Brown envelope journalism is a euphemism for corruption in the media where journalists solicit or accept various forms of kickbacks, gifts, or cash rewards.
For several years now, leading legal eagle Ahmednasir Abdullahi has been inveighing against corruption in the judiciary in a professional jihad he calls ‘Jurispesa’.
In the no-holds-barred war, Mr Abdullahi has taken no prisoners. Even when he appears to declare a truce with the top echelons of the judiciary, the next day he fires a barrage of missiles.
What is not lost in this war within the corridors of justice is that corruption is an endemic problem in Kenya and has been so since the First Republic. To be sure, the vice isn’t limited to the judiciary, where countless reports have been written about it. The problem is that whenever the matter is raised against any arm of the State, the finger-pointing starts.
In Kenya, if you accuse a person of corruption, especially within the elite classes, ethnic kinsmen in that group circle the wagons and cry that they are being “finished” for belonging to the group. By this logic, one would think corruption is communal, not an individual crime.
Harbouring corrupt elements
By extension, when the judiciary is accused of harbouring corrupt elements, it asks the accuser why he or she isn’t looking at the Executive or the Legislature. That’s the exact same response the Legislature angrily gives the Executive when accused of the same cancer. Imagine a chain of thieves, each accusing the other of being the actual thief. In the end, no one is culpable, except perhaps the last one.
My point is that passing the buck on corruption is corruption itself and seeks to defeat any meaningful response to the malignancy. This is why we have normalised corruption and why our children learn thievery before they enter kindergarten. I fear corruption is so deeply ingrained in the bone marrow of Kenyans that it’s now damn near genetic.
In contrast, in my more than four decades in the United States, I have never seen petty corruption. Occasionally, you will read about the rare corrupt judge or some grafter in the Executive. But this is not a culture. It’s just not the “done thing”. The question is: How did we get here and how can we reverse this mendacity? How can we rewire our people?
This brings me to Kenya’s “brown-envelope journalism”. Brown-envelope journalism is a pay-to-play culture in which folks in the Fourth Estate will not report a story unless they have been pecuniarily “lubricated”. This involves journalists of all types in all media houses. I remember my first encounter with this odious practice when I was the Azimio spokesperson. It was routine for the assembled journalists at our press conferences to approach our people for “chai”. Usually, they would nominate the most tenacious among their number to go after the “loot”. At first, I was completely scandalised until I learned that this was “normal”. Those asking saw no evil, spoke no evil and did no evil.
How do we deal with this monster? I now avoid public events, especially political ones, because of this beggarly culture. Recently, a life was reportedly lost over a dispute about the quantum of “mobilisation” funds. This is now a matter of life and death. I have also grown weary of going to some hotels, including several five-star establishments. You often find grown men and women hanging around to extort a few coins from you.
Their “pick-up” lines are tired and unimaginative. Red flags include: “I love your Sunday column,” or “I was with you and Baba.” Then, boom: “Please give me a thousand shillings. I have not had a meal.” Hotels and other public establishments must do something about this menace.
Killing stories
To me, brown-envelope journalism is one of the most galling acts of corruption. A press that strives for accurate and ethical reporting lies at the heart of democracy. Killing stories or distorting them because of meagre handouts is the most cynical betrayal of the role of the press in a democracy. I remember back in the day when newspapers were king, before social media became a ghoulish force, one popular columnist used to sell his weekly column to the highest bidder. To the credit of the media house, the person was fired when some “Deep Throat” outed the offender. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Small, low-life offenders live in the subterranean. The fool is the journalist who doesn’t hawk his or her craft.
Let me end where I started.
Corruption is a national disaster. It’s catastrophic. We all have read about investors, both local and foreign, who have shied away from Kenya because of the vice. It’s our neighbours that reap the benefits when we become untouchable.
I believe one of the reasons our students are restive and burn down their schools, often with tragic consequences for their fellow students, is because they see the political elite, school principals and even their own parents robbing the country blind. This culture must stop.
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Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. On X:@makaumutua.
