Why western media cannot be reliable news sources on Africa

Editor, ALLOW ME to react on Pan Butamire’s article, “Opposition in exile not of any consequence” (The New Times, March 1). I too found Frank Kagabo’s piece rather shallow, and much of his “analysis” founded on either erroneous or exaggerated assumptions. He asserts for instance that the BBC Kinyarwanda/Kirundi needs no introduction to any Rwandan interested in developments in their country. If by that he means that it is compulsory, a must or essential to listen to it in order to be adequately or properly informed about Rwandan affairs, then I am afraid he is really wrong. I believe I am more than adequately informed about what goes on in Rwanda. And yet I rarely, if ever, listen to or watch the BBC (like much of what goes for news these days, you have a small nugget of information – the rest is interpretation, and heavy spin pretending to be news) whose veracity I have come to doubt over the years; and I have never listened to BBC Kinyarwanda/Kirundi. Knowing who its host is, I had no doubt about what it would be pushing, and I don’t willingly put myself in a position in which I let people try to push their rubbish into my consciousness. And so I didn’t know Evode Uwizeyimana nor know about him since I don’t follow the likes of BBC or its American, French, German or Dutch counterparts. I therefore read Mr. Kagabo’s piece on Mr. Uwizeyimana’s return home hoping to understand a little more about the subject, his reasons for going into exile and then for returning home despite all that he had said while in self-imposed exile. However, at the end of the piece I was no wiser about Mr. Uwizeyimana’s story than when I started. All I had was what I already knew: after years of exile, during which he said many negative things about his own government (his former employer), he was back home consulting with that same government and rubbishing everything he said on anti-government programmes, explaining he had been paid to do so. At the end of the day, I wondered what Mr. Kagabo’s spin was all about. Mwene Kalinda,Rwanda

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Why western media cannot be reliable news sources on Africa