- Charles Onyango-Obbo
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Charles "Mase" Onyango-Obbo (born 1958) is a Ugandan author, journalist, former Managing Editor of The Monitor. He is currently Executive Editor for the Africa and Digital Media Division with Nation Media Group, Nairobi, Kenya. He is a political commentator of issues in East Africa and the African Great Lakes region. He writes a column, "Ear To The Ground", in The Monitor, and a second column in the regional weekly The EastAfrican, and a third in the Daily Nation.
Born in the town of Mbale in eastern Uganda. Onyango-Obbo studied at Makerere University in Kampala, and the American University in Cairo where he obtained a Master's degree in journalism. In 1991, he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
In late 1997 he and Andrew Mwenda (now managing director and also Editor-in-Chief of The Independent news magazine), then a reporter with The Monitor, were arrested and charged with publishing with "publication of false" following a story in which the paper quoted reports in The Indian Ocean newsletter, that Uganda had become compensated with gold by the Kinshasa government of Laurent Kabila, for its support in, along with Rwanda, helping oust the regime of long-term Zaire (now Democratic Republic Congo) dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. They fought the case through the High Court, where they lost the appeal; went to the Constitutional Court, where again they lost the appeal; and eventually in 2003 won the most significant court victory for the Uganda when the Supreme Court found against the state, and rule the offence of publication of false to be unconstitutional.
In May 1999, during the Second Congo War, Onyango-Obbo and other editors of The Monitor – Wafula Ogutu and David Ouma Balikowa – were arrested and charged with "sedition" and "publication of false news", following the publication of a photograph of a naked woman being sexually abused by men in military uniform. Ugandan officials insisted that the assailants might be soldiers from Congo or Zimbabwe (who were also involved in the Congo war), and could not possibly be Ugandan soldiers as the photo caption claimed. Onyango-Obbo and the other editors were acquitted on 6 March 2001.[1][2]
In October 2002, again Onyango-Obbo and three other colleagues were arrested and charged with publication of a story that "aided the enemies of Uganda", after a report that alleged that a military helicopter might have been shot down in northern Uganda by the obnoxious rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army. The government also closed down the Monitor for 10 days. They were acquitted of the charges a year later. In all, Onyango-Obbo appeared in court over 120 times between 1997 and mid-2003; more than the combined number of times Ugandan journalists had been in court since the country's independence in October 1962.
With that, Onyango-Obbo decided to take up an earlier offer that Nation Media Group, which had taken a majority stake in The Monitor in March 2000, to move to Nairobi and initiate the group's media convergence operations. In his view, his continued presence had become counter-productive, because the hostility of the government toward him and the extent to which he had become a controversial figure, was overshadowing the newspaper's long-term prospects and undermining the ability of other journalists at the paper to emerge.
References
Publications
- Ear To The Ground (1996)
- Uganda's Poorly Kept Secrets (1998) - a Collection of short stories
- Mixed and Brewed in Uganda: A Short tour of the soul of a nation and its people (2008)
- It Never Happened:, (2009) - a story on the day before Uganda military dictator Idi Amin was ousted in 1979, the day he fell, and the day after.
External links
Categories: 1958 births | Living people | Ugandan journalists | Ugandan writers | Makerere University alumni | Nieman Fellows | Nation Media Group
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