The sour relationship between the governments of Rwanda and Uganda have worsened after President Paul Kagame reportedly issued a blockade on Ugandan media houses.
We have learnt that the first media house to suffer the brunt of Kagame’s wrath us Nation Media Group’s Daily Monitor, which has since been banned from circulation in Rwanda.
It is said that buses that arrived at the three border posts of Katuna, Kagitumba and Bunagana, they were instructed to offload any Daily Monitor products before they could proceed to Rwanda.
Justus Katungi, the Circulation Manager for Monitor Publications Limited, the publishers of Daily Monitor, Saturday and Sunday Monitor, confirmed the development and said today’s incident isn’t isolated since it has been ongoing.
“It is true our papers lately have been blocked but we leave everything to the authorities”. Katungi said.“There was tension after the directive being passed and even the few people who had bought papers of the previous day panicked and handed them over to the authorities.
Currently, some Daily Monitor papers are piled here but some have been taken back by their circulation agents” a source intimated at Katuna border point.
However, the government in Kigali has not yet issued a statement about the ban on Daily Monitor and how long it will remain effective.
Prior to the ban Daily Monitor and some state-owned New Vision were the only Ugandan papers that were allowed circulation in Rwanda.
But it should be recalled that Rwanda last month banned some Ugandan news websites and blogs, claiming they were undermining national security.
Tension between Rwanda and Uganda has been mounting ever since Kagame closed the borders between the two countries, despite the fact that Rwanda entirely depends on Uganda for most of its goods and services consumed by Rwandans.
The reasons given by Kigali then was that it was renovating the borders but later turned out to be untrue.
Kigali later claimed that Uganda was unsafe for Rwandans and that many of them were detained by the military in Uganda without being produced in courts of law to answer charges for which they had been arrested.
