The Lies That Bind

The recent revelations about the role played by British spin doctors, Cambridge Analytica, in Uhuru Kenyatta’s campaigns during the last two elections in Kenya have caused a bit of an uproar. Though long rumored -and hotly denied by Jubilee Party mandarins – the confirmation delivered via hidden camera was jarring not only for the extent of their involvement, but also for their underhand methods.

However, the fuss around Cambridge Analytica has tended to obscure the fact that, even without their involvement, spin and deception have been made into a way of conducting the nation’s business.

Take, for example, the recent online proclamations by the ever publicity-seeking Kenya Film Classification Board that it had bagged a global award, the grandly named Arch of Europe. According to the citation, the award was in recognition of the KFCB’s “immeasurable contribution to the business world” and its “high outstanding professionalism demonstrated by prestigious performance”. Sounds good, eh?

However, a little digging turns up some unsavory facts that the Board’s CEO, Dr. Ezekiel Mutua, would rather you didn’t notice. The organization issuing the award, the Madrid-based Business Initiatives Directions, along with six other organizations, had been investigated in 2014 by the Center for Investigative Reporting of Serbia (CINS) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and their awards found to be, in many cases “bogus, sold by unscrupulous organizations that prey on human vanity”.

The investigation found that “giving” awards had become a lucrative enterprise. “The organizations that provide these awards are nearly always based in European Union countries and mostly market their awards to developing countries”. And the clue is in the word “market”. As the report states, while the organisations claim to do their research to find the best awardees “in reality in most cases they send out hundreds of email invitations and some even allow applicants to nominate themselves on organization websites. Anyone who replies, shows interest and agrees to pay gets an award.”

Basically, KFCB may have simply bought itself an award and then taken to Twitter to parade it as a marker of excellence. And in case you were wondering, the CINS/OCCRP report found that such awards do not come cheap. “In Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, around 50 public institutions received these awards. Some paid for multiple awards at prices that ranged from € 2,000 to more than € 7,000 (US$ 2,500-9,300) per prize.” That means close to a million of your tax shillings may have been expended in assuaging the egos of the folks at KFCB.

Lest one thinks that this is a unique case, a public statement has just been released by the Hamburg Media School, makers of the Oscar-nominated Kenyan film, Watu Wote, which apparently gives the lie to the KFCB’s and Dr. Mutua’s assertions that the latter attended the 90th Oscars Academy Awards ceremony in the US earlier this month. “Dr. Mutua was not in attendance at the ceremony and did not participate in the Oscars with us. He never received an invitation,” says the statement, which was posted on the film’s Twitter account. It also says that a KFCB-sponsored screening of the movie in Las Vegas, again trumpeted by the Board as highlighting “opportunities available for investments in the film industry in Kenya”, was actually done in violation of the school’s copyright and without their permission.

Perhaps Dr. Mutua has picked up this habit from his boss. As the saying goes, the fish rots from the head. Many will recall the "Mandela Prize" that President Kenyatta was awarded last December for apparently demonstrating a true spirit of democracy when he accepted the Supreme Court to annul the August 8 election. “To put it simply, ‘the Mandela Prize’ is bogus,” concluded a 2016 investigation by the Moroccan news website, Le Desk, after Mohammed VI, King of Morocco, “won” it that year. It is not to be confused with the legit UN Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela Prize, which awarded once every five years as a tribute to the outstanding achievements and contributions of two individuals from each gender.

Kenyatta’s “Prize” also came from a fishy outfit, the Paris-based Mandela Institute, which, despite its name, has nothing to do with the late Nelson Mandela other than the claim that its Honorary President, Olivier Stirn, was his friend. Stirn himself has a chequered past, having been forced to resign in disgrace from the French cabinet in 1990 after he was caught hiring unemployed actors, students and day laborers to pose as an audience for senior Socialist Party speakers at a sparsely attended conference.

More recently, during the President’s state visit to Cuba, his spin doctors announced that the Cuban government had honoured his late father, Jomo Kenyatta, “as a towering figure in African and Caribbean liberation movement” by placing his bust at the Park of African Heroes in Havana. However, what they did not mention was that, as Dr Wandia Njoya has pointed out on Twitter, the plaque on the bust doesn't mention fighting for freedom and, perhaps more importantly, that the busts there are sometimes donated by African governments themselves. Crucially, there was no mention of who was paying for this particular bust.

So as we express our outrage at Cambridge Analytica’s corruption of our democracy, we must not deceive ourselves that what they were doing is somehow different from the everyday actions of our public officials. From fake wars against corruption, to our invented ethnicities to the farcical Head of State commendations, Kenya is a state that was built on, and that is largely sustained by, lies and deceptions.

Ezekiel Mutua And Kenya's Language Of Silence

Ezekiel Mutua is at it again. The head of the Kenya Film Classification Board has developed a fondness for showing off the perks that come with his job. In April, he took to social media to boast about using an airport’s VIP lounge and flying business class.

This week, he posted pictures of his diplomatic passport (which, to the schadenfreudic glee of many tweeps, an embarrassed government has since ordered to him to surrender) on his Facebook account to brag that he had received a visa to visit the United States despite his bigoted and illegal crusade against “content promoting LGBT and Atheists culture in Kenya”. "I didn't even have to go to the Embassy for biometrics or pay the visa application fee. It was delivered to my office free of charge," he averred.

Mutua’s immaturity predictably drew a large number of mocking responses which only spurred him on to new lows, petulantly sending insulting direct message calling one “an idiot” and a “bloody fool”. But however disgraceful we might think his antics to be, we should be careful not to be distracted by them. 

It would be a deadly mistake to focus on the theatrics and ignore the real danger. For that lies, not in his braggadocio, but in the silence that has greeted his distorting the law and the constitution in an attempt to impose his views and beliefs on the rest of Kenya. 

Mutua has used the KFCB, which was set up to regulate “the making and exhibition of cinematograph films, for the licensing of stage plays, theatres and cinemas” in ways not contemplated in legislation. He has attempted to police parties, the internet, TV ads and even claimed the power to regulate the content of political shows. Though there is no law criminalizing homosexuality, he purports to declare it illegal and to ban internet videos that celebrate love between same sex couples. He has claimed that atheism is similarly unconstitutional despite the clear constitutional prohibition on establishing a state religion.

Yet few of these outrages have elicited much discussion outside social media. Much of Kenyan media seems to be blissfully unaware or even worse, dismissive, of the threat he poses especially as we head into the election season. If nothing else, one would expect that the idea of a government official prescribing the limits of political speech would have both journalists and opposition politicians up in arms. But it has elicited little more than whimpers and an empty threat to sue from media owners, which Mutua has laughed off.

This silence mirrors a wider quiet, a tendency to focus less on the substantial and more on the superficial. Last week, as the country marked the third anniversary of the horrific attack on the Westgate mall, I noted that official accounts of terror incidents were mostly designed to cover up the incompetence and culpability of senior officials and officers rather than reveal the truth. But the really alarming fact is that the government’s obviously flawed tales do not elicit much commentary or questioning from either the press, civil society or the opposition.

But just as the silence over the mistakes and criminality at Westgate allowed them to be repeated at Mpeketoni, Garissa, Mandera and El Adde, so the silence over Mutua's overreaching only serves to embolden him and spur him on to further violations. Like the proverbial frog slowly boiled alive, we are all imperiled by the failure to raise the alarm over his menacing of citizens and the government attempt to control the lives and opinions of citizens. 

Kenyan novelist, Yvonne Owuor, has described silence as one of our languages, which "plays out in the hasty attempt of the powerful to shut down independent voices that cannot be controlled." From the harassment of bloggers, to the firing of free-minded journalists, editors and cartoonists, this "shutting down" has been particularly evident in Kenya media. But it is not only happening there. Today Mutua is illegally transforming the KFCB into a tool to bludgeon vulnerable minorities -and political dissidents- into silence.

It is a truism worth repeating that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Whether it is about security and terrorism or the diminution of citizens’ rights to free speech and conscience, this silence leaves us all vulnerable. Freedom from predation by terrorists or even by a narcissistic and insecure public official, will only come when we loudly and consistently demand it.

Ezekiel Mutua, Bloggers And The Dangers Of GoK's Single Story

Ezekiel Mutua undoubtedly has a knack for self-promotion. When I first met him as Secretary General of the Kenya Union of Journalists more than a decade ago, I could tell he was a man of no small ambition. Today, as head of the Kenya Film Classification Board, he has found a way to insert the previously obscure regulator into the limelight.

However, the way he has gone about it in complete disregard of what the law says about his organization’s mandate. The laws he claims give the KFCB powers to police what Kenya’s media broadcasters carry between 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. (the so-called “watershed”) actually do nothing of the sort.

And this is not the first time the Kenyan Government has tried to use the organisation as a de-facto media regulator. In 2001, the then Minister of Information, Transport and Communications and now opposition luminary, Mr Musalia Mudavadi, published a notice in the Kenya Gazette which purported to place the media under the ambit of the KFCB, then more honestly known as the Kenya Film Censorship Board. This occasioned a six-year court battle with the Nation Media group which ended in a High Court judgement quashing the notice and describing it - and thus Mr Mutua’s current near identical power grab – as “not necessary or justifiable in a democratic society such as Kenya”.

Unfortunately for Kenya, Mr Mutua is more the rule rather than the exception when it comes to the Uhuru Kenyatta administration’s attitude towards the law. He is basically following a script that has been perfected by the Kenyan state which routinely exercises powers it does not have, ignores what the courts have to say when it deems it inconvenient, and appears to consider the constitution more as a set of guidelines rather than actual rules.

This attitude has been on display in the state’s reaction to the death of dozens of Kenyan soldiers in El Adde, Somalia when Al Shabaab militants overran their base two weeks ago. Under the guise of defending the national interest and stopping Al Shabaab propaganda, the government issued a warning against republishing or even retweeting gory images of dead soldiers which the terror group has uploaded online. This appears to have now mutated into a blanket ban on publishing any imagery (except its own) of the aftermath of the battle.

Pursuant to this, several people, including journalists and bloggers, have been arrested for questioning reportedly over images they shared via online platforms. The most prominent of these was Yassin Juma who spent the last weekend in a cell after being arrested for posting images of burning KDF vehicles, and Eddy Reuben Illah who has been arraigned in court for allegedly sharing pictures of dead soldiers with members of a WhatsApp group.

But is doing this actually illegal? Initially, media reports about the government’s warning cited the Penal Code Section 66A which appears to justify the government’s actions.  In fact, a widely circulated charge sheet indicated that Mr Illah would be charged under that law. What the media failed to highlight was that the section was part of the controversial Security Laws Amendment Act and had been struck off as unconstitutional by the courts.

In any event, Mr Illah was actually prosecuted for contravening Section 29 of the Kenya Information and Communications Act, a Nyayo-era law that criminalizes using “a licensed telecommunication system” to either send offensive, indecent, obscene and menacing messages; or to annoy, inconvenience and cause “needless anxiety” by means of a false message.

Needless to say, none of these terms are actually defined in the law, giving wide leeway for abuse by the authorities. Even more importantly, the courts, in their ruling throwing out the previously mentioned Section 66A of the Penal Code, already comprehensively dealt with the issue of images of terror attacks.

In court, the Attorney General had justified the introduction of the amendment by arguing that “freedom of expression has been abused by the media in publishing pictures of fatally injured people and of security operations, to the advantage of the publicity sought by terrorists.” However, in rejecting this the court declared:

“This new offence under the Penal Code that seeks to punish 'insulting, threatening, or inciting material or images of dead or injured persons which are likely to cause fear and alarm to the general public or disturb public peace' thus limits the freedom of expression to a level that the Constitution did not contemplate or permit, and in a manner that is so vague and imprecise that the citizen is likely to be in doubt as to what is prohibited.”

The parallels with the aforementioned KICA Section 29 are hard to ignore. Essentially, the government is doing an Ezekiel Mutua, claiming to exercise powers it does not have and ignoring court rulings that say it does not have them. Now, none of this is to say that publishing images of dead KDF soldier is a good idea. However, the government claims it is illegal, which it clearly isn’t and is using the law to intimidate those who present a different narrative from the one it is propagating.

An even more sinister reason is to be found in the words of one of the bloggers hauled in for questioning by the police. Cyprian Nyakundi, who spent two days in police custody before being freed on intervention of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecution, said he was questioned on “the whereabouts of other wanted bloggers and why he was critical of government at large.”

Thus this is a thinly veiled attempt, not to preserve national security, but to stamp out dissent. It fits into a pattern of media intimidation which has seen journalists who did not toe the government line fired from mainstream newspapers reportedly at the behest of State House. That campaign has now reached the shores of Kenya’s vibrant social media scene.

Like Mr Mutua, the Uhuru government has nowadays developed a knack and taste for self-aggrandizement. But we should all be very concerned when it is willing to subvert the law to ensure that its story is the only one that can be told.