Rwanda: Nation hit in Kigali

By Expression Today
No.16 Match 1, 2010

Kigali is mad at Nation Media Group. CEO Linus Gitahi had a chat with President Paul Kagame last year and announced that NMG would be in Rwanda as soon as feasible. Then things inexplicably cooled off. The global financial crisis perhaps, but looks like there is more.

Right now it is very unlikely Kagame would want to shake hands with Gitahi again. NMG’s regional newsweekly, The East African, recently interviewed a woman called Victoire Ingabire. Just doing journalism boss, the paper must have thought. But Kigali is hopping mad.

Ingabire’s name stinks in the noses of Kagame and his henchmen. The 42-year-old woman chairs a coalition of opposition parties and is the most watched Rwandan politician at the moment. She returned to the country from 16 years of exile in January to announce she would be challenging Kagame for the presidency in August. Within days she had roughed up and a rotten campaign launched against her in state media.

After the East African ran the interview, two articles promptly appeared in The New Times of Rwanda condemning the newsweekly. “For the editorial management of a respectable regional publication - The East African - to choose to give space to a known revisionist and genocide denier, simply boggles the mind,” one article charged.

Ingabire's interview, the writer suggested, was “masterminded by some intelligence organizations within the region, with a long history of using journalists as agents and assets.”

The other commentary was no less stinging. “In this week's issue of The East African, her interviewers claim that, "She is now fighting to get a national identity card so that she can participate in the election as a legitimate candidate". If the journalists had bothered to do some research, they would have found out that their "scoop" was sitting right there with her ID, given to her in record time.”

Those are not just the opinions of ordinary commentators. Such pieces are often penned under pseudonyms by top guns of the Rwanda Patriotic Front party whose ownership is linked to The New Times. Ingabire has threatened to sue the paper for defamation following a series of articles (certainly including these) which condemned her as a genocide denier and an advocate of hate politics.

Kigali makes the correct noises about an open door policy for all investors, but behind closed doors Kagame and his lieutenants are dead set against media expansion and foreign involvement in the industry.

First, the state routinely hounds the small, struggling and barely independent private media. Journalists operate under the ever-present risk of prison terms, hefty fines and closure of media houses for criminal defamation and other infractions. They have long been excluded from official government functions, so they write from an adversarial standpoint, and sometimes fabricate or slant stories.

Secondly, the powerful oversight body, the Media High Council, is infested with the regime’s sympathisers or pointment who have no doubt about what the Tall Man expects of them. All media houses have just been ordered to register afresh with the Council within 90 days. Will NMG survive in such an environment, even with principal shareholder Aga Khan’s phenomenal connections?

Thirdly, the country’s main media houses are owned either by the state, the ruling party, or shadowy figures with links to RPF. The entry of an established and aggressive competitor is likely to rankle beneficiaries of the status quo. Indeed reports from Kigali say the reason NMG has not hit the ground there is because Gitahi and his men have not been keen to give Kigali’s high and mighty a slice of the planned investment.

Fourthly, NMG’s financial muscle and high profile as a generally independent media giant scares Kigali. It means once in Kigali the group is unlikely to be caressed into docility or bludgeoned into silence on anything wayward about Kagame and his men. Moreover, NMG would in all probability poach some of the most able and fearless journalists – the sort who are already enemies of the regime.

Fifth, NMG would most certainly poke holes into the official narrative about the country’s saddest and defining historical event: the 1994 genocide. State doctrine holds that the slaughter targeted Tutsis, who had suffered throughout history, and that Kagame and the RPF delivered the nation from the hands of crazed Hutu murderers. Anyone telling a different story or researching another angle (as a good journalist surely would) will definitely land in hot water. Please note that the state’s favourite accusation against its critics is genocide denial or revisionism.

And finally, even though they are too weak to provide any serious challenge to Kagame, coverage of Rwandan opposition leaders is a no-no. It is as bad as subversion, according to Kigali. The BBC Great Lakes Service and VOA have run into problems for precisely the same reason the East African is being reviled.

So, will the Nation Media Group make it to Kigali? As Kenyan TV reporters have taught us, only time will tell.