I woke up with peace in my heart. I realised that there are many things I no longer care to be right about. I’m not even outraged by a government increasing tax on everything but reducing them on helicopters.
There is no doubt in my mind that having a discussion about stuff is more likely to get a solution—faster—than all the fulmination, shouting, threats and so on. I have also realised my frequent defence of the media is sinking me deeper in trouble with the vicious press crowd in government.
Which is OK; I’m already in a ton of it anyway. However, previously, unlike now, I was well paid to get in trouble.
But before I batter the sword into a ploughshare, let me make a couple of peaceful points. In November 2010, Chelsea Manning leaked 250,000 diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world to Wikileaks.
The Nation, in an alliance with other leading media houses, was in the thick of combing through them for stories relating to Kenya.
After publishing them for a few days and seeing the damage that the reporting was doing to American interests, very respected US media opted out and stopped publication entirely. Point? At the end of the day, good journalists always, always, always bat for the home team.
Point number two: Industry Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria might be a political thug but he is not a stupid man. Mr Kuria is among politicians that I interviewed at length before the election. His political analysis was not only brilliant, it was also spot-on.
He read Mt Kenya more accurately than any other person that I spoke to during that season. I still didn’t like him or his violence against the media but I believed him when he told me: “I’m not just a politician; I’m also a social scientist.”
His attacks on the media are a political sleight of hand. He wants you to focus on one hand so that you don’t see what the other is doing. He is not the sucker; you are.
And now, point number three, and the reason I’m writing about this at all. I have watched a few fragments of the interview by Jeff Koinange of ICT Cabinet Secretary Eliud Owalo and a certain term, unfairly deployed by a certain top lawyer recently, strongly comes to mind. Hiring strong, it would appear, is not something hustlers do exceedingly well.
Point number four, and the last: The fight between the media and the government is bad. It is bad for Kenya’s brand as a modern and tolerant democracy, bad for the country because it curtails government effectiveness, bad for the nation’s security, bad for the President’s image and bad for the media.
It is also a symptom of the breakdown in the government’s ability to manage—as opposed to control, destroy, cow or humiliate—the mass media. Without exception, bad publicity equals bad management.
This does not mean that the relationship between the media and the government should be without conflict. No. That is an essentially adversarial relationship. The current conflict is not entirely the fault of the current government; it began in the previous one. But the government’s media attack team have escalated it to the Nguema Mbasogo level—without, of course, the boiling of the heads and the drinking of the soup.
It all started in 2013, when TNA came to power, and I think it went down to President Uhuru Kenyatta’s tendency to take personal offence at criticism. President Mwai Kibaki was a bit vindictive, like all politicians, but he was a tolerant gentleman of the first water. The mercenaries came down on the Standard, his wife kicked down the Nation’s newsroom doors, but we remained “friends”.
His Press Secretary, Isaiya Kabira, was a diamond too: Never whined, never bad-mouthed the media, never fixed editors he disagreed with, never on the phone demanding favours but ran an effective media operation for the President.
My unsolicited advice to President William Ruto: A strong, professional press is like a strong-willed wife. She ensures you come home every night, don’t sleep in the bar, don’t marry the barmaid, don’t gamble the children’s fees, she keeps your nose clean. The thing to do is, peg your nose and take it like a man, for the sake of the family.
A free, professional and globally respected media should be the first KPI for the ICT minister and the whole line of media managers in government. Their job is not to fight the media—sack this or that editor, find his wife, sack her, find his dad, kill his business kind of gung-ho bloodthirst—but to build it.
This cuts both ways. Editors, too, must realise that it is their job to cultivate a good working relationship with the authorities. The priority is not their personal brand but the survival of their endangered institutions. The poor editor has to (to extend Kuria’s ugly characterisation) stick on the mbutu (false lashes), wriggle into the mini-skirt, climb into the high heels and, like Ruby in the Kenny Rogers song, take his love to town. So that the children can eat.
The essence of editorial diplomacy is to issue cheques that your newsroom must never cash. And that is the last I’ll ever have to say about that.
