by Eleneus Akanga
At the start of this year, few would have put money on me being the next journalist to flee Rwanda. I worked for the state media, was earning a ‘meaningful’ salary and used to the constraints of self-censorship required to keep your job in such a sector – not just in Rwanda but elsewhere in the world.
Unlike some journalists in Rwanda’s so-called independent media, I had had few clashes with the powers who decide what is or is not fit be published.
But in February this year, amid growing concern among Rwandan journalists in both sectors about difficulties they were facing in their jobs, I began work on a story involving a colleague who had been beaten into a coma by unknown assailants.
Before the life-threatening attack, John Bosco Gasasira published an article in his weekly newspaper, Umuvugizi, about the likely successors to President Paul Kagame.
Being in the ‘independent’ media, he had gone further to assess the relative merits of the people in question and give his opinion on how they measured up to the job. Within days, he informed colleagues that he was being stalked and even reported this to the President during a news conference.
In Rwanda, it is common to have story subjects approach reporters demanding reasons why certain stories were published. It takes on even more serious tones when the people in question are government officials, who assume they have might and power over mere journalists.
Reporters in Rwanda who don’t play the game of self-censorship have had to contend with intimidating phone calls, warnings and beatings.
With Gasasira in intensive care at the country’s top hospital, I began work on my story. The circumstances surrounding the beating were difficult to ascertain, but it seemed to be clearly linked to his article on likely presidential successors.
Police were stationed at the hospital, vetting everyone who came to visit him and fellow journalists wanting to do a story about the attack were barred. One of his visitors, however, was President Kagame , sensitive about his media image and someone who claimed to have an "accommodative stance towards the press".
Normally, this would not have been a story for my pro-government newspaper, The New Times. But there was a feeling among reporters and some editors that failure to report this particular beating could be construed as complicity over it.
With administration support, I started to put together a story and then came under pressure from the then Managing Editor to hand it in before the President and his ministers came back from a government retreat at a game lodge.
It was published on February 17 under the headline Uncertainty as Journalist Beatings Mount.
It was bad timing. During the retreat, we learned that Kagame had lashed out at officials present for contributing towards his image as a press monster by not being helpful enough towards the media. Separately, in my weekly Sunday column in the paper, I picked up on this and asked why the President should have to make such a call in a country which has a full minister of information and a host of other organisations charged with media activities.
Little did I know that this was the beginning of the end of my journalistic activities in Rwanda.
The next day I was summoned to see the same Managing Editor who had encouraged me to write the Gasasira story and told that it was "fabricated, baseless and lacking in fact". I was also ordered to stop writing my column with immediate effect.
Whatever pressure the Managing Editor was under, all the blame was heaped entirely on me. I was sacked a few days later, my dismissal notice - served unusually on a Sunday – stating that my story "was unfounded and full of lies" and had "put the country in disrepute with our development partners" …
Had it? Did these partners even know about the story? I don’t know and my efforts to put my side of the story to the Chairman of the newspaper’s board were refused. Off I had to go and nobody bothered.
Sadly, it was not the first case of the New Times succumbing to government pressure. A year earlier, the then Editor in Chief, Eddie Rwema, had been fired for allowing the publication of a story in which Kagame was reported to have blasted under-performing ministers. At least, he was professional – he stood by the story and spared the job of the reporter who had written it.
Our news story about Eleneus Akanga's exile
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