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Media was unfair in its coverage of Ruto’s first year in power...
Very grievous harm may ensue when an actor chooses to define an important value that they identify with, say, for example, independence, not in terms of the absence of intellectual, ideological or political attachment or compromising association, but as hostility or active disaffection towards certain agencies.
It used to be that the ability to reject or call out another’s claim or position was a cardinal hallmark of an independent standpoint.
In the age of the Second Liberation, however, mere opposition, regardless of reasons, became the primary manifestation of independence.
In particular, by liberally indulging their contrarian predilections, radical politicians quickly elevated a penchant for the gratuitously captious and wantonly truculent into a necessary attribute of anti-Nyayo heroism.
All anti-government posturing was deemed intrinsically virtuous and its opposite: making any allowance in favour of the state or any public official, even for legitimate reasons, was summarily censured in like manner as the outrageous manifestation of the rankest turpitude.
This absurd practice inaugurated a tradition of irascible antagonism as the mandatory attribute of idealistic democrats and progressive politicians.
The consequence was not restricted to mere mutinous scowling and snarling antipathy, the contours which defined the conduct of public discourse were substantively warped.
Because the Second Liberation crusaders did not succeed in overthrowing the government in the first three elections, they constituted the first three opposition sides of our modern democratic history.
This means that they set the precedent for the practice of opposition politics to be less about holding government to account and more about subverting it at every turn, even if innocent citizens were subjected to hardship.
By equating democracy with sabotage, equating freedom with discord and defining subversion to be synonymous with autonomy, the dominant opposition personalities of that era not only diminished the lustre of democracy and circumscribed the beauty of freedom, they also qualified the power and promise of the liberal, progressive ideas they claimed to be crusading for.
The perverse implications do not stop there. Aside from overturning elementary civic concepts, reflexive antipathy sailing under freedom’s flag distorts the very idea of freedom and reduces its exercise into a rigid performance of predetermined cues.
The result is that the pursuit of freedom derails into the dungeon of tyranny, and the quest for democracy hurtles into the abyss of despotism.
Its mechanism is basic and operates in two modalities. First, the fact that someone’s mandatory response to their adversary is predetermined and confined into a narrow set of options means that the responder’s freedom of action is severely circumscribed.
Secondly, and more tellingly, given that the opponent has no choice but to oppose, an proponent can basically control the opponent by recommending courses of action whose opposite, and therefore the opponent’s inevitable response, aligns with the proponent’s actual preference.
During one electoral “cliff-hanger” in a Nairobi constitutency, a sly candidate tricked their adversary by purporting to convene a press conference to denounce election results before they were announced.
On hearing this, the rival promptly went before the media to declare support for the election’s process and result, emphatically terming them “free and fair, and reflecting the will of the people.” When the sly candidate won, the adversary had no option but to meekly accept a humiliating outcome.
In other words, a champion for freedom can destroy their own autonomy and undermine her real interests by embracing a lazy or inattentive definition of their most critical values.
This treacherous tradition has often exposed and betrayed many a progressive politician. As many media practitioners have also been similarly trapped; a great portion of their number having become deeply invested in the opposition politics at its advent, before ossifying into ideological inertia.
Unsurprisingly, the parsimonious coverage of the first anniversary of the government has been so consistent with an opposition narrative that when the latter finally issued its intemperate screed, the sense of redundancy was unavoidable.
To create the devastatingly deceptive illusion of balance, the media understated the government’s achievements and overstated failures.
The effect is to portray government as though it has only accomplished a couple of achievements amid numerous catastrophic blunder.
Obviously, it is utterly untrue that the leadership of the government merely retreated to hibernate in merry obscurity. Quite the opposite, under the president’s leadership, the government has been active, visible and public in all its busy activity throughout the year , day after day, all over the country.
The ungenerous profiling perpetrated by our press this week was utterly consistent with the modus operandi of our old-school opposition. When an agency cannot help but only go a certain way, it has lost its voice and freedom, and any pretence of independent and balanced coverage is just melodramatic self-sabotage.
There is always more to say than is usually said, but the freedom to say it is always curtailed through a perverse self-censorship.
Mr Ngéno is an advocate of the High Court
