I lunched today with one of Uganda’s senior most journalists, Bernard Tabaire. Erudite and broad, Tabaire was long the weekend editor at Kampala’s Monitor daily newspaper. Since his recent return to the Monitor from a six-month fellowship at Oxford, Tabaire has done double-duty, steering both the weekday and weekend newsrooms (though this week he’s getting welcome relief, with the return from vacation of the ME of weekday)
Tabaire is an editor equally adept at directing stories about culture, society or politics. Perhaps his finest moment since returning to Monitor from Oxford was a jarring story about widespread counterfeiting of products in Uganda. The victims are consumers, in the main, while producers and retailers get to peddle (maybe more wittingly than not) fake products for the price of real ones. On Uganda dynamism, Tabaire says, “We’re making up for lost time.†With an economic boom powered by increased foreign investment, returning Ugandans living in Europe and America and strong gains in farm output, Uganda is experiencing a long-term economic boom. The political system still lags the economic transformation, however, which may be why, while at Oxford, Tabaire wrote an essay, “Press and Political Repression in Uganda: Back to the Future?†The essay is a wonderful account of the competing pressures on journalists in one of the freest and creative media markets in Africa.