The news from Kampala is grim, though scarcely surprising. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Uganda’s army chief, has ordered the shutdown of a leading media outlet. Britain, ever the sentinel of liberal values when it suits its interests, has condemned the move as an assault on press freedom.
One must ask, however: what did we expect? The trajectory of modern African strongman politics is well charted, from Museveni’s long twilight to the inevitable succession drama. The general, who is also the president’s son, now flexes his muscles in the classic mode of the praetorian guard.
Shutting a newspaper is the political equivalent of a throat-clearing. It is a signal. It says: I am the power here, not your quaint notions of fourth estate.
But let us not confine our contempt to Kampala alone. The British condemnation, while morally correct, rings hollow. The same government that tut-tuts at Kampala has its own history of muzzling dissent from Julian Assange to the surveillance state.
We live, it seems, in an age of managed hypocrisy. The fall of Rome was preceded by a decay in civic institutions, and the erosion of a free press is always the first brick removed from the wall of liberty. Uganda is merely a particularly stark example of a global trend.
The intellectual decadence of the West, with its hand-wringing and empty sanctions, merely accelerates the rot. One can almost hear Gibbon sharpening his quill.
