When Uganda arrests its most prominent journalist

By Andrew Rice

Being the most prominent journalist in Uganda is a little like having the best arm in the New York Mets' bullpen--the honor is a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. But in a country where reporters are customarily bought off, threatened, or shunned by public officials, Andrew Mwenda is someone unique: a figure larger than most of the people he covers. Mornings, Mwenda's byline appears in Uganda's main independent newspaper, where he routinely exposes stories of government skullduggery and scandal. Evenings, he conducts a rollicking political talk show on a popular radio station, hosting everyone from shady generals to exiled presidents to Western visitors like foreign aid activist Jeffrey Sachs. In the hours in between, Mwenda can be seen holding court beneath a shady tree at an outdoor Indian restaurant in downtown Kampala, attired in a tailored suit, trading gossip and spouting opinions. Imagine Bob Woodward and Chris Matthews wrapped into one diminutive, thirty something, hyperactive, pipsqueak-voiced package, and you start to get the idea. When the Ugandan police came to arrest Mwenda last week, on charges of sedition, a lot of his friends wondered, "What took them so long?"

The case is a complicated one, involving a mysterious helicopter crash, a dead Sudanese vice president, rumors of sabotage, allegations of genocide-incitement, and two men with iron-plated egos: Mwenda and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. But these are the basic facts. Last Wednesday night on his radio show, Mwenda accused the president of "cowardice," "incompetence," and behaving "like a villager" in his response to the recent crash of a Ugandan military helicopter that claimed the life of its most prominent passenger, Sudanese Vice President John Garang. The next day, the government shut down the radio station, and shortly after that, Mwenda was arrested. He spent the weekend in jail before being released on bail and now faces a trial and a possible five-year prison sentence. Upon emerging from confinement, a copy of The Bookseller of Kabul under his arm, Mwenda joked that he was disappointed he wasn't instead sent to Uganda's maximum-security prison, which is situated on a bluff overlooking Lake Victoria. He said he'd been meaning to take a trip to the beach.

All in all, it was a typical performance by a man who, perhaps more than anyone else, symbolizes Uganda's brash, contentious younger generation. To most Americans, the country's name, if it summons up any associations at all, is synonymous with Idi Amin, the buffoonish and bloody dictator who, during his terrible reign in the 1970s, praised Hitler, sheltered terrorists, killed hundreds of thousands of his countrymen and, for good measure, allegedly ate a few of them. But since Museveni marched into Kampala in 1986 at the head of a rebel army, deposing a military junta and promising "a fundamental change in the politics of our country," Uganda has become a different place: thriving, bumptious and something close to free. During the '90s, the world's small and beleaguered corps of Africa-optimists hailed Uganda as a model demonstrating the regenerative possibilities of wise government. Major Western publications--such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine--published gushing profiles of Museveni. And President Clinton visited and declared his counterpart a leader of an "African renaissance." The fact that someone like Mwenda scoffed at such plaudits, calling Museveni an autocrat and worse, only seemed to reinforce the point. How many other African presidents tolerated such talk?

I first met Mwenda in 2002, shortly after I moved to Uganda. As a journalist, I was drawn to the country by all the talk of an African "success story," but my preconceptions were quickly confounded by a more complicated reality. Shortly after I arrived, police raided and closed the newspaper Mwenda worked for, The Monitor, on the grounds that it had published a story deemed compromising to national security. I tracked Mwenda down at his bare office--investigators had confiscated his computer and cell phone--and introduced myself. He jotted a "secret" phone number on the back of his business card. A few days later, we met at his favorite restaurant. Mwenda picked a table conspicuously positioned along the sidewalk, and, at high volume, set about trying to disabuse me of my favorable opinion of Museveni. He rattled off budget numbers, whispered about secret intelligence reports, dropped references to weighty books. He paraphrased a historian's assessment of Napoleon--"the man who in equal measure made and destroyed France"--and added: "That could be Museveni's epitaph." When I seemed unconvinced, Mwenda fixed an intent stare on me and said, with characteristic assurance, "This country is going to go up in flames." Then he commanded me to try his chicken korma.

After a few days, The Monitor reopened, and Uganda didn't burn. But it's not Mwenda's style to admit he's ever been wrong about anything, so, like a frustrated millenarian, he kept pushing back the date of the coming apocalypse. Over the years, we got to be friends, and I sometimes appeared on his radio show as a member of a roundtable panel of journalists. "Museveni is worse than Amin,” Mwenda would bellow, as the president's jovial press secretary, sitting across the table, cracked up laughing. For a while after Saddam Hussein's capture, Mwenda took to saying, "I predict that one day they will find our president at the bottom of a spider hole!"

Museveni, despite his reputation for tolerance, has always had a fraught relationship with the press, but for some reason Mwenda seemed never to endure the kind of routine harassment experienced by many Ugandan journalists. Museveni even deigned to appear on his radio show. Mwenda's fellow journalists used to make a parlor game of speculating about the sources of his seeming immunity: His brother was a military intelligence officer; his sister worked in Museveni's office he was buddies with the president's son. Mwenda claimed that back when Museveni was fighting for power, he had been a kadogo, or child soldier, in his rebel army. In his more sober moments, Mwenda would say the struggle had been worth it. "Press freedom in Uganda, and all forms of free expression, came to be because the government of Yoweri Museveni was civilized enough to tolerate then," he once told me. "Not because the people of Uganda wanted them."

But those are about the only kind words Mwenda has had for Museveni. What he found most infuriating about Uganda's president was what he perceived as the government's betrayals of its early promises of reform. Where Museveni had once talked of clean government, his generals were now implicated in baroque corruption scandals, such as a scheme to buy shoddy helicopters from Belarus in return for kickbacks. Where once Museveni had vowed to step aside as president after two terms in office, this year he amended the constitution to allow him to run for reelection indefinitely. Where once Museveni had promised peace throughout the land, now he was embroiled in a seemingly interminable struggle against brutal rebels in the country's north.

When earlier this month the Sudanese Vice President Garang, himself a former rebel leader, was killed in the crash of a Ugandan military helicopter that was ferrying him home to Sudan from a meeting with Museveni, Mwenda seized the big news story and galloped off on his hobbyhorses. He questioned the official explanation that the aircraft crashed in bad weather and speculated that Museveni had put Garang aboard "a junk helicopter," on a route that took him over mountainous territory occupied by Stinger missile-wielding rebels. Museveni, furious about these and other allegations--some Ugandan papers peddled rumors that the craft was hijacked, or sabotaged by a foreign power--gave an angry speech calling the press "vultures." He singled out Mwenda for particularly scathing criticism, calling him a "young boy" and saying that "he must stop." That night on his show, Mwenda shouted at a Ugandan official, "Are you aware that your government killed Garang through incompetence?" He then pledged that if Museveni shut down his newspaper, he would run for president. After that, the police showed up.

Later, Ugandan officials claimed that they arrested Mwenda protect public safety. Citing the precedent of the 1994 genocide in next-door Rwanda, when radio announcers exhorted Hutus to machete Tutsis, Ugandan Information Minister James Nsaba Buturo said Mwenda had endangered the lives of Ugandans living in Sudan. "Freedom without responsibility is dangerous to a young democracy such as ours," he told the BBC.

But it's likely there are darker motives at work. What he found most infuriating about Uganda's president was what he perceived as the government's betrayals of its early promises of reform. Where Museveni had once talked of clean government, his generals were now implicated in baroque corruption scandals, such as a scheme to buy shoddy helicopters from Belarus in return for kickbacks. Where once Museveni had vowed to step aside as president after two terms in office, this year he amended the constitution to allow him to run for reelection indefinitely. Where once Museveni had promised peace throughout the land, now he was embroiled in a seemingly interminable struggle against brutal rebels in the country's north.

When earlier this month the Sudanese Vice President Garang, himself a former rebel leader, was killed in the crash of a Ugandan military helicopter that was ferrying him home to Sudan from a meeting with Museveni, Mwenda seized the big news story and galloped off on his hobbyhorses. He questioned the official explanation that the aircraft crashed in bad weather and speculated that Museveni had put Garang aboard "a junk helicopter," on a route that took him over mountainous territory occupied by Stinger missile-wielding rebels. Museveni, furious about these and other allegations--some Ugandan papers peddled rumors that the craft was hijacked, or sabotaged by a foreign power--gave an angry speech calling the press "vultures." He singled out Mwenda for particularly scathing criticism, calling him a "young boy" and saying that "he must stop." That night on his show, Mwenda shouted at a Ugandan official, "Are you aware that your government killed Garang through incompetence?" He then pledged that if Museveni shut down his newspaper, he would run for president. After that, the police showed up.

Later, Ugandan officials claimed that they arrested Mwenda protect public safety. Citing the precedent of the 1994 genocide in next-door Rwanda, when radio announcers exhorted Hutus to machete Tutsis, Ugandan Information Minister James Nsaba Buturo said Mwenda had endangered the lives of Ugandans living in Sudan. "Freedom without responsibility is dangerous to a young democracy such as ours," he told the BBC.

But it's likely there are darker motives at work. Museveni faces a tough battle for reelection next year and many observers both in and outside Uganda have predicted a crackdown on the country's culture of freewheeling public debate. Recent opposition party rallies have been broken up with tear gas. Dissidents worry that Museveni's ruling Movement party could reprise tactics used during the 2001 elections, when it unleashed paramilitary gangs across the countryside to ensure that people voted the right way. Mwenda's arrest, then, has widely been interpreted as a possible harbinger of things to come--a none-too-subtle warning that no critic is too big for prison.

But it's possible that prison may be too small to contain the likes of Andrew Mwenda. Characteristically, he is reveling in all the attention. When I reached him by phone after his release on bail, he said he was "unshaken" and vowed to soon be back on the radio. "My head remains unbowed," he said. It's something his friends have always known:
Nothing will shut Andrew Mwenda up. And Uganda, for all its obvious problems, is a better place for it.

Andrew Rice lived in Uganda for two years.

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