Renowned journalist and media entrepreneur Andrew Mwenda has been under fire from several Ugandan journalists for his role in the investigation of documents that were tabled in Parliament last week to support allegations that Ugandan ministers received bribes from an oil company.

Many journalists, ever suspicious of collaborating with government officials on sensitive stories, have accused Mwenda of selling his soul or going to bed with the enemy. Others have not gone so far, but they have said they found his actions suspect.

Before the latest issue of The Independent (“Oil bribery scandal: The story behind the news”), which details the paper’s attempts to get to the bottom of the allegations, hit the stands, the story on Facebook and other social media was that Mwenda had ran to the government (the President and his Foreign Affairs Minister, Sam Kutesa, who is named in the middle of the scandal) with the documents instead of conducting his own independent investigations.

In an interview with ACME on October 13th, days after embattled minister Kutesa mentioned in Parliament that he had first heard about the documents allegedly linking him to the bribery scandal from Mwenda, the journalist defended his actions.

“It would have been wrong to publish the documents without any attempts to establish their authenticity,” he said. “I know that sources have their own motivations for leaking documents to journalists or giving them tips and I always keep that in mind when I am working on any investigative story. I have to verify the claims made by my sources.”

Mwenda said he had received the documents, which suggest that Tullow Oil had made payments to ministers Kutesa and Hillary Onek, last year. The documents detailed foreign bank accounts and payments allegedly made to the two ministers.

“I tried on my own to authenticate the claims,” Mwenda said.

He hit a dead end. He said he had talked to the British Metropolitan Police and to the head of CID in Dubai through a highly placed source with access to him.

“I also went to Global Witness, a big civil society group with the resources to investigate corruption in the oil sector, and asked them for help,” he added.

Mwenda said he had also asked a major regional media group to partner with the Independent on doing the investigation “because they have more resources than us”.

He said he took all these steps because “I was also aware that there were too much rivalry and competition in the oil sector. Maybe somebody could be diverting attention from the actual crime.”

Mwenda said after hitting a dead end on all those fronts he decided to take the documents to President Museveni.

He said Museveni wrote on the documents, “Kayihura investigate working with Mwenda”. Kale Kayihura is the Inspector General of Police.

Is it okay for a journalist to go to the President with leaked documents that could implicate his own ministers or even himself in corruption?

“It’s okay,” Mwenda said. “I knew if he doesn’t do anything and I can prove some percentage of the information is true, I would say we gave him the documents. I told him ‘They are saying these people are making money for your campaigns. That you are involved. I went to him thinking that if he did not order an investigation I would write the story.”

Mwenda added that by going to the President, he was also “holding him to account”.

That Mwenda has access to State House has been in the public domain for a while now.

Mwenda said he had in the past similarly gone to security chiefs and shown them what The Independent was going to publish in case he felt the sensitivity of the story demanded such cross-checking. “I ask them to demonstrate the security risk,” he said. “If they can’t then we shall publish.”

Any investigative journalist will tell you it is a great asset to have friends in high places, as Mwenda clearly has.

The question is to what end you put these highly placed sources. Will it help you get the story or kill it?

Some journalists have suggested on Facebook that the documents were enough cover for a newspaper to publish the story.

Mwenda disagreed.

“We can’t make judgements on whims and emotions,” he said.

He said The Independent’s editorial policy was close to Collin Powell’s principle on going to war.

“If you have a vital decision to make, what guides you? Ours is the 50% - 70% principle,” he said. “If you have information that confirms 50% of the story is true, you can publish if there is overriding public need to know. If you have information that confirms 70% of the story is true, you use common sense, again depending on the overriding public need to know. You may never get 100% confirmation that the story is true.”

Under this logic, Mwenda said, different aspects of the claims by those who had leaked the documents could have been given a percentage weight.

For example, do the accounts exist? -- (15%). Are the names of the account holders those mentioned in the report? -- (15%). Was money transferred to those accounts? -- (15%). Was it transferred by the said company? -- (15%). And so on...

Mwenda said had The Independent confirmed the first three questions, for instance, they would have published the story.

“Our business [journalism] is based on four important and self-reinforcing principles,” he said. “These are truthfulness, accuracy, fairness, and balance.”

He added: “For any institution to work and perform its functions [with credibility], it must have some values. To do our work in promoting accountability we must be guided by those principles I have mentioned. We must to establish the authenticity of the information we get.”

Mwenda is spot on here. However, his detractors will question whether going to Museveni was the best way of establishing the authenticity of the bribery claims.

It assumes that the President is above board and that he will in fact pursue all corruption allegations against his ministers.

This is a judgement call. And it is a very big one.

The other problem of course is that The Independent did not publish the findings of Kayihura’s investigation until after the matter came before Parliament (As Minister Kutesa was telling Parliament that investigations had shown the documents were forged, Vice President Edward Ssekandi interrupted him and said the President had told him he had ordered an investigation which had concluded the documents were fake).

Mwenda said about a month ago Kayihura had given him letters from Malta and the Metropolitan Police in UK which suggested that documents were forged and the accounts did not exist.

So why did he not publish the story then?

“My judgement was there was no story,” he said. “The fact that there was no crime means there is no story. I can’t write a denial story where was no positive claim of a crime in the public domain.”

Mwenda said he could have done a story about the police investigation, as it was still going on. “But I had confirmed separately from Dubai and London that the documents were fake; the accounts did not exist,” he said. “It would have been malicious.”

But surely the forgery finding also raises another story. Who forged the documents? Who stood to benefit from the forgery? How do all these claims and counter claims fit into the jigsaw of Uganda’s nascent oil sector?

In other words, what seemed the end of one story was actually the beginning of another—possibly a bigger one.

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Correction: We had previously written that Andrew Mwenda had given the oil documents to Platform London but he has since clarified that it was Global Witness.

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About the Author: Dr. Peter Mwesige is Executive Director of the African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME). He has chaired the department of journalism and communication at Makerere University and is a former Executive Editor of the Monitor in Kampala.