Rise of regional media giant and the fight for broadcast licence

In 1986, a Paris based director reported after a visit to Nairobi, ‘I have continued to push the concept of the Nation becoming a major regional newspaper through editionising and eventual satellite printing’, adding, however, that ‘appreciation of this concept is very slow in coming’. 

Early efforts to extend the Nation’s reach into Tanzania and Uganda were blown off course when the Uganda Nation and Mwafrika of Tanzania were folded for commercial reasons.

Thereafter, these two countries received early editions of the Kenya paper which contained a modicum of regional news. Although sales were often healthy, supplies were erratic.

Read: Aga Khan’s dream: how ‘Nation’ became Kenya’s biggest newspaper

Periodic bouts of inter-government hostility resulted in frequent border closures. Distribution in Uganda became impossible when the country collapsed into bloody anarchy under the murderous rule of Milton Obote and Idi Amin. 

There is a story that Amin personally hammered a notice on the Nation office door in Kampala, declaring, ‘This newspaper is closed.’ The author has been unable to authenticate the report, but certainly being in the news business was fraught with danger.

In 1973, a Kenyan teleprinter operator with the Nation’s associated company, Uganda African Newspapers, was murdered, apparently for buying a car from an Asian who was leaving under Amin’s wholesale expulsion order.

In 1977, the tottering East African Community finally collapsed and the concept of an integrated region of cooperating nations faded. 

It was only with the accession to power of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and warmer relations between Kenya and Tanzania that regular distribution resumed to the two countries. When (Albert) Ekirapa (the Nation Chairman) visited Uganda in September 1990, the Nation was selling 2,700 copies a day in Kampala.

He told a board meeting that he found the new government tolerant of criticism. Compared with Kenya, where the official attitude to independent media remained hostile, Uganda and Tanzania began to look like viable markets again.

Accordingly, the author of this book (Gerard Loughran) was asked to investigate how the Nation footprint could be planted firmly across the region.

Senior executives favoured a strategy of separate editions for the two countries: the basic Kenya edition with four localised pages. However, since the Nation was already producing two editions (Coast and City) and planning a third for Western Kenya, close examination suggested that two further editions with eight page-changes per night would be an editorial and production nightmare.

The concept of a single edition covering both countries and perhaps titled East African Nation became the basis for in-house debate and wide-ranging research, led by marketing manager Jerry Okungu.

Read: How Aga Khan’s innovative spirit birthed The EastAfrican

Thinking turned to a separate new product altogether, a weekly rather than a daily, an upmarket compact whose bottom line would be quality. Thus was The EastAfrican conceived. The title choice proved contentious. Critics considered it needed a noun, The East African Journal perhaps or The East African Gazette, while reformers pointed to The Sowetan, The Australian and The Scotsman as precedents. Cover prices were set for each country, space rented and staff hired for fully fledged bureaus in Kampala, Dar es Salaam and, because it was to be the site of the East African Co-operation, the East African Community’s successor, in Arusha, Tanzania, too. 

This was the group’s most significant editorial development in many years, the first major new product since the birth of the Nation. With Joseph Odindo, a former chief sub-editor of the Daily Nation, at the helm, issue 0001 of The EastAfrican was a revelation.

Almost all of the region’s tabloids were based on the Nation formula; indeed, on Bierman’s 1960 design of a dramatic page one, and an editorial page which boxed the leader alongside a political cartoon and the top news feature. Now here was a tabloid of small headlines and broad columns, the op-ed space two pages deeper into the paper and horizontal editorials without a box-rule in sight.

There were no advertisements on page one, not even ear pieces; portrait photographs were shot on camera – and reshot and reshot – so that all the heads were the same size; and rule-offs encapsulated major stories.

Trendily, the features section was named Part 2 (confusing some readers, who wondered if they had missed Part 1). The new product was proof of Michael Curtis’ argument that a tabloid newspaper could be handsome, authoritative and indisputably upmarket at the same time. 

Above all, its meticulous apportionment of stories disarmed Ugandans and Tanzanians who had predicted a Kenya-dominated news agenda. Mohammed Warsama, who joined The EastAfrican in a senior position shortly after its launch, said, ‘My feeling was that it was totally different to any paper I had ever worked on.

Odindo had a very clear vision of the sort of paper he wanted. It was so professional, such demand for precision and accuracy. It was as if I was learning my job all over again. For the first time, I talked to journalists who said they wouldn’t work on The EastAfrican because it was too demanding. I was there a full year without hearing a serious complaint about inaccuracy in a story.’

Some 18 months after the launch, an International Press Institute report on the world media said, ‘One of the best, if not the best, of regional newspapers in sub-Saharan Africa is The EastAfrican, providing readers with sober incisive news of issues and events. Such a newspaper is far ahead of the political leadership of the region.

The EastAfrican is proof that commerce, travel, the environment and culture tie the region together logically.’ 

Odindo achieved his vision of an issue-led journal of record with a bias towards business, but it was a hard sell in a region dominated by politics and personalities, and building circulation proved an arduous task.

The ME (Managing Editor) was encouraged when the Aga Khan, visiting his Nairobi operations, assured him, ‘Quality is not easy to sell.’ 

The EastAfrican nonetheless moved into profit within two years and after five years it was selling around 30,000, half in Kenya, the rest split evenly between Uganda and Tanzania. The years between the 1992 and 1997 elections saw extraordinary growth in the Nation group, involving a move into new headquarters, upgrading of pre-press technology, launch of The EastAfrican, construction of a press hall and installation of state-of-the-art presses, entry to the Internet and the launch of three websites, and, finally and crucially, expanding into the electronic media. 

Read: Former Nation CEOs pay tribute to the Aga Khan

From the perspective of the turbulent multiparty struggle years, these were extraordinary achievements. The group marked the multiparty era by finally moving out of its decrepit headquarters at scruffy Nation House.

Accommodation that was neat, clean, conveniently central and adequate for its staff in 1960 had long been bursting at the seams, with desks crowded together, partitions erected and dismantled, toilets overflowing and the noise level somewhere close to a jumbo jet on take-off. 

The newspapers’ new home was the custom-built 17-storey Nation Centre on Kimathi Street, in the centre of town. Designed by a Danish architect, Henning Larsen, the building had a curved façade of black and white horizontal stripes topped by two circular towers, bisected by a red mast starting above the canopied entrance.

The black and white were said to represent a printed newspaper or a zebra’s stripes, and the mast to be a Maasai spear or a representation of a broadcast aerial. Two jutting windows high on the façade gave the impression of eyes in an African mask. For the first time in three decades, all of the group’s departments were housed under one roof, with the exception of circulation, which remained at its distribution centre on Tom Mboya Street. 

The new building was owned by Industrial Promotion Building Ltd (IPB), an affiliate of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED), in which the Nation had a 20 per cent interest. The newspapers took four floors in the new building in 1992 and the fitting-out budget was KSh80 million ($2.2 million).

Rent costs increased from KSh2 million ($55,000) per year at Nation House to KSh20 million ($555,000), but the extra space delighted the staff. By 1994, the Centre was 100 per cent occupied and the Nation’s share in IPB contributed significantly to group profits. Prestige tenants included the Nairobi Stock Exchange and the financial institution Diamond Trust Bank.

The new building was a distinctive addition to Nairobi’s architectural repository, a marked departure from the soaring glass towers like the Lonrho building, and if it did not please all the city’s aesthetes, Nation people were happy to work in a spacious, bright, air conditioned, noise-controlled ambience with plenty of toilets. Unusually, for a building of such importance, Nation Centre never had a formal opening. It was felt that to invite President Moi at a time when the media were suffering persistent state harassment would send the wrong signal to staff and public. The move to Nation Centre had a knock-on effect, which took the company into a new era of technology. 

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The mid-1990s saw significant changes in the media. One of The EastAfrican’s first stories reported that the Standard had hired four expatriates to capitalise on colour printing and push a more populist style: ‘Recent editions demonstrate an evolution towards light and often shorter stories and a bolder visual presentation, punning headlines, multi-photo reportage, involvement of the newspaper itself in some stories and some magazine-style serials.’ 

The story noted that the Daily Nation sold 163,487 copies a day during 1993 against 61,516 by the Standard, and it added that downmarket experiments had not proved successful in the past. The Nation’s huge lead did not, however, remove a long-held sense of insecurity.

When board members suggested that the Standard’s presentation was better than the Nation’s, Peter Chadwick replied that the Standard was being turned into ‘a real tabloid’ and the board must decide if the Nation should follow suit. The hint of exasperation was understandable since policy was ‘upmarket’, and at this point the Nation was selling more in Nairobi than the Standard was countrywide.

The Nation, too, was under new leadership. The deft and subtle chairman Albert Ekirapa retired on 31 March 1994 after 20 years with the group, 17 of them in the top job. Wilfred Kiboro, MD of Nation Newspapers since February 1993, became Group MD, and long-serving board member Mareka Gecaga became non-executive chairman. Kiboro had spent 19 years in the oil industry before rising through Rank Xerox Kenya to become MD there. Gecaga had become the Nation’s first African director back in 1960 and had been on the board ever since. 

On 12 October, Michael Curtis vacated his seat on the NNL board, severing his last official link with the group after 35 years. He donated the 20,000 shares he owned in NPP to the Nation Group Staff Investment Trust Fund.

A message from the Aga Khan said, ‘I acknowledge publicly and with gratitude my debt to Michael. He can look back with justifiable pride and great satisfaction at what has been accomplished.’ In a similar publication headlined ‘Kwaheri [Farewell] Albert’, the Aga Khan acknowledged Ekirapa’s many years as chief executive and chairman, and praised the dedication and skill which brought the group to the cusp of extraordinary commercial success. The pre-tax profit for 1994 was 137 per cent up on 1993, the 1995 figure was 23 per cent up on 1994, the 1996 figure was slightly down because of investment in a new press, but 1997 was 59 per cent up on 1996, reaching KSh417 million ($6.6 million). Kiboro charged energetically into a wide range of projects.

At a cost of KSh750 million ($12 million), a 759-square-metre, two-storey press hall was built off the Mombasa Road on the outskirts of Nairobi and computer-controlled printing presses were installed capable of producing 60,000 copies per hour. President Moi pressed the button to start the great machines rolling and Kiboro demonstrated the advance in technology by presenting him, as he sat down to lunch, with a special issue Nation bearing a colour photo of his arrival an hour earlier. 

Read: Why Uganda Was ‘Spiritual Home’, Crown of the Aga Khan

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It was back in April 1961 when the first reference to the electronic media appeared in the company records. The Aga Khan wrote to Curtis, ‘It will be essential to have a foot in the door when television comes to Kenya.’ Television arrived just 18 months later with an inauspicious opening ceremony in which Patrick Jubb, chief of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, hailed ‘a new drama on the stage in Africa’.

The drama followed immediately as the studio lost sound on the filmed messages of congratulation, including one from Jomo Kenyatta, forcing viewers to practise their lip-reading skills. 

‘That was bad luck’, VIP guest Governor Renison remarked cheerily.

It was just about par for the course in TV’s early days. The arrival of Achieng Oneko as information minister swiftly put paid to the Aga Khan’s early ambitions in broadcasting and the government increasingly monopolised the medium in its own interest. 

But the Nation kept its eye on TV and radio for the day the airwaves might be liberalised. In 1991, when the independent Kenya Television Network prepared to launch, Gerry Wilkinson, by then at the Aga Khan’s Secretariat in France, enquired at a board meeting if this was the right time for NNL to revive its own plans. Stan Njagi suggested the company might at least apply for a licence. Year after year thereafter, the group’s annual reports bemoaned the government’s lack of response. 

Kiboro later recalled: “The government was not willing to give us a licence nor to say why it would not give us a licence. We assumed it was because of our independent editorial line. Some people saw us as an opposition newspaper and there was a lot of discomfort as to what effect a Nation radio or television station might have on those millions out there who heard only the official view from KBC. When I came aboard in 1993 I pushed very hard. I would write every other week to the Minister of Information about the status of our application. I would ask ministers at social functions. They would come up with all kinds of excuses but never an official letter of acknowledgement. By the end of 1997, we were coming to the conclusion that the government was never going to give us a licence, so we decided to see if we could get other people to help us.”

The Nation had already bid unsuccessfully for KTN. The company was owned substantially by Transnational Bank, and the Central Bank was pressuring Transnational to get rid of its shares. Kiboro said, ‘I went to see the chairman of KTN and said, “If this company is being sold, we would like to make a substantial offer”. I wrote a formal letter making an offer. We never even got an acknowledgement and the next we heard, KTN was sold to the Standard.’ 

The Standard group itself was already in the hands of its new owners and Kiboro said, ‘The government had now allowed the Standard to enter the electronic media and this strengthened our case. We also knew that we had to get into broadcasting real quick.’ 
The Nation’s solution was to buy a controlling interest in East Africa Television Network Ltd (EATN), which already had TV and radio licences.

‘It was perfectly legal, but it was a naughty thing to do’, Kiboro said. ‘We were trying to get in through the back door because the government had stopped us going through the front door.’ 
Kiboro called a Press conference and announced that the Nation was establishing a nationwide broadcasting service.

The government reacted by cancelling EATN’s licences on grounds there was a dispute between the two original directors of the company about the transfer of shares to the Nation.

The newspaper went to court, challenging the action of the Ministry of Information and that of the Kenya Posts and Telecommunications Corporation (KPTC), which had withdrawn EATN’s frequencies.

There ensued a series of postponements, hearings, adjournments and objections. ‘It was a merry-go-round of delay’, Kiboro recalled. ‘Everybody was working in high gear to stop the Nation group from broadcasting. We decided to use the case to show the injustice the Nation was being subjected to by the government, which by then was giving licences to anybody who applied – Capital Radio, Hilary Ng’weno at Stellavision, anybody other than the Nation.’ 

Finally, in May 1998, the Nation was awarded TV and radio licences, but for Nairobi only. 
‘This was a major disappointment’, Kiboro said. ‘Our intention was always to cover nationwide.’ 

He decided nonetheless to seek the necessary frequencies but met new procrastination from KPTC: ‘I went to see the President just before Christmas and I said, “The government gives us a licence but the Post Office denies us a frequency. I don’t understand it”. So the President picked up the phone and called the MD at the Post Office and two days later we get the frequency.’ 

But the saga was not over: 

They had neglected to give us the microwave link frequency to transmit the signal from Nation Centre to the transmitter site at Limuru. They were also asking us to set up our transmitter in Ngong after we had all the no-objection certificates for Limuru, a far better site. And finally we found that the frequencies were so weak the signal would not reach the city centre and TV would only get to Dagoretti Corner. We did not know if this was a sick joke or malice or incompetence, but it was a harrowing experience. We couldn’t get straight answers, you call and they don’t call back, you write and they don’t reply.

In his darkest hour came a ray of light: “The President called and said he had ordered that we be given other areas than we had applied for and this was music to my ears. We got radio-only licences for Mombasa, Nakuru and Kisumu and we started negotiating for frequencies for these areas, along with stronger frequencies for Nairobi. A timetable was set: radio broadcasting in Nairobi before the end of 1999 and television early in 2000, with radio operating to Mombasa, Nakuru and Kisumu later that year. Resolution of the EATN case would provide a vehicle for a national radio and television network.”

At the height of these efforts, Kiboro explained why the campaign was so crucial: ‘All over the world, there is media convergence and the division between print and electronic is becoming less distinct. We cannot afford not to be involved in multimedia.’ The advertising spend, traditionally dominated by the print media, was turning to electronic broadcasting, and Kiboro said, ‘We must share in that new revenue even while we are losing some of the share in the print media. Electronic and other multimedia applications like the Internet are really the future.’

**

As the millennium moved to a close, the Nation group was a significant force in the life of the country. The ninth largest of 56 companies quoted on the Nairobi Stock Exchange, it was valued at some KSh4.9 billion ($81.8 million), with share capital and reserves of KSh1.4 billion ($23 million).

Its payroll approached 1,000. To reflect its entry into broadcasting and to optimise its position within the corporate tax legislation, the group restructured and changed its name to Nation Media Group Ltd (NMG).

A subsidiary company, Africa Broadcasting Ltd, set up to handle TV and radio, was merged into a divisional structure within NMG, along with Nation Newspapers Ltd and Nation Carriers Ltd. A sign of the group’s strength was the launch of a KSh500 million ($6.6 million) commercial paper issue to finance the entry into broadcasting and planned print activity in Tanzania and Uganda, and to retire debts of KSh200 million ($2.6 million) incurred for new buildings and facilities. Chairman Gecaga said the initial capital outlay for the broadcasting project would be KSh300 million ($4 million).