For the past months MUBS Principal Wasswa Balunywa has been a victim of ‘falsehoods’ and ‘malicious’ stories published by local tabloids, something that has rubbed the flamboyant Professor the wrong way.
And in combative mood on Wednesday, Prof Balunywa took to his Facebook page and expressed disgust at the tabloids for dragging him through the mud, in what he described as ‘three stupid articles in the newspapers’.
On May 19, 2016 The Kampala Sun, a publication of The Vision Group, ran an article ‘MUBS Balunywa in sex for money’, in which three female students allege that their lecturer, Yusuf Balunywa, (a relative to the MUBS Principal Wasswa Balunywa) seduced them to have sex with him in exchange of high grades that would enable the said girls graduate with first class degrees. According to Prof Balunywa, the title of the story was only meant to sell the publication’s copies because his name is newsworthy. And for that the Kampala Sun faced the Professor’s wrath.
“I have just been informed that they will write about you if they suspect your appointing authority has good things for you. When they write the bad things, he changes his mind. I hope he has some good things for me. Fortunately, he has a mechanism to verify this nonsense that appears in the press. The other reason is they want to discredit you and make people dislike you. I think in my case, this is possible if you are talking to people I have not worked with or related too. They do not believe this trash”, Prof Balunywa commented about the matter.
Then a month later, Hello!, a sister publication of Red Pepper published a story intimating that the MUBS principal was a scandalous person. Prof Balunywa again came out guns blazing, vowing not to sit back in a bid to ensure that his name is not associated with defamatory stories and also to have his rights as an authority respected by the media.
“I am fed up with this nonsense that demeans us among our peers, family members and right thinking members of society. For your information, the story in Hello is a lie. The truth is the PPDA in one of its annual reports cautioned us about not planning our procurements properly. This multi-billion scam talked about the figment of the imagination of the authors. I will be referring this case to the Media Council, the Ugandan Journalists Association and my lawyers to advise me on my rights,” the professor posted.
For now we can only wait and see how far the battle the Professor is waging on the media will go and whether the ‘errant’ media houses will be served with lawsuits.
