The minister of Information and Communications Technology and National Guidance, Judith Nabakooba, has said that government is going to come up with more and clear guidelines for politicians and media houses on how to conduct campaigns ahead of forthcoming scientific election.
While addressing the media on Sunday in Kampala, Nabakooba also noted that the country has enough infrastructure to support scientific elections. She made the remarks after concerns by the various national election stakeholders and opposition leaders that the scientific election in Uganda is not viable.
Nabakooba said the available radio stations, television and telephone networks across the country are good enough to transmit electoral information to every single household in all corners of the country.
“We currently have 309 radio stations and 36 television stations and currently about 90% of the country’s population has access to radio and 70% has access to television,” She said.
She noted that Uganda has a unique blend of community radio stations that are providing customised information services to different villages and parishes through out the country.
Nabakooba said Uganda Communication Communication(UCC) is going to come up with guidelines in order to protect candidates from using language that would minimize the minimum broadcasting standards.
She also warned the media against unbalanced coverage during this period and tasked all the media houses to provide access to all the interesting candidates during campaigns.
“Under the current circumstances, the media is being called upon to provide equal and objective access to all the political candidates and ensure that all the information being provided is free from distortion of facts and also is in compliance with the existing laws,”she said.
On the public calls for the revision of Over the Top Tax(OTT), Nabakooba said that nothing has come up in that direction as per the moment. “I believe that we can use the same ministry to engage and see whether something can be done but as of now it’s a legal tax which was introduced by finance and it’s now a known tax in Uganda,” she said.
She said that the television sets and radios that will be distributed by the government to the citizens are not meant for campaigns. “The radios will be used for the purpose of helping children who are at home to learn and also acquire knowledge using the different radio sets that will be distributed,” she said.
Nabakooba called upon all the political contenders to embrace digitalization.”I call upon all political parties to quickly embrace this opportunity by learning and understanding how to use the different media landscape to achieve their different political goals,” she explained.
