Kill the journalists only for what they won’t say [opinion]

You don’t have to be very bright to guess what I am not going to tell you. What you are reading today is a completely different column from what it should have been, because for a political journalist who has been in the ‘mix’ long enough, there is only one issue I should have been writing about today - Wednesday June 23 – to be published Saturday June 26 of course.

It’s about an incident that happened a few days ago, somewhere. In fact long before it happened, I called a friend of mine and told her exactly what was going to happen. She promptly dismissed me as unduly and overly imaginative; watched too many movies.
When my prophecy (to be fair I had only put two and two together; to which mathematics I added a history of the parties concerned ) came to pass with clinical precision, she called me and asked, “how did you know?”

I smiled into the phone and demanded that she buy coffee and I’d be only too happy to discuss the details. She quickly bought the coffee and when it came to fulfilling my part of the bargain, I told her to go to hell. She emptied her coffee cup in my face.
As I wiped myself dry, I, in compromise told her I’d be happy to tell the story – but she’d have to buy a copy of The Saturday Monitor, to read it. So I wrote the story in as much detail as my limited column space would allow me and I was just about to e-mail it to my editor, when I remembered the age-old proverb: discretion is the better part of valour.

And after thinking deeply about my family, I deleted the entire story and saved the changes, remembering that we stand in the compound of the coward to point at the ruins where the brave man used to stay.

What happened a few days ago actually set me thinking about the way African politicians hound the media in their countries – closing or destroying radio and television stations and newspapers - just because we write a lot of what they don’t want us to say. Their impression is that what we say and write is harmful to their reputation as rulers and so if we can’t sing their praises we should shut up. The hostility towards the media is understandable, but the breath in which it comes is completely misconceived.
I would like to correct this false impression by painting a proper picture of the quintessential African journalist.

As journalists, we do know a lot of things. Some of this information is got in the course of routine research for our stories. But a lot of it actually looks for us, as people feed us with what they want to see published. Our duty then is to sieve carefully what we think is publishable and what is not; and then see how to research further and cross-check what info has been brought us.

Problem is, most of what we know, we dare not write or say it. Some of it is simply stranger than fiction; the rest is either politically or morally sensitive, or so outrageous that if we let it out, society would riot within moments of publication. But there is another category we handle carefully; that which we are certain that if we publish it, the chaps concerned won’t even bother arresting us; they will simply finish us off (or like in my case, what is left of us).

If African leaders were any wiser, they’d never kill or jail the journalists for what they say. What they should be very afraid of is what we have thought it prudent to simply carry to our graves with us. You don’t have to be very bright to guess what I haven’t told you.

Mr Tegulle is a social/ political commentator

- June 26, 2010 by Gawaya Tegulle

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Source:  www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/Commentary/-/689364/946488/-/a0d6j7z/-/index.html (accessed on 29.06.10)