Africa-Press – Uganda. Uganda is still in mourning after last Sunday’s passing of her Speaker of Parliament, Jacob L’Okori Oulanyah. While the death was announced in an avant-garde style — with President Museveni using five posts in a Twitter thread to get the message across — prior updates on Oulanyah’s status had been conspicuous by their absence.
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Information gap over Oulanyah health leaves public guessing
Information continued being drip-fed to Ugandans even after a high-level delegation—including Chief Justice Alfonse Owiny-Dollo and Deputy Speaker Anita Among—ended up bedside with the stricken Speaker. Instead what bore striking resemblance to a propaganda machine kicked in, with Ms Among telling Ugandans that Mr Oulanyah was “responding to treatment” hours before the Speaker lost his battle to a still undisclosed condition.
We are conscious of the administrative discretion our leaders enjoy whilst discharging duties in the realm of public administration. We are, however, alive to the fact that the failure to exercise reasonable judgment is abuse of discretion. The optics are particularly bad if state actors don’t work hand in glove as has recently been the case.
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While addressing mourners at Mr Oulanyah’s home in the leafy suburb of Muyenga, the health minister said doctors were still trying to stabilise the Speaker before disaster struck. Dr Ruth Aceng’s narrative was out of kilter with Ms Among’s revelation that treatment—in the strictest medical sense—was being administered to Mr Oulanyah.
The contradiction in terms should stand as a reminder of the dire need to recalibrate the government’s communication policy. In its current state, the policy—by reason of messiness and red tape—is tailored to create an information vacuum. Yet nature abhors a vacuum. It’s small wonder the end result has been pockets of misinformation and disinformation.
The unprecedented turmoil of the last few days should strengthen the government’s resolve to tighten up the loose ends. Mr Oulanyah’s Wikipedia data was repeatedly edited to indicate he had died when in fact he was only showing signs of frightening weakness and pain. An information vacuum is what precipitated this classic case of disinformation.
We believe the government should dedicate itself to resolving such information deficits going forward. It has already seen how enormously harmful they can be. A policy that encourages responsible public officials to be transparent whilst singing from the same hymn sheet has never been self-defeating as some in the ruling government would want us to believe.
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Muted messaging in the Information Age—thanks to a point of reference that runs everything down to the smallest details—demonstrates nothing more than crippling weakness. Above all, the failure to defuse information-hungry Ugandans has shown the limits of not taking a proactive approach. You cannot be economical with information in this day and age. A paradigm shift is, consequently, long overdue.
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