Soccer Match Pits Uganda’s Military Vs. the Local Media

Uncovering the News — 04/13/21 – 04/19/21

What’s At Stake: This week we give cred­it to the Ugan­dan armed forces and the media who are work­ing to build bet­ter rela­tions. This is a big deal for a coun­try known for clamp­ing down on its media institutions. 

On Fri­day, April 16, two soc­cer games were held in Ugan­da pit­ting the country’s armed forces against the media. The two sides have often clashed on issues involv­ing jour­nal­is­tic cov­er­age of gov­ern­ment activ­i­ties. The media wide­ly cov­ers the con­flicts between the two organizations.

This is wel­come news for a coun­try often cit­ed for vio­la­tions of press freedoms.

Over the past months, men­tions of Ugan­dan armed forces’ rela­tions with the media have been far from pos­i­tive. Since Novem­ber 2020, a series of events involv­ing jour­nal­ists and media pro­fes­sion­als who were beat­en, and oth­ers killed by police offi­cers, were reported.

Mean­while, sto­ries about the police using exces­sive force with jour­nal­ists were cov­ered by Human Rights Watch,  AP News, Reuters, and France 24, to name a few.

In an inter­view with the Voice of Amer­i­ca (VOA), the Ugan­dan chief of defense forces, Gen­er­al David Muhoozi, explained the impor­tance of the encounter between the two sides. He stat­ed that since the two orga­ni­za­tions could not avoid each oth­er, build­ing a sol­id part­ner­ship “through such light moments” was the appro­pri­ate solu­tion to the ten­sion between them.

This rec­on­cil­i­a­tion attempt is not get­ting much atten­tion. In fact, the VOA is the only media out­let to have giv­en the sto­ry wider circulation. 

Although this sto­ry from VOA is the first result when search­ing “Ugan­da police and media rela­tions,” it does not appear in the top search results for news about the African continent—making it pret­ty dif­fi­cult for any­one to find it unless they are specif­i­cal­ly look­ing for it.

While these soc­cer games do not guar­an­tee a change in police behav­ior and a safer envi­ron­ment for the media in Ugan­da, it is a step in the right direc­tion that should be acknowledged.

“It’s a step that we are tak­ing,” said Abubak­er Lubowa, a Ugan­dan pho­to­jour­nal­ist who has been vocal about the police mis­treat­ment of jour­nal­ists. “We are not say­ing that all is going to be well. But we are hope­ful that after this, at least, we would have built some rela­tion­ship, and we will have some­thing in com­mon that unites us.”

The media team walked away with a vic­to­ry for both games on Fri­day. How­ev­er, both orga­ni­za­tions were left hop­ing for a bet­ter Ugan­da where police and media can work togeth­er to keep the pop­u­la­tion safe and well informed.