After the elections in early 2011, Museveni was sworn into office in April the same year. Immediately after the elections, a great part of the opposition disputed the results.

The economic situation at the time, manifested in inflation and a general rise in the cost of living saw some members in the opposition take to the streets in what was known as Walk to Work, spearheaded by The Activists for Change.

It has also been the year in which the dealings in the young oil sector have come under question from Parliament, triggering what has come to be known as the oil debate.

The 9th Parliament has also been very vocal and pro-active on fighting corruption, and several of Museveni’s Ministers have come under question. In fact, some have been made to resign, while others have stepped aside to pave way for investigations into allegations of corruption.

It’s been a year punctuated with relentless civil disobedience and increasing police action on protesters.

This edition puts all these events that have happened over the last one year of the fourth NRM elected government in perspective.

Likewise fresh news is like food for thought to the hungry. A hungry person like a hungry reader and listener want fresh food and not stale cabbages and beans.

Good stories will always be treated and appreciated as good stories as long as they sound new to our ears. One such story this week was the striking shift from the old story about the challenges facing Butabika hospital to the lice that have curved a battlefield in the lives of the already battered mentally ill persons. I surely enjoyed this story.

I have been reflecting on the many stories that appear to be regurgitating on the site with no fresh perspectives. “Tea farmers stuck with tea in Kabale”, “ so and so arrested, charged, jailed for defilement” , “Garbage protests in Lira”, and “Parents not packing lunch for their children”, the list is endless.,

When I think about all these stories, fresh perspective is what comes to mind.

Yes these are the ever occurring waves of stories in our communities, but remember that like the waves in the sea, each phase of wave comes with its own strength, destruction, calmness and sometimes we don’t notice at all, that a wave passed.

If you have no new developments since you last wrote the story, find a way of turning around the intro to make sound fresh and new. We can breathe fresh breath in old stories, revive the old dying stories and resuscitate the fainting ones.

How do we do that?, I hear someone ask

Well all it takes is craftsmanship, creative use of the information and technique.

Craftsmanship: obviously no one would like to buy the same design of a pair of shoe; likewise no one would love to listen to the same news hook. A journalist like a craftsman needs to add a fresh perspective call it design to the story. For example how would a craftsman flesh out a new design for the tea farmer’s story in Kabale.

They were stuck with tea in 2010; the story is still the same in 2012. Does that tell us something yes. The story can be moved a step, how are our tea exports doing? Give the story a tweak and add some fresh perspective.“ because Uganda’s tea exports have declined, many farmers in Kabale are stuck with the produce”.

Give the reader an eclectic mix; 200 pupils miss school because farmers can’t sell tea…amazing, its all refreshing and you can see the relationship between tea production and education opportunities.

Just like a craftsman, plays around with various designs, so should we as writers play around with various hooks to find one the fits and attracts the audiences.

Creative use of information: Many of us still suffer from information overload. And all we need to do is internalize and comprehend all the materials gathered before we can put our fingers to the key board. I am told that headmasters are finding ways of compelling parents to pack food for their children. This surely is old stale food to some ears.
A journalist would then realize that parents still can’t afford to pack lunches for there children. Why? Perhaps because the price of goods and high cost of living. What next. Visit a home, and find out how much money they are spending on food. What hurdles are they faced with putting food on the table, let alone packing food for their children?

Technique: technique in this sense refers to the ability to get fresh info by testing it out on the audiences. Seek opinions from people and find out what they think about whether parents should or should not pack lunches?

Find another hook that could perhaps teach parents why packed lunch is important to the children. Find a nutritionist and file a story on the advantages of packing lunch and effects of no lunch to the learning.

Instead of listening to a headmaster lament about parents failing to pack lunch, why not visit a school and find out what is in the lunch boxes. Are they empty? Do some have food? What type of food? What does the type of food tell you about the parents?

Technique is that tweak you apply to tune the story so it sounds fresh and new.

Remember a good memorable story is always one that sounds new to the listener and reader.

Six years ago, I heard that “Journalists at URN were the cream of the cream”, this phrase has continued to resonate in my ears. Who would have not loved this tag anyway?

I have worked with URN because I am part of the cream, -thick, attractive, delicious and stand above the rest. It was never a matter of choice but we were up there.
I remember my first days at the URN news room in Sedler Lane with all its calmness, serenity, the cream team.

I remember the editorial meetings where crap or garbs were never closer to the cream. The first Editor to make an impression on me was Sis Rachel, a no nonsense and committed who contributed to my skills. Such was the team that on a day we wanted the cream, we would form a rig to make sure no adulterated missives crawl through the cream.

The team soared above to shed off that light unattractive part and slowly curve into the cream. There was passion and compassion for the cream and we went just for that. The likes of TM, “ we must discomfort the comforted” he always said, the towering CO, towering with the high towered stories, DR, the Bazoouka rising from one of the areas that has good relations with the Congo.

My memories reflect back on the three girls Rosebell Kagumire, snaking through the Health beat and always fleshing out fresh perspectives. Lynn Musitwa, mastering the council, always on her feet to do what she likes and off course Christine Nabunya, a time keeper who would afford a smile amid criticism. The team worked hard to keep and not sink the cream.

Yes it is true I am describing an innocent pure faith I have harbored in URN for the last six years.I am no longer a child and my relationship to the cream is much more complicated. I have gone through periods when I have found myself at a distance from the cream for one reason or another, but because I yearn for that taste and smell, I have always returned to it, it has been my professional home.
My relationship with the cream has withstood many disagreements, professional arguments and disappointments. Never before however, has the cream come under threat with the advancement of technologies, social networks and an emerging citizenry journalism. As a news agency, to get the cream required as my Brother Sam loved to say “ Being the first on the scene and being the last on the scene”.

In recent weeks I have seen my brother scream, and I guess when he is driving he just screeches at how horrible some stories have instead of adding a flavour to make thick cream, have instead added drops of sloppiness to dilute the cream. I saw my towering brother scream the other day and I must say. I am having a very hard time wrapping my head around that.
How can I continue to find professional sustenance on the cream that I care about? In the last couple of days I have had conversations with myself, a monologue if you like and shared with my ego the pain in the face of a cream under threat. It is hard to listen to my ego tell me that some of the works that would contribute to a thick cream are just crap.
I am grateful to the big brother eyes that continue to pry over the cream screaming and screeching as the years sail. My faith formation has been within the professional home. So although I am away and angry, I yearn for the smell of the cream, that stood thick and was an attraction to the hungry consumers.
To my professional friends, remember each day is different, the advances in how we look for the cream and the challenges are ever evolving, but there is never a dull moment unless you allow one to creep through.

But he had never taken time to spend three days with a patrol mission, to understand the details of how these missions are carried out, what kind of incidents the patrols respond to or what kind of challenges the officers face.

So in this second and last edition of our series on police patrols, Malaba brings us his experience of spending three days working with a group of police patrollers.

He trails the patrollers as they interact with the community on a sensitization trip.

His second day was highlighted by spending some time in the police control room at Central Police Station, Kampala, where all emergency calls are received and responded to.

But the most interesting part is that he actually became witness to police patrol action as they respond to a road accident in Kireka, just outside of Kampala.

In the three days, Malaba also gets to share in the challenges that such missions face. Some of the challenges apply to the work of the police, not only in Kampala, but across the country.

Have a good listen.

But let’s step away from the numbers-in-the-book, because April 25th was a day of strange news. I was lost in reading and tweeting about malaria figures. I was reading about reduced deaths and the uncertainty of prevention and treatment projects due to the slump in donor economies, when this and this came in.

That people were using mosquito nets to catch edible ants wasn’t the strangest mosquito net misuse story i had read. Years ago, there were reports of people turning these bed nets into wedding gowns, and even fish nets. But according to this article from February 2012 that too is not a story of years ago.

Besides such practices harming the fishing industry and bringing more would-have-been mosquito net users to the hospital wards, those practices may not necessarily make you wish that you don’t get a patient (or be the patient) that needs a blood transfusion one of these days. Imagine. Your trusted doctor, running across the street to buy a 300ml bottle of Mirinda Fruity to transfuse into your blood stream. The case in which this happened may not necessarily have been malaria. But it could also have been, considering the illness figures.

So i ask myself, what is the link between mosquito nets, white ants and soda? A poor health system. A health system that has been branded sick time and time again.

It is a health system in which even attempts to window-dress and cover the shameful inside, always fall short. Even in cases where a facility or two are in place, many times they become white elephants. Because the planning thread in our public service system, the one that should link equipment to electricity and air-conditioning for proper functionality, seems to have been gnawed at by rodents.

We have a Medical and Dental Practitioners Council, which licenses private clinics and other facilities, but is too thin on the ground to ever cover the country with a watchful eye. As such, a quack doctor flees the wrath of a family mourning a relative for a transfusion gone bad, and opens a new clinic in the next district.

You want to be hopeful sometimes, and imagine that if the regional blood bank had been adequately stocked, perhaps said doctor would have done the right thing. A quick internet search on blood shortages gives you a hit on almost every referral hospital.

When we hear the mosquito net misuse stories, we laugh, at the residents of Oyam, or Bugiri. Because the uncomfortable truth, when it is happening miles away from you, gives you a distance comfortable enough to laugh. But we should be laughing at ourselves.

One will argue that the mosquito net gospel has been preached, complete with radio adverts accompanied by a scary-sounding drum-roll and mosquito characters. So why don’t those people in Oyam get it? In Ugandan speak; why don’t they just stop being ‘villagers’? The question should be, whether the people that claim to run this health system have, instead of laughing, tried to find out why the message doesn’t sink in.

The question should be why the Medical Council and the National Drug Authority are not empowered enough to do continuous checks on the medical practitioners. Even in cases where checks are done, the phrase “You are guilty until proven rich”, most times comes into play.

Recently, a friend wondered why public departments are always crying about being understaffed, when we have very high unemployment levels. There are many sides to this story, but one of them is systems failure. So the other question should be, with the high number of medical sciences graduates, why we never have enough gate-keepers in the profession.

Sometimes when the questions have been asked, they have been met with evasive answers. Sometimes these questions are not asked; and we join the laughing lot. But we shouldn’t stop asking; we can’t afford to, it would be disastrous.

How do patrols happen? How should they be carried out? As a member of the community, what should you expect of a group of patrollers? And what do they expect of  you? This edition tries to shed light on these and other issues.

Do patrols have any impact on crime prevention in our communities? And what do people think of them? We take a tour with a group of patrollers, as they interact with members of the community.

Tune in to hear how the patrol operations have evolved over the years, from officers on foot to patrol cars and other sophisticated mechanisms.

Check here for details on stations and broadcast times.