The Uganda Communications Commission has threatened to revoke licenses of media houses for not airing President Museveni census messages.
This is after the National Association of Broadcasters declined a need to the directive by the regulator for broadcasters to air the President’s census messages free of charge.
The broadcasters argued that such a move is unfair since they already pay exorbitant license fees in addition to meeting huge operational expenses.
Addressing the media shortly after the two parties held a meeting at the UCC headquarters in Bugolobi, the Commission’s Executive Director Nyombi Thembo said that, any media house that will fail to comply with this directive will face serious penalties”, the national message from the President has to be broadcasted, it is a must and to make sure that all the radios and the televisions comply, if they don’t comply they will be sanctioned and sanctions can vary,” Nyombi said.
He says the president’s messages must start airing today until Tuesday of next week.
The National Association of Broadcasters Chairperson, Innocent Nahabwe explains how and why they reached a compromise with the regulator,” we have resolved to continue to run the President’s Message ,but for our own commercial, the UCC had shared with us some advertising and we told them we will not be able to run the advertisement because government needs to be able to budget for their advertisement which they always have budget for, but they always forget to budget for media,” Nahabwe said.
Meanwhile, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics has flagged hundreds of enumerators across the country following several weeks of intense training.
The 2024 National Population and Housing Census starts with census this evening and the actual counting kicks off tomorrow and will run until May 19th.
The ten-day exercise will run under the theme; “It matters to be counted”
