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Rwanda: How the Bizumuremyis of This Country Thrive
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Focus Media (Kigali)
OPINION
26 March 2008
Posted to the web 26 March 2008
Shyaka Kanuma
As of writing this article, the Police are looking for a young man called Bonaventure Bizumuremyi. As you may know by now Mr Bizumuremyi - the editor, cum publisher of Umuco, one of this country's so called independent newspapers - has just put out an issue with a number of highly incendiary, even deranged articles.
The most astonishing of these (astonishing even by the standards of Rwandan "independent journalism") is an article full of concoctions about supposed similarities between President Kagame and the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler; between the RPF government and that of the Nazis, and between the Rwanda Defense Forces and Hitler's army, the Wehrmacht.
The front page of the newspaper sports a photograph of Hitler side by side with one of Mr Kagame.
Hitler, complete with his trademark fanatical stare, is in SS military dress uniform. Mr Kagame is in combat fatigues in a photograph that apparently was taken when he still was leader of the RPA during the war against the Habyarimana regime.
The article, in densely packed, 8-point size text covers two pages of the newspaper. The article asserts that Kagame and his government are facing their last days and that the end is imminent for the president of Rwanda personally in three possible ways: either that he will be arrested like former Liberian president Charles Taylor, or that he will flee to exile like former Chadian leader Hissene Habre, or that he will commit suicide like Hitler did.
When I read through the article, I thought the Media Ethics Committee - which has recommended that Bizumuremyi's press card be revoked and Umuco suspended for a year - missed the point with the third recommendation: that Bizumuremyi be taken to court to answer charges of defamation. I think this young man should be taken to Ndera first, for he clearly needs the kind of psychiatric help they provide there.
One can be a hundred percent certain that nowhere else in the world do they practice the kind of journalism that Rwanda's "independent journalists" do. So, how is it that they thrive in this country? A confluence of unique factors that already has exhaustively been discussed in media circles is responsible.
There is the dire poverty of this country's media organizations and journalists and the chief reasons for it, which are that Rwanda still is a tiny media market and that the private sector is so small the advertisement revenue it sends the private press's way cannot support it.
A few practitioners in the private press manage to make a living, but for most it is very difficult to make ends meet. The unfortunate result is that, with a few exceptions here and there, the press cannot attract educated, motivated Rwandans.
Mostly what we get are former school renegades who dropped out halfway through secondary school, people who cannot find employment anywhere and even former street boys.
Yes, this is a fact: we have impoverished former street boys running briefcase news organizations in Rwanda.
This brings us to the second factor why these "journalists" do thrive in Rwanda, which is the Kagame administration's wish that we have a free press in this country. But the country's leadership, one easily guesses, cannot be happy with the "independent" journalism of this country.
That the likes of Umuco carry on the way they do is because the leadership is nervous that to take even simple remedial action like suspending any of them is to risk alienating the almighty Americans and Europeans who immediately see a threat to "freedom" the moment someone so much as sues a journalist of one of these organizations.
You will also have international human rights bodies and media rights bodies yelling blue murder and classifying Rwanda one of the worst abusers of human freedoms.
And of course if Western aid comes tied with the understanding that we have to have more "freedoms", meaning among other things that people like Bizumuremyi, Charles Kabonero (Umuseso), Bosco Gasasira (Umuvugizi), Jean Burasa (Rushyashya) and others like them are not to be touched, the government will not touch them.
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No matter what they write. Not only that, even private citizens, it seems, are not to seek justice when what they see as defamatory things are published about them.
You should have seen the allegations by Reporters Without Borders (RSF to give it its French initials) when businessman Tribert Rujugiro decided to sue Umuseso when those young men wrote, without showing proof, that he was a tax fugitive wanted in South Africa.
RSF, naming no source for its information, alleged that Rwanda was behind Mr Rujugiro's lawsuit, that somehow Mr Rujugiro was the government and it was harassing Kabonero, and therefore media freedoms in Rwanda were compromised. What a nice piece of circular reasoning.
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Hello, I am not a politician nor a journalist just a concerned citizen. I do believe in freedom of speech, freedom to provide your point of view on a certain topic. That Bonaventure or someone else said this or that about the president should not be an issue at all. There should be more important things to worry us, such as inciting people against each other one way or the other, electricity problems, water shortages, judicial problems. There has not been any tangible proof against anything this fellow has said. The president is a public figure, not a human god... [Read Full Text]
Is this journalism, or propaganda?
Shyaka, are you a journalist, or a civil servant? An apologist for the state? Who owns Focus Media? It's my understanding that it is 75% owned by the state. Is that correct?
This is your final sentence: "My only fear is that a time might come when you won't know what hit you."
This sounds very much like a threat, lightly veiled. Since when has journalism descended to the levels of threatening the people who disagree with you?
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