Writing Wrongs
By Andy Martin, News Editor, The Bournemouth Echo, UK
27 February 2007

So he did it then.

Not too much of a surprise that Forest Whitaker won the Oscar for best actor for his incredible portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, certainly not to anyone who has seen this stunningly powerful film.

I had the pleasure of meeting Whitaker last week at the movie's African premiere in the Ugandan capital Kampala where Amin wreaked havoc for eight years.

Over 300,000 people died in Uganda during his reign of terror.

And of course, while that was 30 years ago, thousands still die each week in Africa in similar circumstances, so it's not just history. It's very much real life, just somewhere else.

That wasn't why I was in Kampala - your local paper hasn't suddenly taken to sending its staff on such showbiz jaunts. I was there for a rather different reason and one that contrasted sharply with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. In fact I learnt a rather humbling lesson last week.

I spent it with 22 political and parliamentary print journalists from East Africa, teaching both politics and journalism. The workshop I was asked to run was called Reporting Politics in a Multiparty Democracy, since Uganda only became a democracy in 2006 after 20 years of one party rule in the wake of the Amin and Milton Obote years.

The journalists were for the most part in their twenties, although the oldest was 42 and they were Ugandan equivalent of our own Westminster press corps. Four were from Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia and the conference was organised by the Commonwealth Press Union in London whose job it is to help train and raise journalistic standards across the Commonwealth, especially in emerging democracies.

To a man and woman, the journalists were incredibly bright, articulate, committed and with a great individual and collective sense of humour - a credit to their profession. But most of all they had a thirst for knowledge, a desire to improve what they do, to be better journalists. This thirst bordered on a desperation to learn. How can I write a better story? How can I interview more effectively? What I can I do to investigate corruption in the government and get better sources? How can I get more front pages and persuade my news editor to use more of my stories? How can I be a more effective journalist? How can I do all this and keep myself jail at the same time?

Being a journalist in Africa isn't what it is in the UK. They are by and large poorly paid and poorly resourced. They don't have cars and often have to queue up to use the internet for research. Although most are staff reporters, they will only receive a small basic salary and then be paid on how many stories they get in their paper. They have to be careful what they write lest they offend the government. They face regular intimidation, their editors may be hauled in by the police for questioning (as happened to the editor of a paper called the Red Pepper on the morning I arrived in Kampala.) Their publications may be shut down on official overnight whim as happened to the Daily Monitor for a week last year and a small TV station this month.

By the middle of the week, after we had worked on stories, interviewed government ministers and the leader of the opposition, run copy clinics, talked story structure, intros, sources, visited a stormy session of Parliament, discussed their role in informing the people about what is being done in their name by government, assessed how good or otherwise a job they do on reporting issues like HIV/AIDS, poverty, education and literacy, corruption and bad governance, I scratched my head and tried to work out what was troubling me.

I was drawing comparisons between my experience of journalism at home and in Africa. And then the difference dawned on me. It is passion.

I realised how easy it is to take the job we do for granted. And how many of us do. It's just a job isn't it? You turn up, earn your money and go home. Do your best of course but don't worry too much about things. Some of us I am sure, do not actually believe journalism is any different from any other job when it quite patently is and always will be - at least it is if you believe in what you're doing. Where's the passion gone in what we do? Have we lost sight of our basic function of being the watchdog that barks when things go wrong when those with public and private power screw up.

How many of us can say we still want to learn about what we do or just try to do it better? How many of us can say we're still desperate for knowledge? How many of us can say we are still passionate about the profession we have chosen or that we still consider it a privilege to be called a journalist? That's why I say I learnt a lesson last week. Because despite the background and the conditions, despite the fact that if they push too hard on a particular story they might wind up in a police cell, the journalists in "my" African newsroom can say all those things and more. And it may be in part because their job, unlike ours and the way they do it, can literally be a matter of life or death, if not for them then certainly for the people they represent.

They say winning is everything these days, that first is first and second is nowhere. I prefer the words of Johnson Natuhwera, a 27 year old reporter on the Red Pepper (which is constantly annoying the government). Over a beer in a Kampala bar he outlined his ambitions to be one of Africa's best journalists said: "I always try to set my standards as high as I can, so that if I fail, I fail higher than anyone else."

Now that's passion.