We should give a standing ovation to men and women around the Covid-hit world whose profession is journalism. If you are really a journalist who matters, you should in fact never join the gamblers group that a certain high profile figure in government wanted to the other day throw out his spacious and glittering office. They sounded uninformed. The bigwig wondered.
We are glad to have lived during an era where it is so easy to write a lie against someone. Written lies are widely read.
I about two years ago wrote a piece that was later perused by all ambitious journalists in the country. It was entitled: This crime journalism. Look for it and read it if you haven’t already. You will learn.
I am quite exhausted today. I will sit down one day in the arm chair to tell you what journalism of the seventies and the eighties meant. Journalists today are well-equipped. They are afraid to work as facilitated and equipped. It is unfortunate.
I was shocked to the core when I, in the run up to the general elections, saw Martin Okoth Ochola the police chief bragging that the force he leads was one hundred percent right when they beat unarmed journalists. Your pen is your weapon fearful journalist.
Military officers in Uganda can do nothing to harm me. I am never biased. They know.
It is wrong for a journalist to appear in public five times a week. It is wrong for a journalist to feast on every kind of food even during this period when all Muslims in the country, who are able, are fasting.
Okoth Ochola said he would again and again order his men in uniform to continue whipping journalists. It is because journalists formed cliques about six years ago. They are fighting each other. A brown envelop given to a journalist will gag him or her there and then.
I am a powerful writer who writes to inform. Journalism itself means talking. Reporting is sending to the editor exactly what you saw happening. A soft editor should be (immediately) sacked by his employer. But how can that person grow the paper placed in his hands?
You will know why the name Sekka Bagenda is among the unique names on the list of those you allow to fight for you, you journalist.
A shabby journalist looks ridiculous. And it is a crime to look unkempt if you are journalist. Newsrooms that are serious should get into the habit of ill-treating shabby journalists.
Security services are right to make a shabby journalist weep.
It is a shame for a journalist who has fully identified him or herself (as a journalist) to then run away, for his or her dear life, on seeing a military officer with a club.
It pains me to the core when it is discovered that an accurate thinker who studied journalism cannot say the whole truth if he or she is not paid.
We are free thinkers. Our silence or noise meant Ugandans would vote the way they did on 14 January.
Like an honest public servant in the country, a journalist should be revered. It is a crime for a journalist to be poor.
This article alone has already made me friends and enemies at the same time. It will be published by more than one platform and as soon as it is, opportunities will seek bold and independent journalists. Journalists should be united.
Journalism is not a sector for timid men and women.
Instead of sitting down for hours every day trying to sharpen their tools, journalists are often seen moving up and down, looking for daily bread. This is laziness. Use your head and succeed, journalist.
Time is here for journalists in Uganda to stop seeing plagiarism as something normal. Over-staying in power is to a dictator. Thinking is to a journalist.
Last year was incredibly tough.
It is not easy for a manufacturer of sentences with sense in them to die a pauper. Voters in a country are powerless if this sector called journalism is powerless too.
President Museveni has led this country for 35 years. The ageing man knows that a free thinking journalist is deadlier than a rifle. He has humbled many.
Journalists of the past could hustle and rise through the ranks until they became more feared than fighter jets. Today the word editor has lost meaning.
Someone listening to me doesn’t know what a reporter can really contribute to a media house.
Being this available for all to see (and to be cheap) is among the reasons why social media is now a platform where even real thinkers can go to look for reliable information.
An employer who has refused to pay journalists working for him or her is worse than a hated government.
sekkabagenda@gmail.com
