KAMPALA – Nation Media Group (NMG) broadcasters NTV Uganda and Spark TV were taken off air early Sunday morning during a military raid ordered by Chief of Defence Forces Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!The coordinated military siege, which began shortly after midnight, targeted NMG’s headquarters in Namuwongo and its broadcast center at the Kampala Serena Hotel.
By dawn, NTV Uganda and Spark TV had been reduced to blank screens flashing “video unavailable,” while 93.3 KFM and 90.4 Dembe FM fell silent under the military operation.
Meanwhile, at other NMG outlets including the Daily Monitor and The East African, staff were locked out and sealed in, bringing the flagship publications to a grinding halt.
The dramatic escalation followed a series of incendiary posts on X (formerly Twitter) by Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is also the son of President Yoweri Museveni.
In a post at 1:07 AM, Gen. Muhoozi declared: “NTV and Monitor are being shut down from today!” He followed this with a stark warning that the outlets “will not re-open without my permission.” In an earlier post, he declared his stance on media freedom: “In Uganda, I DO NOT believe in a free press! The press should be guided by cadres of the revolution.”
Opposition leader Bobi Wine condemned the raid as a bid by Gen. Muhoozi, with his father’s backing, to silence Uganda’s remaining independent voices and proof of creeping authoritarianism.
The crackdown is the latest in a pattern of state hostility toward Nation Media Group, which has weathered similar attacks before, in May 2013.
Police raided the Daily Monitor and Dembe FM over a letter concerning the Muhoozi Project, locking down the offices for over a week, while NTV had been temporarily silenced just months into its inaugural 2007 broadcast.
At the time of this publication, neither the Uganda People’s Defence Forces, the Uganda Police Force, nor the Uganda Communications Commission had issued a formal statement or legal order to justify the deployment.
Nation Media Group (NMG) Uganda, which employs more than 500 people in the country, had also not released an official response by the time of publication.
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