Broken News

Every newsman worthy of the name desires a scoop. A chance to break the news or catch public officials with their hands in the till. It is why they swarm at the sniff of scandal. It is a chance to make one's name and fortune while providing a public service. So why is Kenyan media not swarming to Garissa?

To be sure, there is more than a hint of scandal there. Following a spate of terror attacks, the government sent in a a high level fact finding mission led by Internal Security permanent secretary Mutea Iringo. What it uncovered was scandalous in itself: a powerful network of business and government officials facilitating an illegal trade in imported and tax-evading goods from Somalia, a trade which was funnelling money to the coffers of the al Shabaab terror group, allowing it to sustain fighters as well as purchase arms and explosives, some of which are used in attacks in Kenya. According to the Daily Nation, while initially the attacks in Garissa were in reaction to Kenya Defence Forces entry into Somalia, the most attacks, including the one at Kwa Chege food parlour which killed 10 people, have been masterminded by local businessmen with the aim of pushing out their competitors. According to one unnamed official, "Almost the entire government team is rotten."

All this is should undoubtedly have investigative journalists smacking their lips and editors dreaming up headlines. And it doesn't stop there. The Iringo mission then proposes an 11-point action plan directed at the police chiefs in the area which included carrying out a massive security operation. This operation is to be run by the same "rotten" government team (the police chief, for example, was not replaced until a week into it and, as the unnamed official quoted above went on to say, Garissa area would be left without an administration in place if radical action was to be taken at a go).

Nonetheless, our ever-vigilant media quickly dubs the operation "an anti-terror crackdown." No questions are asked when not a single individual of the nearly 600 people arrested  is charged with any links to the attacks. When the Daily Nation reports on the arrest of six men described as “high value” suspects, one of them said to be a coordinator of Al-Shabaab activities in the town and the rest his key link-men, but none of them are arraigned in court. When it turns out that the real suspects are actually those running the operation and their friends in the business community. When it is clear that the operation seems to indiscriminately target ethnic Somalis and that none of the businessmen and government officials actually suspected of links to the terror acts are arrested.

Following the failure to catch anyone of note, the media is not even remotely curious when the government then declares that the criminals it seeks have fled to other areas necessitating widening the scope of the operation.

David Kimaiyo, the Inspector General of Police, has said all officers involved would be dismissed and charged in court once investigations are completed. “I’ve sent senior investigators and they are already in Garissa. Once they are through they will provide a list and make recommendations on who should go home but of course with evidence." None of our journalists asks why he would need evidence to arrest police officers but none to arrest citizens.

So how does one explain the silence in the press about all this? Why has it not been on the front pages of every newspaper? The media obviously know what is happening. Are they deliberately downplaying the abuse of citizen's rights and citizens' intelligence because it involves people they do not consider to be real or, in the words of Louis Otieno, "indigenous Kenyans"? Or are they so in thrall of our "awesome" President, as Larry Madowo described him, that they are unable to see the wood for trees?

Or is it, perhaps, that our media, and especially our electronic media, no longer employs newsmen, just entertainers? Perhaps we are the ones who should ask questions when Citizen TV advertises for a news anchor and insists on a photograph of the applicant. When TV news becomes a space where beauty trumps brains and where we are fed on a diet of advertising and entertainment rather than real news. How will we be  able to keep the government in check if we do not know what it is doing? Or has somebody decided that there is no need for the government to be kept in check?

Coming Home To Roost

Earlier this week, I was invited to participate in a discussion on the media coverage of the recent election. It was quite an interesting and informative engagement with opinion seemingly split broadly into two groups: those like me who think the press was induced into a "peace coma," and ignored fundamental and widespread problems witnessed during the poll; and others who, though admitting that the reporting may not have scaled the heights of journalistic achievement, believed that the call for peace and cautious stance contributed to a remarkably peaceful and violence-free election.

Whilst we were debating all this, the Uhuru government launched its security operation in Garissa. In less than a week, two people were dead, hundreds had been arrested and many more had fled the town in terror of an operation the Daily Nation calls "an anti-terror crackdown". Those nabbed included at least 7 recently elected county representatives. 80 people were arraigned in court but none for any links to the recent spate of attacks in the city, the justification for the operation. In fact 75 of those were in court for the apparently horrendous crime of not applying for an ID. Meaning they were Kenyan citizens. Meaning the police knew that they were Kenyan citizens.

The more one looks into it, the more it seems that the operation is targeting ordinary citizens, specifically ethnic Somalis, and inspiring the very terror it is meant to quash. It looks like collective punishment. So why isn't the media replete with howls of indignation and outrage? Why, despite being offered multiple opportunities to question the President this week, not a single journalist raise the issue?

Heard about the rape epidemic in the poorer areas of Nairobi? The violence visited daily on the poor? No one asked President Kenyatta about that either.

And, to be fair, it is not only the media. Where is our civil society? Where are the voices of our eloquent defenders of human rights and constitutional limits on the arbitrary exercise of power? They are also conspicuous by their absence.

I think we are seeing the consequences of trends that we encouraged or ignored during the last election cycle. When we kept quiet about the denigration and delegitimizing of civil society by their traditional enemies, the political class. When we ignored the lobotomising of the news and encouraged our journalists to be performers and entertainers rather than newsmen. When we allowed them to privilege the voices of the rich and powerful, and their narratives of economic development, and refused to hear those of the poor and displaced. When we turned a blind eye to malfeasance in the name of peace and accepted the wisdom that the only alternative to a poorly run election is chaos, not a better run one. When we shouted from the rooftops about a new constitution and devolved government but only whispered about the Bill of Rights. When we pooh-poohed justice and celebrated mediocrity.

Today, it is citizens in places like Garissa and the slums of Nairobi who are paying the price. There's perhaps a false comfort in the idea that it doesn't really matter because we had already, through years of abuse and neglect, relegated them to second class citizens existing on the margins of society. This, we think, could not happen to us, in our stone houses with three square meals, an internet connection and a car outside.

Well, what's to stop it? Remember it was a coalition of media and civil society (including churches) that forced reform on the government. Today, all these are facing a crisis of confidence and legitimacy.

Institutions do not only exist in government. And, in fact, it is those institutions outside the government -primarily the the press and organised civil society- that are the most important check on government excess. When we allow them to be hollowed out and undermined, we all ultimately suffer the consequences.

We must beware when what passes for news is a regurgitation of government propaganda. We should be afraid when we let the government dictate the agenda and when our journalists are more interested in the President's wardrobe than they are in his closet. That, my friends, is not the path to peace.

Shut Down and Shut Up

The search for a teenage terror suspect -accused, along with his brother, of bombing the Boston Marathon two days ago, killing 3 people and injuring nearly 150 more- yesterday shut down the entire city. Think about that. 650,000 people living in the birthplace of the American Revolution, which gave the world its most constitutionally shackled government, have been terrorized into staying at home by the hunt for a 19-year old student.

Closer to home, the Uhuru government has finally broken its two day silence on the terror attacks in Garissa which killed 10. It was a tragedy which President Uhuru Kenyatta felt did not merit a mention in any of the speeches he has given since, let alone a special media address or visit to the town ala his counterpart in the White House. 

Now he has apparently released a statement expressing "his concern over the continued killing of civilians and security personnel" and ordering security chiefs to head to Garissa on Saturday. I am not expecting to hear of a lock down there. Given the history of government action in that part of Kenya, it would probably create more fear than the original attack. 

But a lock down of sorts has already been underway across most of the country for some time. It is not a physical one though, which is easier to identify. One can see the pictures of empty freeways and train stations in Boston and immediately know that something is amiss. 

Not here. It is, however, not dissimilar to what is happening in Boston. A deep-seated terror has overtaken the land and the authorities, with the help of a compliant media, have instituted a shut down. Only this is a mental and spiritual one. A desertion of the streets of thought and conscience. A confinement in the tribal homes. The 2008 post-election violence has become today’s bogeyman.

How else is one to understand the silence that has greeted the Supreme Court’s release of it judgement? One would have expected our “vibrant” media to be all over it, taking it apart, explaining the precedents it sets or overturns. Where are the eloquent lawyers to whose endless analysis and opinions we were subjected in lieu of actual news during the election? Why, for that matter, did the Chief Justice not read his judgement in open court?

Why, a month after the election, and with the Supreme Court asking for a corruption investigation into the procurement of technology for the election, haven't we heard of the police or the EACC launching investigations? Where are the demands for an audit of the way the entire election was handled, for reforming the Commission and its way of doing business?

How can the man who masterminded one of Kenya’s biggest financial scams through which the country lost up to Sh100 billion walk free after all those years of tribunals and trials? Was the Goldenberg scandal, which bought Kamlesh Pattni national infamy, just a figment of our imagination? For that matter, why was Brother Paul even allowed to run for elected office? 

I guess a country that has just chosen a guy accused of bankrolling militias to kill innocent Kenyans to be its President would not be expected to be squeamish about the face of the guy accused of almost bankrupting the country twenty years ago gracing an election billboard. But what should we make of the fact that the Nation filed the story of Pattni’s acquittal under the title “Politics”?

This is all about fear. Fear of one another. Fear of the uncertain. Fear of looking foolish.

We need to leave our comfort zones and venture outside. We need to remember the taste of freedom and the scent of justice. We need to start thinking and feeling again. It is time to show some outrage. To speak up. Let’s not move on. Let’s go back and make it better.