‘People's parliaments’ in uganda's mediascape

Between 2001 and 2009 ebimeeza, also called ‘people's parliaments’, were taking place every weekend in pubs, gardens or courtyards and were broadcast live on private radio stations. Hundreds of people used to gather and discuss the political issue of the day. There were ten in Kampala: almost every radio station in the capital city had to have its own, from CBS, owned by Buganda, to Bukedde, which is attached to the government. There were not nearly as many up-country, concentrated in Masaka (in the centre of the country) and Gulu (in the north). Most of them were held in vernacular languages (Luganda or Luo); one of them was in English.

All followed a similar pattern: voluntary speakers registered on a list before the debate and were called to the microphone by a speaker or a chairman, usually appointed by the radio station organizing the show. Each orator gave his/her opinion on the issue of the day for three minutes. The audience was very active and the speakers had to cope with hecklers and numerous comments and interruptions. All the ebimeeza lasted between one and two hours. The venues were open to anyone. It was free apart from one where you had to buy a soda (800 shillings, approximately £0.20) to enter. The three main ebimeeza in Kampala gathered between 200 and 600 people every weekend. Others were smaller, with 20 to 30 people attending. As we will see below, the audiences were mainly composed of men, of all ages – the majority in their thirties and forties.

Topics were picked by the stations’ staff. Usually participants debated the main political controversy of the week, what had made the current headlines in the national press. Thus discussions focused on the attitudes and aptitudes of national leaders, their legitimacy as rulers, the effectiveness of public policies, the conflicts inside the ruling class, and the principles or strategies that guided decision making. Typical ebimeeza stated a topic and asked a question. ‘President Museveni's 11 points agenda: what are his chances of success?’ ‘The arrest of the Buganda Kingdom officials: what are the implications for the rule of law and lessons for Buganda?’ ‘The Supreme Court election petition ruling: how do we bring about everlasting political and electoral reforms?’ ‘The northern war: how can both sides ensure that this time, the peace process holds?’

Some precedents of interactive radio can be traced in the history of the Ugandan media (Mwesige Reference Mwesige2004; Kirevu and Ngabirano Reference Kirevu and Ngabirano2001), but these shows were an innovation. Through repressive measures, the regime defined what it considered to be a ‘legitimate’ form of political speech in the media as early as 1986 (Tabaire Reference Tabaire2007; Stremlau Reference Stremlau2008). Since then, journalists and regime elites have engaged in ‘negotiations’ or mutual – and of course unequal – adjustments (which could take a violent turn against the former) around what can and what can't be said in the media, reaching ‘compromises’ (in Gramsci's sense)Footnote ² that were constantly renegotiated according to the political conjuncture, as well as the sweeping socio-economic and technological changes in the media field over the last 25 years, one of the most dramatic being the advent of private broadcast media in 1993.

Up to 1992–3, media speech was limited to journalists’ voices in the print or state media, and reached a limited audience. The distribution of newspapers hardly reached beyond the main urban centres; the vernacular press was weak; and the market was dominated by publications attached to the government. Change came in 1992, with the launching of what is today Uganda's main private newspaper, The Monitor,Footnote ³ and in 1993 the airwaves were liberalized. Private media political speech could now reach a different kind of audience: wider, poorer, less educated, rural and vernacular-speaking. The emergence of interactive political talk shows on these private stations, in the second half of the 1990s, represented yet another challenge to the regime's expectations regarding the nature of media speech, as ‘non-professionals’ were encouraged to comment on national politics in spheres that were not controlled by the state.

Elite repertoires of politics and practices of sociability

The ebimeeza are not only a media product. The first one to be launched, in 2001, extended practices of discussion and sociability already in force in a specific social environment: the Ganda bourgeoisie of Kampala. It was the initiative of a radio owner who decided to broadcast discussions that were already taking place within a circle of friends in Club Obligatto.

Club Obligatto aimed at a well-off clientele of a certain age. It was famous for attracting the crème of Kampala's political and business class. When the club was launched, the owners, wealthy Ganda businessmen and professionals (lawyers, a medical doctor, landowners) in their fifties with links to the NRM establishment and the Buganda Kingdom, offered lunch to their friends on Saturdays. They used to gather there and discuss politics, in English. A number of them had known each other at King's College Budo, Uganda's oldest and most prestigious school (McGregor Reference McGregor2006). The bar was the cradle of a masculine sociability, where men came without their families, and where relations were relatively equalized, compared to when someone is receiving at home, or to other social gatherings such as clan meetings, funerals or wedding ceremonies.Footnote ⁴

The political discussions between these high-profile friends were characteristic of their vision of politics. All supported Museveni, but discreetly, and not because of his leftist revolutionary ideology but because of his positive action on the business environment. The owner of the Club admits he ‘campaigns’ for the NRM by ‘talking in private circles’ (P. W., Kampala). He has access to the closest acquaintances of the President, even if he also says that he is ‘not interested in politics’. For these people, the suitable way of ‘doing politics’ is to have private conversations and to support the NRM financially, in a discreet manner. For them, the discussions at Club Obligatto could not be compared to the Resistance Councils, the NRM's popular spheres of deliberation.

This conception of the ‘suitable way’ of doing politics explains why some of the original members opposed the idea of broadcasting the discussions put forward by Maria Kiwanuka, also an eminent member of Kampala's business community and owner of a radio station. In the heated context of the 2001 electoral campaign, she wanted to launch a new media product. For the owners of the bar, it was a commercial opportunity, which prevailed over the desire to preserve the exclusive and distinguished character of the discussions.

After they were broadcast, more people came to attend the discussions, especially students, who were from another generation (mainly born in the 1970s) and who were sometimes openly attached to political parties. Opposition parties’ members found that the show was a good opportunity to campaign and touch people easily despite the ‘no party democracy’ system (Carbone Reference Carbone2008). Young MPs from remote constituencies began to frequent the ekimeeza in order to have cheap and easy media time as well as access to citizens. Rapidly, other radio stations launched their own, this time in the vernacular rather than in English.

In both the ekimeeza in English and the ones in Luganda, the overwhelming majority of the people in the audience were men: the few women who did attend (generally less than 10, sometimes only one or two) were experienced political activists. The average age of the people I interviewed was 30. In the ekimeeza in English, the ethnic composition was balanced, with a large number of people coming from northern and eastern Uganda. On the contrary and not surprisingly, in the ones in Luganda the Baganda represented a very large majority. An analysis conducted on the basis of a sample of 276 members of the audiences of three different ebimeeza showed that one member out of two in the ekimeeza in English, and one out of four in the ebimeeza in Luganda, had a University degree. This shows a difference in terms of education level according to the language in which the debates were organized; nevertheless, the fact that in both cases the majority of the members of the audience had attended at least secondary school and that most of them lived in Kampala goes against the often stated assumption that the ebimeeza in Luganda were for ‘peasants’ and the ‘lowest classes’.

Ebimeeza codes and class distinction

Officially, according to the ‘Code of conduct’ of one of the ebimeeza, ‘any member of the civil society in Uganda’ was authorized to take the floor. Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the term ‘civil’ (Elias Reference Elias2000; Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1999) and its links with the idea of a specific behaviour and gentility are here fully deployed: while officially organizers were not allowed to discriminate and the places where the shows took place were, objectively, open to anyone, nevertheless the founders, the organizers (orators and journalists) as well as the speakers wanted to preserve a certain ‘civility’ in the discussions. There was a tension between this and a general discourse around their supposed ‘openness’ and the idea that they were ‘representative’ of ‘public opinion’.

There was an important separation between a minority of orators and a majority of spectators. For example, in the ekimeeza of the Buganda Kingdom's station, only 39 per cent of the respondents had ever taken the floor. Theoretically, anyone could register to participate. But compared to spectators, orators were more educated. Even if they were still a very small minority, women were more present amongst the orators compared to their proportion in the audience, because the moderators of the debates favoured them.

The founders and orators did not resent the inequalities the procedures created: they saw them as a way to protect the ebimeeza from what was perceived as a social and moral degradation. This is illustrated by the discourses the founders and a lot of orators hold around the fact that one of the ebimeeza was in English: they praise the use of English not because it is the vehicle of a multi-ethnic citizenship, but because it carries a form of exclusive citizenship, which is supposed to be limited to educated, ‘rational’ and suitable people who don't engage in ‘tribal sentiments’, as one of the founders (a lawyer) explained to me:

Actually, in all the ebimeeza, not only the one in English, grammar, pronunciation or vocabulary errors were systematically noticed and mocked. In all cases, spectators encouraged a severe implementation of the rules and codes of conduct, and made ironic comments when an intervention was deemed boring or ‘emotional’. The topics of the debates were always complex national issues and their wording encouraged analysis. The majority of the spectators and the journalists expected the speeches to be based on research, to bring knowledge to the audience. They wanted to maintain the idea that the ebimeeza were a battle of wits, not an angry crowd.

These injunctions to adopt an ‘intellectual’ attitude were opposed, in the codes of conduct, to ‘emotional outbursts’, ‘personal attacks’, or criticism based on ethnicity and religion. Generally, academic knowledge was considered a barrier against irrationality, anarchy and tribalism, echoing Museveni's modernity model, which aimed to ‘go beyond ethnicity’, defined as a ‘short-term problem’ that could be ‘solved’ with development and education (Museveni Reference Museveni1997: 188). The procedures of the Kingdom's radio ebimeeza were different in the sense that they reflected this attachment to intellectualism as a shield against ‘emotions’ but also contained an imperative of loyalty towards the King, and respected some of the etiquette in force in his domain. Some speeches celebrated the greatness of the Kingdom. The following extract from an intervention of a woman orator illustrates this:

Several shows had codes of conduct (see Figures 1 and 2). Disciplinary measures, like being expelled, were sometimes taken when a member committed a felony. Over the years, one could witness a growing process of bureaucratization of the ebimeeza, with the creation of powerful executive committees in response both to an injunction from the state, which considered they were a potential source of disorder, and initiatives from the journalists and the orators, whose concern was not just that the government might ban the ebimeeza, but also to preserve the quality of the shows. Generally, there was a high coincidence between the visions of the state, the radio producers and the orators around the kind of speech that should be deployed.

Figure 1 Ekimeeza code of conduct

Figure 2 Mambo Bado code of conduct

The ebimeeza codes were directly drawn from media deontology codes (H. Booza, Kampala). They reflected the way journalism was defined as a profession from the 1980s up to today and the ‘compromises’, mentioned above, between journalists and the state. Generally, journalists kept a tight control of the debates in the ebimeeza: the state required that ‘professionals’ (as defined in the 1995 Press Act) should host them; stations controlled the choice of the topic and sometimes distributed ‘Issues to consider’ before the debate, in order to guide the orators. One of the most important rules was that orators were not supposed to discuss ‘personalities’ but stick to ‘issues’, which echoes old controversies between state authorities and journalists around the legitimacy of the naming and shaming of corrupt politicians.

Respecting the codes of conduct also echoes earliest representations of legitimacy and honour in Buganda, where politeness has been an important criterion to judge leaders’ fitness to rule, even if the manners at stake have evolved over time (on the 1940s and 1950s see Summers Reference Summers2006a). There have been major ruptures with ancient patterns of politeness, especially in terms of respect for age, nobility and relations between genders (Richards Reference Richards and Fallers1964; Hanson Reference Hanson2003). But in the 1990s, M. Karlström and R. Banégas showed how in Buganda ‘democracy’ was often ordinarily defined as a society where leaders and subjects respect rules of civility (Karlström Reference Karlström1996: 490; Banégas Reference Banégas and Martin1998). In the last decade, it seems that the political importance of civility and politeness was reflected in the ebimeeza, and that local imaginations of the ‘good polity’ rely on procedural rather than equalitarian representations of legitimacy. This is revealed in the way orators talk about how they would like the rules to be better implemented:

ESTABLISHING reputation and morality through education

Analysing the biographies of members of the audience and orators enables one to point to the different backgrounds of those who acquire an ability to talk in public and master the procedural challenges: some of the best orators combine their involvement in the ebimeeza with preaching (especially in born-again churches) and acting as masters of ceremony at weddings or graduation parties. These experiences, they say, helped them learn how to manage big crowds and address people (F. A., K. M., Kampala).

The Resistance Councils (today Local Councils or LC1s), the participatory institutions created by Museveni, had an ambivalent relationship with the ebimeeza. LC1s remain one of the most important spheres of political socialization and oratory experience (Banégas Reference Banégas and Martin1998). But the ebimeeza were not, contrary to what the name ‘people's parliaments’ may convey, an avatar of the LC system outside of the state's realm. The biographies of the orators as well as the analysis of the forms of talk do not support the establishment of a direct filiation between the two. Even if they supported the Movement system, the participatory dimension of the management of local affairs was minor in the political ideals of the founder members of the first ekimeeza (P. W. and Shonubi, Kampala). All orators I interviewed considered the two to be very different things. The ebimeeza were born out of the attachment to intellectual elite debate rather than radical democracy. In all the ebimeeza, orators had many previous or parallel political experiences, but most of them had not participated in the LC1s with great frequency. Many rarely attended the meetings and were not interested in ‘local politics’.

LC1s are open to anyone above 18 in a given village or zone. They have administrative and socio-political mobilization mandates. Since the bush war and the constitutional consultation process of the 1990s, they have been largely bureaucratized (Ddungu Reference Ddungu, Mamdani and Oloka-Onyango1994). Today, LC1 councillors help solve neighbourhood and domestic conflicts and act as a channel of communication with the higher government levels. They monitor the arrival of newcomers in their area and deliver letters of recommendation. Meetings usually take place once a month, and people discuss local problems and how to resolve them. Sometimes they are addressed by a higher leader who ‘sensitizes them’ or consults them on an issue.

It is very possible that even if – unlike the Church for example – LC1s don't emerge in the interviews as a training ground, they had an influence on the ebimeeza: the attachment to procedural politics is visible in both. Several regular orators did have important experience in LC1s, but to be successful in the ebimeeza, this had to be combined with an involvement in other venues of political and oratory training, particularly debating societies and political parties. The oratory and cognitive competences required are different: some LC1 chairmen and councillors I did meet in ebimeeza – and they were, interestingly, spectators and not orators – explained that addressing an LC1 was easier because the audience is ‘captive’ (R. O., Kampala). Moreover, the LC system promotes a consensual model of deliberation, whereas the ebimeeza are competitions. LC1 chairmen tend to shy away from discussing national politics and to invoke party etiquette during councils (Chairman Lule, Kampala). The leaders with whom the citizens interact in the LCs are local leaders, whereas in the ebimeeza one can see national leaders from all over the country. Moreover, as we will see in greater detail later, it is the very role envisaged and performed by individuals in the LC1s that differs from the one moulded by the ebimeeza (for a discussion on similar issues in the Kenyan context, see Haugerud Reference Haugerud1995).

Ebimeeza speeches can be recognized easily: they are usually slightly pompous and jumbled, funny, and educational in tone; they target national leaders and are full of intellectual and factual references:

One of the most striking characteristics of the ebimeeza, in English or in other languages, is their similarity to forms of talk associated universally with the Westminster Parliament. People attending are called ‘members’, ‘members of the House’ or ‘Honorable members’, the speeches are addressed to ‘Mr Speaker’ or to ‘Mr Chairman’. The language used is formal (‘Allow me to proceed…’), the topics are sometimes called ‘motions’. This similarity is not the result of mere mimesis. It reflects the integration and reinvestment of habits acquired in school through the numerous debating societies one finds in Uganda, which are inspired by British debating societies (Cheney Reference Cheney2004; Ceadel Reference Ceadel1979; Graham Reference Graham2005).

When they were created in Britain and in the Empire, debating societies were supposed to encourage students to engage in a ‘civil’ form of politics, and to train some of them for parliamentary careers. They were considered a domesticated means to produce reputation and to canalize competition between students (Engel Reference Engel1980). The procedures that the ebimeeza follow are openly inspired by the codes of conduct of the debating clubs, as one of the founders of the ekimeeza in Club Obligatto, who was also the secretary of King's College Budo debating society in the 1970s, told me (E. K., Kampala). This association between ebimeeza and school debating competitions was renewed, generation after generation. Some orators engaged in debating competitions at the district and national levels. Debating societies ask for a lot of involvement and work from children: they usually debate once per week, prepare the topics, learn the codes, diversify their vocabulary, learn proverbs and oratory tricks, and correct their grammatical mistakes. In this way, individuals acquire reflexes and forms of talk that are reinvested in the ebimeeza.

The fact that the ebimeeza attracted a lot of people is linked to the intensity of university politics in Uganda. There are Guild elections every year and many positions to fill in every university in the country. There are thus a great many young people wanting to get elected. Ambitious students are encouraged by the Guild leaders to go and practise politics in the ebimeeza and thus train in public speaking (E. Kintu, Kampala). This connection was reflected in the questionnaires I distributed: in the ekimeeza in English, for example, 91 per cent of the respondents said they had occupied a position in the students’ leadership when they were at school. Two former Makerere guild presidents were coming regularly. In the Guild Representative Council sessions I observed at Makerere, the similarity between the procedures used in the national Parliament, and thus in the ebimeeza, was striking.

In the Buganda Kingdom's ekimeeza, the imaginary of the school-initiated heritage of the debating competitions was central to procedures. Between 2002 and 2006, the competition was based on what participants called ‘the houses system’. The audience was divided into four ‘houses’. Each gathered about 100 people, seated in a bloc (see Figure 3). Each ‘house leader’ (supposedly elected) had to choose people in his ‘house’ whom he thought were good speakers and give their names to the executive committee of the show. Each house was competing against the other, and each orator was presented as coming from one of these houses.

Figure 3 Houses system – ekimeeza of the Buganda Kingdom

This system was derived from the education system, where student boarding establishments are called ‘houses’ and are the basis for sports competitions inside schools. According to historians, the houses were created in Ugandan schools explicitly to break ethnic loyalties and create ‘citizens of the world’ (Summers Reference Summers2006b: 107). They are still regarded as cradles of friendships which overcome ethnic solidarities, thus allowing for a sane competition inside the school (E. Kayondo, Kampala). The system allowed a partisan scheme of political competition between debaters to be avoided. It followed the legislation against party politics but also reflected ancient representations of politics and political competition. Several authors have shown that many Baganda used to view political parties negatively years before the arrival of the NRM, seeing them as a source of violence and degradation for the Kingdom, as they displaced political competition away from the axis of the King and divided Baganda (Karlström Reference Karlström1999). This historical hostility is still visible in this ekimeeza: ‘As people of the Kabaka (King), we must sit together’, the moderator told me.

‘Enlighten the masses’: ebimeeza as schools of leadership

As the extract above illustrates, the legitimacy to take the floor in an ekimeeza is not based on an equalitarian ideal. Much depends on certain moral and social qualities: it's only anyone ‘in quotes’ who can take the floor. The ebimeeza thus become an opportunity to analyse the repertoires through which processes of distinction operate in urban contemporary Uganda (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1978; for an African example, Fumanti Reference Fumanti2007). Even if the university and the old figure of the évolué have lost momentum in Africa since the academic qualifications don't fulfil the promises with which they were once identified (Banégas and Warnier Reference Banégas and Warnier2001), people who have invested in education still have to find places where their qualities can be of social and political value: the ebimeeza are such places. They reflect the distress of ‘alienated intellectuals’ (Curtis Reference Curtis1962; Chartier Reference Chartier1982) who suffer from the gap existing between their expectations and the objective probability of ever reaching the positions to which they aspire.

The trajectories and discourses of members illustrate this quest for recognition. P. S., for example, was born in 1979 in the Central Region to a Ganda family with an agricultural background. He speaks English and Luganda. Helped by a rich uncle, he went to school in Kampala where he headed the debating society. He then went to Makerere University to study finance. Even after graduating, he spends most of his time on campus, using the students’ sociability spaces in order to make acquaintances and look for employment. He lives on short-term contracts with NGOs and considers he is being underemployed. He is regularly out of money. In parallel, he was elected vice-chairman of the LC1 of his village in 2002. After beginning to frequent the ebimeeza in 2003, he entered the Democratic Party. A year later he was nominated as a member of the Buganda Kingdom Youth Council; according to him, this was thanks to the ebimeeza, where he goes three or four times a week. He was always seated in the front rows and registered almost every time to speak. He expressed his frustration in an interview:

Another orator, who was born in 1984 and graduated from Makerere in economics in 2006, told me:

Ebimeeza are also places where people keep bragging about their supposed popularity, especially among those who are sometimes contemptuously called the ‘villagers’, the ‘ordinary people’ or the ‘local people’. As P. S. told me:

Orators justify their participation by saying their intellectual qualities need to be shared for the common good, because they have the capacity to ‘represent’, or ‘enlighten’ the ‘masses’ and the ‘rural folks’, and they need to ‘educate’ the ‘public’ out of their ‘ignorance’ and ‘backwardness’ (several orators, Kampala). A lot of them say they want to become MPs. Some of them do try to engage in political careers and sometimes are candidates in an election. Most of the time, they are not elected. But the ebimeeza are, like debating societies in Britain or in the Empire (Durrill Reference Durrill2000), places where one can try to build one's political reputation and get noticed by a ‘mentor’, especially when one doesn't have access to other venues of political advancement such as powerful kin. Ebimeeza are integrated in – both nurturing and modifying – networks of recognition, political promotion and mentoring.

These ambitions are nourished by the fact that some politicians frequently participate in ebimeeza and present their rise as a result of that involvement. Among these, many were recruited by the Office of the President as advisers. It is readily noted that they had other assets – speaking in ebimeeza needs to be associated with other practices of networking and reputation building, especially in terms of University diplomas and University students’ mobilizations – but the ebimeeza did help them to be noticed (F. Tumwebaze, Kampala). They are considered as a ‘school for presidents’, a place where you can train to become a leader:

In the ekimeeza, whether in English or in Luganda, orators extensively use the repertoire of academic knowledge to prove their political value. This is particularly clear in the extract quoted below. The orator is a member of the executive of a small opposition political party and was a parliamentary candidate in 2006. Aged 30 and former Guild president at Makerere, he is a regular at Club Obligatto:

In all the ebimeeza, orators seek to distinguish themselves from people they call the bakopi, the ‘common men’ in Luganda, an expression that conveys contempt for vulgarity and peasant manners. Until the 1960s, a mukopi used to be a ‘common man’ as opposed to a chief or a royal (Apter Reference Apter1961: 200–1). Now, it is mostly someone who is ill-mannered. Sometimes this counter-model is also incarnated in ethnic stereotypes, especially against northerners, who historically have been despised politically and considered brutal. One never hears that on air, but contemptuous words such as those sampled below are not uncommon in day-to-day conversations with orators:

This desire to claim one's sophistication and to position oneself with modernity and the elite is comparable to the aspirations of Ghana's literature society members in the 1930s (Newell Reference Newell2000: 55) and Nigeria's theatre actors (Barber Reference Barber1997: 352).

Repression and the State model of citizenship

In September 2009, violence erupted in Kampala, with an intensity rarely seen in the south of the country since 1986. The repression of what are usually called ‘the Buganda riots’ left at least 40 people dead and dozens injured (HRW 2009). The violence erupted after the ban on the King's visit to Kayunga, a contested area of the Kingdom.

In addition to repressing the demonstrations in the street, the state shut down four radio stations and required every station, including those that were still on air, to suppress all the ebimeeza programmes (Bareebe Reference Bareebe2009). Today, all the stations are back on air, but the ebimeeza are still banned. Analysing the way the government justified its attacks on the ebimeeza is a way to decipher how its elites imagine a ‘decent’ manner of talking about politics and a ‘legitimate’ format for citizenship. In order to ban the programmes, the elites of the regime had to produce an explanation that could justify an apparent contradiction: the fact that a regime, having based part of its legitimacy in the creation of a ‘grassroots democracy’, where popular political speech was granted a fundamental role, could suppress such things as ‘people's parliaments’. They had to differentiate ‘decent’ popular speech from a degraded form, and thus to define how a ‘good’ citizen was supposed to talk.

One of the main targets of the 2009 media repression was CBS, the radio of the Kingdom, which was clearly supporting the King's visit to Kayunga and was accused of fuelling the violence (although this was never proven and no judicial action was taken to ascertain the facts). Some speakers, including in the ebimeeza, were regularly saying that the Kingdom was ‘under attack’, that Baganda must ‘fight’ for it, and that some people, never openly identified, wanted to ‘chase us out of the Kingdom’. Sometimes these speakers called for boycotts on typical products of western Uganda, such as milk and beef (notes on several ebimeeza, 2008). For Movement officials, the ekimeeza of the Kingdom was a vehicle for the revival of a ‘political’ version of ethnic identity, which is considered as typically ‘backward’ and dangerous. Nevertheless, the ban was not only about this aspect of the debate on citizenship in contemporary Uganda. It must also be situated in a longer and parallel chronology of hostility towards a certain form of participatory radio debates.

Almost since their inception, for some people and particularly some important state officials, interactive radio and particularly the ‘people's parliaments’ incarnated a degraded form of citizenship characterized by the influence of ethnicity and violence – but also alcohol, ignorance and idleness. Ebimeeza were described as ‘a platform for mayhem’ (Mugere 2002) and accused of encouraging tribalism, violence and ‘genocide’. Already in 2002, the Broadcasting Council, the institution regulating the airwaves (largely dominated by the government), tried to ban them, saying they were illegal (see Brisset-Foucault Reference Brisset-Foucault2011: 434–40), but without success. Orators were accused of ‘insulting’ the President instead of ‘educating’ people. The discourse of a former cabinet minister I interviewed just after the ban in 2009 illustrates these views well:

This kind of discourse is denying ebimeeza speakers a significant format in which to practise citizenship: the right to talk in public about any topic. Their opinion is reduced to an ‘insult’. According to the state and the NRM elite, citizens should limit themselves to a ‘suitable’ format of oratory, limited to ‘development’ issues, deployed in state-controlled spheres of deliberation, and limited to local issues: a citizenship based on residence, practice and experience.

Many in contemporary Uganda (as in other contexts: Lagroye Reference Lagroye and Lagroye2003) make a distinction between ‘good’ politics and a desecrated form of politics – ‘bad politics’, characterized by the manipulation of sectarian feelings, authoritarianism and violence (see Karlström Reference Karlström1999: 282–3). According to Museveni, in order for politics to remain noble, it should be protected: thus people who are vulnerable to sectarian sentiments, because they are uneducated, should be encouraged to engage in a certain format of politics, inside state structures and largely limited to local issues framed as independent from national elite behaviour, party politics and national problematics, and usually called ‘development’ (Museveni Reference Museveni1997; Kassimir Reference Kassimir1999; Dicklich Reference Dicklich, Hansen and Twaddle1998; Tripp Reference Tripp, Hansen and Twaddle1998). The ebimeeza crisis illustrates this nuance in the NRM participatory model particularly well: only those who are able to handle it should be allowed to talk about national politics. Per se, this philosophy encouraged the formation of a model of a ‘bifurcated’ (Mamdani Reference Mamdani1996) public sphere, characterized by the separation of the voice of the non-educated citizens and the voice of the elite. As such, the ‘democratization’ encouraged by the NRM was reinterpreting ancient rules of legitimacy and political participation already in place during the protectorate, which were partly based on the level of academic education (Chibita and Fourie Reference Chibita and Fourie2007). It also echoed a widespread contempt for uneducated citizens in Uganda (Obbo Reference Obbo, Hansen and Twaddle1998; Kassimir Reference Kassimir1999). As Ibirige Ssebunya, at that time Minister for Agriculture, once said to a rural crowd:

Indeed, the repression was and still is stronger on radio shows in vernacular languages and those produced in rural areas (HRW 2010). Generally, rural radios receive strong injunctions to focus on ‘development’, rather than ‘politics’, indicating the idea that participation in common affairs should play out in different formats according to the nature of the social environment.

Facing these attacks, ebimeeza members tried to distinguish themselves from this degraded form of citizenship and insisted on their suitability, underlining their belonging to an educated elite. In that sense, the justification of repression, and the state's objectives of control, coincided with the ideals of civility mentioned earlier. As we have seen, the codes of conduct, the executive committees, are there to ensure that discipline is maintained, that personalities are not attacked and ‘insulted’, that ‘ekimeeza is a forum for intellectual debate and not unqualified emotional outbursts’ (‘Issues to consider’, distributed at Club Obligatto). All orators I interviewed agreed with the necessity to create a ‘leadership system’ to ‘control’ people and most agreed on what the government officials criticizing the ebimeeza thought a ‘good speech’ was (based on research, academic credentials, expertise and manners). The adoption of rules to frame lay political speech was not seen as a constraint. In the ebimeeza in Luganda, the executive committee regularly took disciplinary measures against unruly orators, even suspending some of them, as ‘Letters of apology’ found in the archives of one of the ebimeeza illustrate (see Figure 4).

Figure 4 Letter of apology from a suspended orator in Simbawo Akatii

This relative coincidence of views concerning the mode of speech to adopt didn't stop the ban. The 2009 violence acted as a trigger for a longer and subdued hostility towards lay speech on the radio. No matter how hard orators tried and wanted to be recognized as rightful intellectuals, the state did not recognize ebimeeza as elite and intellectual debates. Nor would they trust the executive committees of the ebimeeza and the journalists to control them.

In contrast with the 2002 ban attempt, this time media owners agreed with the move, mainly because the banning of four stations by the government encouraged them to be conciliatory and protect their businesses. Maria Kiwanuka's promotion to Minister of Finance, which happened two years after the ban, doesn't seem to have a direct link with this episode but is symptomatic of relationships between business milieux, media owners and the NRM government elite: repression and threat oscillate with a process of ‘reciprocal assimilation’ and accommodation.

Today there are still no ebimeeza in Kampala. Some prominent orators are sometimes invited inside the studios by talk show hosts, but the fundamental organizational principle of the ebimeeza, the idea of a debate being held in an open venue, in front of an audience, with a microphone theoretically accessible to anyone who wishes it, was suppressed. Generally, orators followed their political and career plans. I shall give two examples: F. A. continued his career as spokesperson of the NRM in one of the divisions in Kampala and became, in 2011, the spokesperson of one of the NRM parliamentary candidates in the capital city. He was also acting as master of ceremonies in NRM rallies during the campaign. P. S. was again a parliamentary candidate in 2011 in his constituency of origin in rural Buganda, this time with backing from the Democratic Party; but, once again, he lost.

Interestingly, some up-country radio stations have reinstated open radio debates; nevertheless, these programmes depend heavily on donor funding and are limited to topics like HIV-Aids prevention or agricultural techniques; radio producers are very vigilant not to create a link between these topics (which potentially could be highly politicized) and the decision-making process at the national level or the behaviour of national elites (M. Kisenyi, Kampala).