Editorial
Discuss development and less politics, please
With advancement in science and technology, on a daily basis, the goings-on all around the world.
Because of global competitiveness, and public interest in world affairs especially in the world of business, most places today have media outlets at their disposal in the places of work and around their person through modern media capabilities.
Through these capabilities, people living in this country, we are able to know what is going on around us, on a daily basis if we wish to. And many do because of their crucial interest in human development and because of their cognisance of the role of the media in changing people and countries for the better.
Uganda for example is a country rich in natural resources. It is blessed with good climate that favours agricultural development in which most Ugandans are engaged in. Better still, we are lucky to find ourselves among countries with oil that can easily transform lives if the resource is used wisely and in thew interest of all.
Even without Aid, if government can invest in development areas, in projects that transform people’s wellbeing, and it mobilizes Ugandans to just work harder, Uganda would, given our level of stability within our region, be able to grow our economy as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, the political leaders who are supposed to give guidance, the legislators who are supposed to champion the interest of the people, and the media which is supposed to most importantly to educate the population on how to improve their quality of life, are busy politicking because that’s what benefits them most.
This is clearly demonstrated in the content and discussion in the media everyday in the debates in our parliament, and in speeches by our political leaders. Every day, all we hear, see, or read, is just politics, politics and more politics. The ordinary people who suffer most from the mismanagement of what would make them better off, are unfortunately not players is designing policy.
Fortunately for the important players, the ordinary people live in circumstances which don’t empower them to even complain because they simply don’t seem to know what the government they vote into power every so often, owes them. They live in poverty, ignorance and disease. And the government seems to favour the everlasting status quo.
It is for this reason that we in the media feel we urgently need to champion journalism that is important for the development of Ugandans and we shelve our Ugandan type of politics that has nothing to do with human transformation. We in the media are educated enough to know that the politics we churn out every morning under the guise of topical issues, is unhelpful crap to the majority of our people and only helpful to politicians who have for all our years of independence kept us in underdevelopment.
We know that we deserve to live better given the wealth our country has been blessed with. We know that politicians do not lose sleep just because the people who were promised better lives ‘in exchange for votes’ are wallowing in abject poverty. This needs to change and to change soon and the media can become the powerful agents of change if we choose to put people first.
As it is today, we are undisputed accomplices in a dehumanizing crime of our people and we ought to be ashamed for betraying our noble purpose.
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