Chogm2007: International Media Picks the "Wrong Story!".

ELIAS BIRYABAREMA.


Kampala--Kampalans are agog! After all, haven’t their city been transformed over night into a World Class metropolis. Well, at least that’s the impression of many across central Uganda where the Chogm bonanza has impacted most.

It’s been a breathtaking makeover: roads have been smoothened, pavements laid. Medians have been planted with grass. Garbage mounds have disappeared. Messy intersections have been rebuilt and traffic lights fixed. Cameras are recording, and deterring crime, SPCs are roaming the city to the point of over-policing. Streets are lit. Five-Star hotel towers are shooting through the city’s skyline.
Entebbe airport is dazzling, abuzz with activity.

The world is descending on Kampala.

For once, President Museveni seems to have succeeded in putting Uganda in a global spotlight, right?

So why isn’t the international media picking up this great story unfolding in our city? This is the tale that is even more amazing to watch than the proceedings in the hallowed conference rooms in Munyonyo and Serena Hotels this week.

If president Museveni thought he and his NRM government would somehow harvest some political capital from the global media coverage of Chogm, he will be disappointed that the scribes have their eyes and ears on something else. In fact if the Western media’s disinterest in the ongoing Kampala Chogm2007 fever is a reflection of their disenchantment with Museveni and his government, then it’s pretty worrying indeed.

When the Commonwealth Youth Forum, the first of the major meetings that preceded Chogm got underway last week in Entebbe, it didn’t generate a world headline. Instead the French newswire AFP hollered to the world on Saturday, November17th; “Floods Deluge Uganda Capital, Kill Four.”

The online edition of BBC, the western media house with the broadest coverage of African news and supposedly with the keenest interest in the Commonwealth affairs has largely ignored the chogm frenzy in Kampala. And as if to demonstrate the triviality of the chogm euphoria in Kampala or even their loathing for the organiser-in-chief, they quickly picked up a gutter story run in local papers on November 14th, “Love Zones Set up in Kampala,” in reference to the restricting of whores to Kabalagala and Bukoto suburbs.

But if the BBC was mean, the Sunday Telegraph of UK gave Museveni a generous early Chogm gift. From Lira, their correspondent, Mr Mike Pflanz reported on November 18th, “Uganda’s £70 million Conference, £7 million Flood Relief.” The reporter sounded out the agonies of half a dozen starving flood victims slamming their government for spending so profligately on a useless meeting while its citizens were collapsing from hunger in sordid camps.

The report described Uganda as “poverty-wracked.”

For the whole of this year, president Museveni and his ministers have been quick to dismiss those criticising the splurging of vast amounts of money on a seemingly inconsequential meeting as blind.
Chogm, they have claimed, will “showcase Uganda’s rich potential to the World,” and draw in investors in their droves.
But the world’s businessmen and women reading the cries of the dying in the Sunday Telegraph story will probably first ponder the wisdom (or lack of it) of those of ruling the country before they inquire about the investment opportunities in Uganda, if they ever will.

In fact the Sunday Telegraph story mirrors the sort of questions and ideas that will run through the minds of the thousands of scribes jetting into the country this week. From the comfort of their hotels they will stroll around in the vicinity and see Nile Avenue, Garden City, Jinja Road intersection, Kampala Road: it’s a decent city.

But they know that’s not Kampala. Before they came they read up on Uganda’s online country profiles. They know Uganda’s GDP is a miniscule $8 billion and income per capita, a humiliating $230. They know Museveni bribed parliament to lift term limits so he could stay in power. They know Kampala is home to hordes of poor. They will look for them in Katwe, in Namuwongo, Kibuli and other slums. IDPs in northern Uganda will cry out and they will grab better headlines than the banquets and political rhetoric in Kampala.

That will be Museveni’s chogm media publicity harvest.
In the Western media; it will be the IDPs that that Museveni has betrayed, the dying flood victims in North East and the foolishness of the chogm extravagance that will run in banner headlines, not his taking of the Commonwealth chairmanship.