Namugenyi Kiwanuka

Nam Kiwanuka (external link)  ‘99 is an award-winning journalist and a host/producer at TVO.

She was the host of The Thread with Nam Kiwanuka and co-hosted The Agenda with Steve Paikin.

Kiwanuka describes herself as a public servant, focusing on local stories and amplifying stories that impact communities throughout Ontario and has volunteered with War Child, Journalists for Human Rights and the Canadian Red Cross.

She contributes columns to TVO.org and has been published in The Globe and Mail, Jane magazine, Toronto Star, Chatelaine and Reader’s Digest. Kiwanka also worked with Sportsnet, MuchMusic and has written for the BBC’s Focus on Africa as a columnist.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

What did your early days in journalism look like?

In grade 13, I moved to Toronto, and a teacher suggested that I should consider pursuing journalism. Honestly, I was like journalism? What?

I was born during a civil war, and in the country where I was born, journalists were usually seen as enemies of the state in a way. The people in my community, the ones that I knew who did journalism, were facing challenges and were fighting with the government in Uganda. It felt like a scary thing to pursue, but after he mentioned it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

When I got into *Ryerson, I remember the first day, or the first week, one of the teachers said, “Look to the person next to you, one of those people is not going to be here next year.”

And it was such a jarring introduction into journalism, but I kept that thought in my head. 

Another teacher said one of the things we need to think about is internships. From year one, I started thinking about where I could get an internship. I knew that I needed to graduate with an internship because of my student loans and all of that. I went to an event that Master T was at, and a friend of mine was like, “Just go talk to him and ask him if he's accepting any interns.” I did, and he said to me, “Call my producer on Monday.”

Come Monday, I was like, Oh, he's just blowing smoke. He just wanted me to stop talking to him, so I didn't call the producer. Then, a few weeks passed, our teachers were like, “You need to get an internship.” So, I called, and she (the producer) was like, “Oh, I was actually expecting you to call me a few weeks ago, but unfortunately, we filled the intern position.”

That was my first introduction to even when you don't believe in yourself, you gotta figure out how to just get things done.

After that, I was invested in getting into that building. I think the reason why I wanted to get into CHUM was that on City News, the anchors looked like Toronto. After that, I would send her a package in the mail. Eventually, she said sure, and I don't know if she said it because she liked the work I was sending in, or was tired of me calling her.

Once I got into Much Music, I was determined to make my mark in any way that I could and build from there.

 

Is there anything specific you would like people to understand about journalists?

There are a lot of people going through hard times. I'll use the example of a few years ago, this person kept tagging me [on X, known as Twitter at the time]. The things that he was talking about, I was like, I have nothing to do with that. I'm not the government, I'm a journalist.

I don't decide on the stories. If there's a headline on an article that I've written, I didn't write that headline; the editor did. 

So this person was tagging me, tagging me, tagging me. I was getting very frustrated because it felt like he was trolling me, and it wasn't just me. He was going after the other people that I work with, and he said, I think he used the word elite. That was a trigger because I've been on my own since I was 16. I was born in a civil war. In my mind, I was like, “Elite? What are you talking about?”

I thought and thought about it, and then I said, he is right because journalists have better access to politicians. The things that he was upset about had to do with how certain things were being run.

I am an elite because I have access. I can speak to these politicians. I can write columns. Most people don't have that access, and most people don't have those platforms.

We (journalists) have to also try to figure out why there's a lack of trust, why people don't trust our industry. It has gone up a little bit in the last year or two, but there's still a distrust of our industry.

Journalism is an essential public good. We see what's happening in the world right now. We see how dissenting voices are being shut down. This is an opportunity that calls for us to show up and do our job, which is to hold power to account.

 

What stories have stuck with you throughout your career?

We did a story on international students (external link)  last year, and the way it was presented was the first that I've seen anyone do in Canada. I pitched the idea to do an episode on students and how everything is hard for students. Housing is expensive, and jobs are hard to get.

The story that I pitched was to look at students, both domestic and international students, and then we had many conversations with The Thread team. Even though it aired last year, we started working on it in 2023. Initially, we were just talking about international students, because there was a backlash. There are too many students. Housing is becoming more expensive because of these students. They're taking away the jobs. Everything negative was being blamed on students instead of government policies.

We started having one interview after another. Each conversation that we had created an opportunity for all of us to learn something and to challenge our own biases.

For example, we spoke to a young woman who told us that [she] came here to get a better life. 

She's like, “If I come to Canada and I'm going to school, I'm trying to get a job, I'm doing everything that I was told that I should do to get a better life, but my employer withheld my pay.” Then that story led into another story of students living in a garage, in really horrible situations. You have people living in this province, living in a garage and using a bucket as a bathroom.

Then that story led us to a funeral home where the funeral director is telling us that, on average, they have to send back four to five bodies back to India of international students who live in this country who die by suicide because it is so hard for them to make ends meet that they end up taking their own lives.

He was talking about having to call the parents. He was telling me about a parent, an older father, who was in his 80s. The funeral director had to tell him that his beautiful child of 19/20, years old, had died in a foreign country.

That story led to another organization that works in different humanitarian zones around the world, but they decided to start working in Ontario to create a food bank, because international students, when they went to other food banks, were being turned away. So it was all of these little different threads that were challenging our worldview and our own biases, but it was expanding the conversation.

It's an episode that will stay with me for a very long time. As a journalist working in this industry, people look at me and they make a lot of assumptions about who I am, what I am, and coming from different backgrounds, I try to fill in the gap of stories that people care about, and those stories may not have [been] covered more.

What advice do you have for journalists who want to bring their worldview into their stories and go beyond the normal news coverage?

Read a lot and talk to people you might not normally. Be curious about people.

I try to be open to people. People will reach out to me, and I'll repost someone with five followers, but they're talking about a thing happening in their community, and I'll amplify it.

And then that person will see I’m interested in that, because I am interested in that. This is our job. We want to be able to tell these stories, hold power to account and serve the people.

I see journalism as a public good, and I see it as being in service of something I'm trying to help. I'm trying to make the world a better place. I'm also trying to give back to Canada for everything that it's given me as a former refugee. That's why I try to center people's voices because I think it's important. It's an important element of journalism.

Grads at Work is a series of profiles of alums. If you know of a notable grad you’d like to see featured, send us an email at office.journalism@torontomu.ca.

*The name of the university has since been changed. You can read more about the philosophy behind this name change at Toronto Metropolitan University's Next Chapter.