Plainclothes police officers arrest demonstrators in Nairobi on June 6, 2023, during protests against the Finance Bill 2023.
If there is anything that brings us close to starting a fight, it is the abduction of young people — artists and other innocent troublemakers. They needle the high and mighty, as any useful commentary should. But their actions do not rise to the kind of crime that justifies being plucked from the street, stuffed in the boot of a car and disappeared.
But abductions and the outrage and revulsion they cause are also deadly as a political and propaganda tool. You only need to be tarred with it and you will never clean yourself.
After so many years of playing in the blogs, I have some clear—and possibly divergent — thoughts about the current online campaign against National Intelligence Service Director-General Noordin Haji.
Public Service Cabinet Secretary Justin Muturi claimed in a statement to the police that he had overheard Mr Haji telling President William Ruto that his team had taken Mr Leslie Muturi, 40, Mr Muturi’s son. At the time of the incident, Mr Muturi was the Attorney-General and a member of the National Security Council.
First, let me share my (past) pain. I do not think there was an editor who was as assiduously and relentlessly lampooned by bloggers as I was. Once, some guy published the picture of an expensive car and a logbook with a Gmail address with my names and some text to the effect that a powerful Cabinet minister had established a well-paid cartel of editors. The conclusion he wanted his reader to arrive at was not genius level. An editor’s reputation is his bread and butter. Without it, your career is dead.
Fight abductions
After anguished analysis, I concluded rather sadly that sometimes, doing nothing is the only thing to do. You will spend six years in court, the court will say you were right, it will award damages against a man whose only earthly possession is an unkempt beard. It would not change the really important thing: People believed every word he wrote even though it was as false as Satan’s face. Even my closest friends maintained an impossible duality, they knew it was false but they still believed it. I felt the helplessness and injustice of being injured without recourse.
In my case, it was my reputation and job at stake. They were invaluable and precious, but one could live without them. In Mr Haji’s case, it is different. In the event that Mr Muturi’s claim is pure politics, Mr Haji still loses face in the eyes of the community in which he lives. He has to deal with the Gen Z, which he probably has in his household and extended family, and there are serious consequences for his liberty and standing with international and other professional partners.
Could Mr Muturi have overheard a phone conversation that was being conducted deliberately away from him? He could only have arrived at his conclusion that Mr Haji was the abductor from the President’s end of the conversation, if he was within earshot. In which case what was the point of the President moving away? Or he could have put two and two together — what his friend had told him and the outcome of his encounter with the President — to arrive at that conclusion. Or President Ruto could have told him. Whatever the case, it is only fair that Mr Muturi provides better proof to support his claim.
In any case, only two weeks ago, we were definitively given the identity of the abductors by those who claimed to know these matters. Or is there more than one set of abductors at play? Let us fight abductions with everything we have. Let us hold office holders accountable. But let us be fair.
***
After meditating and reflecting calmly under the shade of a tree in Makandune, I have come to the following unsurprising realisation: While former governor William Kabogo, being an experienced politician, brings the regime better value in terms of countering Waititu Babayao and other Kikuyu politics, and would probably be good at the administrative functions of the ICT Ministry where he has been appointed Cabinet Secretary, I would have made a much better CS in terms of igniting a true digital revolution and transitioning the country’s communications resources—that includes our vaunted but dying media—to a more stable, effective and profitable future. Like Donald Trump, I would arrive with a binder full of executive orders.
First, I’d proscribe by fiat the Government Advertising Agency (GAA) five minutes after putting the Bible down. I’d invite the head of the agency to a conference room and physically assault him/her/it continuously, get a guard to hold him/her/it down if he/she/it is bigger than me, after which I’d order the cancellation of all GAA contracts and transfer all staff back to the Public Service Commission.
Second, I’d freeze all infrastructure spend and convert ICT Hubs to Artificial Intelligence Performance Centres, one in each sub-county and a centre of excellence in every county. I’d put a 9mm round in the leg of the airhead who came up with that hub concept and seriously consider replacing one of those mouthy principal secretaries with my one of my cows.
My other ideas are all illegal and would certainly get me abducted.
Mr Mathiu, a media consultant at Steward-Africa, is a former Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group. [email protected]
