In the wake of Paris-based media pressure group Forbidden Stories’ instantly infamous, and extensive hatchet job, published under the Rubric "Rwanda Confidential”, I feel as a Rwandan journalist of many years that one thing needs to be made clear.
Forbidden Stories’ usage of the term "journalist”, when applied to individuals like Samuel Baker Byansi, a preeminent actor (yes, I will call him that because it more accurately reflects what he is in the anti-Rwanda hit job) is a gross manipulation, in the task of selling their misinformation.
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If we are to talk about facts, and nothing but facts, Byansi, and so many others like him, are not journalists.
A good analogy to illustrate what it means when one talks of independent journalists in Rwanda, is to think of a person that previously was a vendor selling vegetables in a market turning up at a health center, asking to examine patients so as to prescribe medicines to them, then afterwards claiming he is a doctor.
I apologize in advance for any fellow Rwandan journalist that will be offended by this. My only concern is to articulate an uncomfortable truth, because in doing so it helps show the true nature of the reports put out by groups like Forbidden Stories, and the bottomless mendacity, lack of ethics, name it, behind such reports.
The fact is too many of Rwanda’s so-called independent journalists are individuals with not the first idea about the most basic tenets of the profession – for instance someone like Byansi, who is treated like a fount of truth by the European journalists that prepared the "Rwanda Classified” articles.
This is a familiar story within the Rwandan media fraternity. I myself – and many of the first crop of media practitioners in the post-genocide period – got into this profession equipped with not the first idea what it meant to be a journalist.
On my part, when I grew up in neighboring Uganda one of my passions as a schoolboy was reading newspapers. That didn’t mean I was a qualified scribe. I also had this ability to write good sentences in English. That too hardly meant I was ready to be a good journalist.
However, our reality as a genocide-wrecked society meant a lot of us got into lines of work that we were little prepared for, or that we wouldn’t have dreamt of being in, in our previous lives.
That was what life was in a country that basically was starting from zero.
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Over the years as a "journo” I had the good fortune to acquire various media trainings, attended many a journalism seminar, and even did a university course overseas. Only then could I consider myself a professional.
Not many in my cohort experienced a similar career trajectory. A good few, the best generally, would work at some media house and after about a couple of years would get a well-paying job in the PR department of some big firm, or a big government institution.
Or they could be recruited by the local office of some big multilateral organization: a UN body, the local representation of the EU, and so on. (At one time I had a job at the local office of a UN body). Others would quit, to find occupations in non-media-related activities.
Journalism has scarcely been a desirable career path in Rwanda, though over the past decade and half a different dynamic has slowly emerged, with a handful of media houses now offering attractive employment opportunities.
Some offer living wages and benefits like health insurance, or the ability to negotiate housing loans. Not surprisingly more than a few professional journalists work at these establishments now, and for longer periods.
These however are a very few exceptions amidst a wider norm, due to the negative legacy of a fraught past.
When Rwanda emerged from colonial rule some six decades back, it was one of the poorest countries in the world, with some of the worst indicators of social well-being, among them some of the lowest per-capita incomes, and literacy rates.
In other words, the ingredients for the growth of a professional media industry were woefully lacking.
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There wasn’t a middle class, therefore very few people with the disposable incomes to buy newspapers or magazines, and as for television, well, there was none. There only was one radio station, whose main duties were to build a personality cult for the ruler, and to sensitize the masses of peasants to dig their gardens harder.
Only with the Kagame administration did more effort go into nurturing a good "Fourth Estate”.
But by then, beginning with the early 90s when Habyarimana allowed a so-called pluralist politics (meaning of course the emergence of different "Hutu Power” cliques) in the country, did private media become a thing.
And what a miserable, divisive, completely hopeless thing it was, attracting mostly goons for hire (to mudsling, tarnish, or smear whoever they were told to, and spread hate), the most notorious of whom was Hassan Ngeze of Kangura.
And so even today, whatever the changes in place, the legacy of the private media attracting mostly desperadoes still is very much with us.
I write with utmost honesty when I disclose that there are people who never completed primary school, that have been self-styled editors in our media industry. I am speaking only the truth when I point out we’ve even had genocide suspects in our media. Some of our so-called media practitioners have even included petty thieves, not mentioning pickpockets.
We have YouTubers, right now, that seem like inmates of mental hospitals.
As for the so-called media houses themselves, never be surprised when you find out that an "editor” of, say, something called umuravumba, in fact carries his newspaper (office) around, in a scuffed old briefcase, looking for some place to sit so as to work on his next article.
One truth about such individuals is, many of them use journalism as a stepping stone to finding a life in Europe, North America, Australia, anywhere else.
These are the kind of journalists that will contrive to get into trouble with the authorities, usually concocting the most outrageously false story, about any issue, after which at the slightest sign of getting in trouble with the law, they will shout "Kagame is after me, or my god, my life is in danger!”
And the next thing you know, the guy (or lady) has gotten a visa and is somewhere, in a Western country, being quoted as an indisputable source of truth on "the Kagame regime.”
Go figure.