.
Opondo recalled how Wafula himself one time privately met him at Hotel Equatorial along with Augustine Ruzindana and tried to lure him to join the Besigye group. Opondo said the meeting went on up to 2am. He said all this shows Monitor was founded with the intention of destroying the NRM government. He also admitted working with New Vision founding MD William Pike back in the day to try and destroy the newspaper by officially denying it access to adverts revenue from government MDAs.
Opondo also admitted to being part of the difficult negotiations which resulted into the exiling of eminent editors Onyango Obbo and later on Daniel Kalinaki to NMG group headquarters in Nairobi after they refused to be compromised and the GoU considered their editorial work poisonous and anti-Museveni. He also bragged about several critical columnists whose content was banned from the Monitor pages at the instigation of the GoU.
CAUTIONS MK: Opondo regretted that the current siege and closure of NMG wasn’t done properly and said the international backlash and hostile media coverage from the world media in defence of the NMG was expected and therefore avoidable. Opondo said the exclusion of the UCC and Justine Kasule Lumumba’s Information Ministry was anomalous and created costly PR problems for the GoU, whose efforts to attract international tourists and FDI-carrying foreign investors became complicated as a result.
Opondo asserted that there was no need for the military to take lead in the siege and eventual closure of the newspaper and NTV. He suggested the best way would be for the government (political leadership of the country) to be the one to make and coordinate the closure with security only being called in to enforce the same. To him, the decision should have been made by the political leadership and not the military.
Going forward, Opondo said there are more subtle cards Gen MK should leverage to achieve equally cowing effect on the Monitor and NMG as a whole without allowing the world to perceive him as unreasonable and as acting excessively. Opondo suggested that one of these ways is to instigate the URA to come down hard on the company while demanding total and prompt payment of all pending tax arrears.
The other option is to identify and pressurize the company’s creditors, like banks, pushing them to swing and demand abrupt payment of all the pending loan obligations. That way the company’s top executives feel the pressure and begin playing ball with the state. Wafula Ogutu, who personally founded Monitor newspaper in 1992 to serve as a platform for dissenting voices in absence of a credible opposition to Museveni, admitted that such tactics work better because the government is able to circumvent the bad publicity repeated closures of independent media result into. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
