Yesterday, a one Davidson Ndyabahika’s Facebook timeline turned into a battle ground for the Facebook war that was between the office of the public Relations Officer (PRO) of Makerere University led by Ritah Naminsango and Clare Muhindo the social media guru for Daily Monitor newspaper.
Ndyabahika, a reporter with Uganda Radio Network ( URN) posted a screenshot of a Daily Monitor story which had wrong names for Makerere University secretary and Bursar. It turned out that the indicated names belong to former holders of the said offices, that is Joshua Karamaji and Kahunda Muhwezi respectively who both retired from serving Makerere years back.
Ndyabahika’s post read thus in part: “Those people you [Daily Monitor] refer to in your story left Makerere long time ago. Joshua Karamaji resigned from Makerere University on Friday October 25, 2013. And among the reasons he resigned was his foresighted failure by the university to implement the 70% staff incentive. Unless you want to follow Kahunda muhwezi in his home in Kyangala Karegyeya Ntungamo.”
Now, the war, which yesterday started at 6:41am and still ongoing, was as a result of accusations and counter accusations started by Daily Monitor’s Muhindo who bodly tried to defend the wrong names that were published, arguing that the PRO’s office is so slow at responding when contacted for such information.
“[The] Reporter must have checked the Makerere website to verify the names of the bursar en secretary… And of course u know when the website was last updated… En u know that when u call the university spokesperson, and ask her for the names of those people, she will most likely tell u that she needs to first get permission, she might inform u after two days,” Muhindo responded.
But becase of the post and its intriguing comments, Namisango dived in flanked by coworker Hasifa Kabejja to defend their duties.
Namisango said: “Clare Muhindo Valentina and Davidson Dvd Ndyabahika, would you kindly be genuine and inform your followers when you called me, and asked me for the names of officers at the University and I responded that I would seek for permission,and I provided the names after two days.How come other reporters and media houses state the correct names.”
Kabejja too was irritated and added: “Clare it’s unfair to publicly insult the PR officers yet you will need them more than yesterday in the course of your duties… For the sake of maintaining good relations, I think it would have been better to notify them instead of, i repeat, insulting them on this forum..it’s very disappointing.”
Things seemed to cool abit when Wilson Kaija the editor of URN stepped in with his view.
“Ritah Namisango and Hasifa Kabejja The best thing to do here (one of them) is to share links to Mak pages with profiles of the right office bearers. In the same way, Clare could share the links she talks about here (those that are not updated). Therein lies part of both the problem and the solution,” Kaija advised.
For now Muhindo has gone silent but most of Ndyabahika’s friends who are journalists seem to still be raging with anger for both sides, with some saying that it’s true that the PRO’s office is relunctant at giving information while others say that Makerere’s website is not the only source of information for workers’ profiles.
When Campus Bee, because of our high level of accuracy, checked the website, it was indeed found out that it was updated with correct names.
The Bee is still Buzzing…
You must be logged in to post a comment.