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The role of journalists in exposing torturers
Raymond Mujuni
What you need to know:
- Today’s stories on torture are way too many, in all manner and fashion and rather hard to watch. They conveniently ignore the perpetrators and focus on the victims. They lump up the torturers as ‘security forces’.
On a cold and wet morning 7 years ago, I was scraping the mud off my shoes to get into office when my editor, a no-nonsense, blunt and firm man; Williams Kato asked me to hear the story of a person that had camped at our office reception.
The NTV reception is a revolving door of all kinds of people; celebrities, artists, newsmen, politicians and religious leaders – any day you check in, you’ll find one of them. It’s also a busy place to try and hold a meaningful conversation so I took the source who was visibly distraught into the car parking and the narration that followed left my jaw on the floor.
The source said that a car dealer had beaten his sister to death over failure to pay Shs9 million debt. The sister had bought a premio car for Shs17 million and had paid religiously till she skipped one day on her due date. The car dealer, unhappy about this, had picked her from her workplace, detained her at his premises and administered all manner of torture until the lady breathed her last.
The lady’s name, dear reader, was Betty Katushabe. And her torturer Muhammad Ssebuwufu.
Ssebuwufu wasn’t the name you mentioned easily. His name was whispered in town corridors. He had money. Power. Influence. Means. Authority. He ruled the car dealership market with an iron fist. He wasn’t crossed – neither was he messed around with.
My editor suggested we firm up our facts – and we did.
When we were ready to run our story. Ssebuwufu’s power set in. First, it was police officers calling to say our story was bordering on the verge of defamation – we humbly asked that if they had a case, we were ready to meet them in court. Then it was pressure from politicians offering all kinds of bribes to kill the story.
We stuck our ground and ran the story. Public pressure piled on Kale Kayihura, the then Police boss to act. He first called a press conference to dismiss the story as a rumour. It was hard to deny a story where a coffin, relatives and a corpse were all present.
After unrelenting pressure, Ssebuwufu was arrested, arraigned before court, tried and convicted. At each of those turns, it took active involvement to shine a light on individuals who were involved, the clues they were leaving behind and the courage of a society to stand up to a bully, his money and his power.
Today’s stories on torture are way too many, in all manner and fashion and rather hard to watch. They conveniently ignore the perpetrators and focus on the victims. They lump up the torturers as ‘security forces’.
As I learnt 7 years ago, to stop torture, you’ve got to show faces, follow clues, ask hard questions to people in charge. Listen to the victims narrative and get clues but most importantly, do the dirty work of building the story from the ground up.
There’s a lot we are hearing that is uncorroborated. Perhaps, a good journalist should start there.
I have since hang up my field boots dear reader, after Ssebuwufu, Boda Boda 2010, Flying Squad, I feel I did my part.
