Truthful, Not Neutral: Canary Mugume and the Weight of the Story

For Mugume, that willingness has come at a real cost.

A Profession Under Pressure

Journalism in Uganda operates within one of the more difficult press environments in East Africa, and the period surrounding the country’s 2026 general election has been especially fraught. In March 2025, security forces assaulted dozens of journalists covering the Kawempe North parliamentary by-election in Kampala, confiscating camera equipment and hospitalising at least one reporter. Mugume, anchoring live from the scene for NBS Television, was among those caught in the violence. Months later, in July 2025, he was violently attacked outside his home late at night by unknown assailants who pulled him from his vehicle and struck him in the face, taking only his phone and leaving his other valuables untouched, a detail that has fuelled concern about targeted intimidation rather than ordinary robbery.

These incidents were not isolated. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights documented a wider pattern in the run-up to Uganda’s elections: a media office ransacked, journalists stripped of their accreditation to cover Parliament, and growing reports of surveillance targeting reporters and human rights defenders. Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index ranked Uganda 131st out of 180 countries, an improvement on the previous year but still classified as a “difficult” environment for press freedom, with the organisation noting that the criminalisation of journalism across the Great Lakes region continues to cast a long shadow over the profession.

Asked by The Independent magazine whether the repeated attacks had made him consider leaving journalism altogether, Mugume did not pretend otherwise. He has thought about it, he admitted, more than once. But he has stayed, in his own words, because people rely on him for the information they use to make decisions about their lives. That tension, between the personal cost of the work and its public necessity, sits at the centre of investigative journalism across much of the continent, where reporters covering politics, corruption, and accountability frequently do so without the institutional protections their counterparts elsewhere take for granted.

It is against this backdrop, not in spite of it, that Mugume’s body of work has to be understood.

The Journalist

Since 2016, Canary has anchored NBS Live At 9, NBS Television’s prime-time news bulletin and one of the most watched news programmes in Uganda. It is a role that requires more than a good voice and a steady camera presence. It requires the editorial judgment to know what matters, the discipline to get it right, and the ability to communicate complex issues to a wide and varied audience night after night.

His investigative work goes beyond the anchor desk. His 2018 investigation into human trafficking networks in Soroti District, which exposed how children as young as twelve were being sold and transported to Kampala to beg on the streets, helped spur parliamentary debate and contributed to legislation criminalising organised begging. His coverage of economic dysfunction, governance failures, and civic technology has sparked national debate on multiple occasions. These are not small outcomes. Journalism that changes laws and shifts public conversation is journalism doing exactly what it should.

In 2023, Ghana’s Avance Media named him among the 100 Most Influential Young Africans, a list that in that edition also included figures such as Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré and climate activist Vanessa Nakate. It was the second time he had appeared on the list, having first been recognised in 2022, a recurrence that reflects the sustained reach and weight of his work on the continent.

Beyond the Bulletin

Canary’s voice extends well beyond prime-time television. He hosts The Big Talk on Next Radio, a daily political talk show that brings the same sharpness he applies to his television work to the more intimate and immediate medium of radio. He also hosts Mind Your Head, a podcast dedicated to mental health conversations, built around personal stories, healing journeys, and honest dialogue about mental wellness.

The podcast is worth pausing on. For a journalist whose professional identity is built around holding power to account, and whose own body has absorbed some of the cost of that work, choosing to create a space for vulnerability and candour about mental health says something about the kind of leader Canary is becoming. He is not only interested in the systems that fail people. He is interested in what those failures cost them internally, and in building platforms where that cost can be named.

He is also a global moderator, bringing his skills in curating difficult conversations to international spaces where the same tensions between power, accountability, and public interest play out at a larger scale.

The Fellowship That Sharpened the Lens

Canary is a Young and Emerging Leaders Program Fellow of the LéO Africa Institute from the class of 2018. For someone already operating at the level he was when he joined, the value of the fellowship was not instruction. It was perspective: the kind that comes from being in a room with other young leaders across different sectors, all asking serious questions about purpose, ethics, and what it means to lead responsibly.

That conversation, for a journalist committed to public accountability, is never finished. It only deepens, particularly at a moment when the cost of that accountability is rising rather than falling.

What Stays

Canary Mugume is shaping how Ugandans understand their country, in a media environment that does not always make that work easy or safe. Through prime-time news, radio, podcasting, and investigative reporting, he remains one of the most consistent and consequential voices in the country’s media landscape. His commitment to truth over neutrality is not a slogan. It is a practice, visible in the stories he chooses, the questions he asks, and the standard he holds himself to, even when holding to that standard has carried a price.

The story, for him, is always in service of something larger. And that is precisely what makes it worth telling.

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