This month, instead of our usual market note, we want to point you towards someone else’s writing.
Between 28 June and 28 July 2026, Nation Media Group, one of East Africa’s largest independent media houses, was forced off air in Uganda for a month. It has since resumed operations. Writing in the Nile Post, and republished by AllAfrica, Robert Kigongo uses that month to ask a deceptively simple question: when the voice of the voiceless is silenced, who loses?
His answer is that everyone does. He begins with a single story a broadcaster once carried, about a widow evicted from her land, and traces what followed from it being told at all. From there he widens out to government, to business and to ordinary citizens, and to the growing physical risks journalists face in doing the job.
We would not claim to be the right people to make the press freedom argument. Kigongo is, and he makes it well. What we can add is the commercial reading, because a month off air is not only an editorial event. It is lost airtime revenue, broken advertiser commitments, idle production capacity, disrupted carriage deals, and a risk premium that every investor looking at the market quietly repriced. Regulatory unpredictability is a market fact before it is anything else, and it shows up in valuations long after the signal comes back.
It also picks up a thread running through our recent notes. In June we looked at Zimbabwe, where six new licences produced more channels without producing many more genuinely independent decision makers, and where the one clearly independent applicant ended up streaming online rather than broadcasting. Uganda in July shows the other end of the same problem: what happens when a strong independent broadcaster does exist, and is switched off. In both cases the audience does not disappear. It moves, usually to a phone, and the terrestrial business case moves with it.
It is a short read and worth your time. If you are weighing what regulatory risk means for your channel, platform or distribution strategy in East Africa, get in touch.