Why Has the Kenyan Media Remained S

Media Ethics in the Internet Age

By Patrick Gathara

A year ago, six attackers stormed the Dusit D2 hotel complex in downtown Nairobi, eventually slaughtering over twenty people. The event and ensuing rescue efforts were a spectacle covered intensely by both local and international media outlets. Much of the coverage elicited little controversy. However, a story published online by the New York Times attracted much umbrage due to one of the pictures used to illustrate it, which showed three victims’ bodies slumped over coffee tables.

There was a furious reaction on social media, which was focused on the incoming bureau chief, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, who had authored the article the picture was used to illustrate. There were calls for her to be deported and although, as the Times protested, she had no role in the decision to publish the photograph, the state, via the Media Council of Kenya, threatened to withdraw her accreditation if the photograph was not taken down. Eventually, perhaps as a result of the furore, she did not take up the position.

The episode neatly illustrates some of the difficulties faced by editors across the world as a consequence of the digital revolution. Prior to the rise of the internet, journalists were the undisputed gatekeepers of the public sphere. Through codes developed by their professional associations, to a large extent they determined the ethical rules to be observed. However, today the internet has transformed the public sphere, opened new gates and diminished the power and authority of the media. On social media and on blogs, online communities have found a means to assert their views and police the media’s actions – even when, as in the case with Kenyans and the Times, they do not form a significant part of a particular outlet’s audiences.

Speaking in the aftermath of the controversy, the NYT’s director of photography, Megan Looram, acknowledged that while in the past news outlets may have applied different standards to images from far-off places, that was no longer an option. Despite the fact that 9 in 10 of the NYT’s subscribers are located in North America, the paper’s editors were now required to “make decisions based on the fact that we serve a global audience”.

“Gone are the days in which we can view our audience as an American one,” remarked the paper’s National Editor, Marc Lacey, a former foreign correspondent based in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. He admitted that the Times could have done “a better job of having consistent standards that apply across the world” and promised that the paper would “convene a group of people to come up with clearer guidelines” for their editors. However, it is unclear whether this has actually been done.

It is not just an issue for the so-called global publishers. Many of the same attitudes that informed the NYT’s coverage of the attacks in Nairobi are prevalent in local newsrooms around the world, not least in Kenya itself. In interviews carried out with Kenyan editors late last year, many told me that they paid little heed to the potential reaction their publishing decisions might arouse among those they did not consider part of their audience. One editor spoke of a “double standard” where “you all recognise that certain things are not publishable, but you only apply that stricture when the content is about yourselves, aimed at the local audience”.

The research project had set out to investigate how in the digital age Kenyan newspaper editors working for both print and online platforms make ethical decisions on the publication of gruesome images. The study concluded that while ethical considerations played an important role in editors’ selections, they are largely left to their own devices when making such determinations. Media houses have so far failed to provide effective systems and training to support them in this, though, in some cases, editorial policies and the Media Council’s Code of Conduct do have some advice. However, prior research has shown that such codes are generally not useful for guiding day-to-day newsroom decision-making.

In interviews carried out with Kenyan editors late last year, many told me that they paid little heed to the potential reaction their publishing decisions might arouse among those they did not consider part of their audience.

Editors are thus forced rely on their gut instinct, experience and consultations with colleagues rather than on methodical ethical reasoning to decide what is appropriate. This creates the sort of cultural blind spots that the NYT has struggled with.

Despite the obvious pitfalls, there is, so far, little agreement among both scholars and practitioners on what the new ethical rules are for publishing in today’s globalised, digital age. That makes it daunting for editors, especially when it comes to a subject as sensitive as the publication of graphic images. To what extent do and should editors factor in potential audience reactions in their decisions to publish? Is it the case that, as the late Lawrence Grossman, the former president of NBC News, reportedly said, “The job of the press is not to worry about the consequences of its coverage, but to tell the truth”?

Can newspapers really afford to ignore the potential offence their content may cause in an era where offending relatively tiny audiences in remote corners of the globe can have significant consequences in terms of reputation and profits? In a world where newspaper content is instantly available across the world, what do concepts like “local audience” or even “local newspapers” really mean? While the media is increasingly globalised, the cultures and the ethical standards they breed are not necessarily so.

There are few readily available answers and proposed solutions only seem to lead to more questions. For example, NYT’s Lacey suggests that news outlets should take decisions without regard to nationality. “If we believe a particular type of photograph or article is too sensitive for an American audience, we ought to apply that same standard to a Kenyan audience, and a French one and a Mexican one,” he says. However, that assumes that disparate audiences are offended by similar things. Yet this is not always the case.

Take for instance photos of animals being killed or participating in blood sports. Kenyan editors said that bloody images from cockfights or ones that showed the slaughter of animals for food would not necessarily be considered problematic by Kenyans. However, they were routinely flagged by online platforms like Google and Facebook as potentially offensive to other audiences. Whose standards are these platforms applying? The short answer is their own.

The study revealed that Google News and Facebook News have differing approaches to ethical standards regarding disturbing content. The former relies on aggregating global cultural standards through the use of over 10,000 search quality raters. The data generated by these raters is used to improve Google’s search algorithms and indirectly influences search results. Flagging by the raters and algorithms can also mean that offending pages are denied opportunities for making money through Google ads. Facebook, on the other hand, imposes a predefined “Community Standard”, the violation of which can lead to content being taken down.

As news publishers are forced to comply with platform standards for fear of having their content flagged, this increasingly raises these platform standards to the level of de facto global media ethics codes. Yet it is worth keeping in mind that these platforms are commercial entities and, as the controversies over the use of Facebook by entities like Cambridge Analytica to influence elections across the world have shown, leaving it up to them to decide what is appropriate for audiences can have terrible repercussions.

Further, looking at the internet as a flat network can also be deceptive. Research has shown that networks are inherently hierarchical, with people tending to cluster around sub-networks. Kenyans thus will tend to cluster around a network of websites, blogs and social media where their own cultural values will predominate. Applying the same standards within these sub-networks that the NYT may, for example, apply to audiences in the US, would not necessarily eliminate the potential for causing offence and the consequences that can arise from that.

A potential solution might be abandoning the use of graphic images altogether. However, this would not be ideal either. While media use of disturbing imagery may exaggerate the public perception of risk beyond what was reasonable, potential benefits include cultivating public appetite and will for early intervention to stop atrocities.

And isn’t provoking action to prevent atrocities part of the reason journalists cover the atrocities in the first place? In fact, Kenyan editors use graphic images primarily for their shock value, not newsworthiness. They were used to portray the horror and magnitude of events such as the 2013 Westgate terror attack or the 2011 Sinai fire tragedy when it was felt words alone would not suffice. Horrific pictures are also employed to incite political action to stop tragedies, such as when images of starving children generate action to deliver food aid or when newspaper editors agreed to publish graphic pictures during the 2008 post-election violence to shock Kenyans into stopping it.

Yet it is worth keeping in mind that these platforms are commercial entities and, as the controversies over the use of Facebook by entities like Cambridge Analytica to influence elections across the world have shown, leaving it up to them to decide what is appropriate for audiences can have terrible repercussions.

Not showing the consequences of wars also opens journalists to covering up the consequences of policy conducted in the public’s name. “If we’re big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it,” wrote American photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke, whose photograph of a horribly burned Iraqi soldier during the first Gulf War went largely unpublished. As the threat of war looms once again in the Middle East, the world’s media should be giving serious thought about the imagery they would choose to portray such a conflict.

In sum, the internet is not just disrupting media as a business; it is also challenging the ethics that for over a century have defined journalism as a profession. It is no longer enough for media houses and regulators to rely on antiquated notions of ethics buried in codes and policies. Or to expect that editors will respond automatically to audience needs or reactions. The study suggests that editors are more likely to respond to the internal demands and pressures within media houses than to outraged audiences. In short, the onus is on media owners and managers to prioritise, enable and demand ethical performance from their editors.

The urgent need is for scholars and practitioners to seriously think about media ethics for the internet age, and to develop practical on-the-job training as well as systems that would equip editors with the skills to avoid, or at least mitigate, the risks of publishing on a global platform.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Patrick Gathara

One of the most memorable events on the calendar of creative writing on the continent was the founding of the landmark Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS), which brought African writing to the attention of the world and to all Africans who could read English. Sadly, the pioneer writers unveiled by this series are ageing and in need of successors.

Publishing is a fairly old trade on the African continent. By the seventeenth century publications in Arabic were already in circulation in western Sudan’s trading centres. Nigeria and South Africa were among the first countries in sub-Saharan Africa where the first mission-run printing presses were set up in the mid-eighteenth century, giving them a head start in literacy on the continent.

Oxford University Press Nigeria (now University Press plc) opened in Ibadan in 1949, paving the way for Onibonoje Press which started operations in 1959. Longman and Macmillan came to Nigeria later, in 1962 and 1965 respectively. These multinationals also expanded into Southern Africa in the 1960s, where Jan Carl Juta had already blazed the trail, establishing a commercial press in Cape Town way back in 1853.

Fiction did not form part of the catalogue put out by these early presses, whose main concern was to translate the Bible into indigenous languages for the natives, and thus help spread the religion and the Christianising mission into the hinterland, in the process softening up the native for colonisation. Any other literature was meant to support the technical and industrial training the missionaries offered at their mission centres, and it was designed to prepare the converts to fit into the clerical and technical positions in the white-run economy when the colonial machine came into full swing.

The East African Literature Bureau is the earliest known publishing house in the East Africa region, having been established in 1947 as an offshoot of the missionary-owned Ndia Kuu Press. It had offices in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala. The first truly indigenous publishing house, the East African Publishing House would emerge much later in 1965. Fiction did not form part of the catalogue put out by these early presses, whose main concern was to translate the Bible into indigenous languages that could be understood by the natives, and thus help spread the religion and the Christianising mission into the hinterland, in the process softening up the native for colonisation.

The 1970s saw the establishment of university presses in Nigeria such as the University of Nigeria Press and the University of Lagos Press that paved the way for Africans to take control of indigenous publishing. In Kenya this happened in the 1980s, with the establishment of major independent African publishers such as the East African Educational Publishers (EAEP) and Longhorn. Baobab Press started operations in Zimbabwe in 1988, alongside other publishers who came into business in Southern Africa around this time.

One of the reasons why AWS was successful was because Heinemann had a foot in all the leading capitals throughout the Commonwealth, a physical network through which its writers could move across international borders. It also had the financial muscle. When Heinemann (East Africa) was bought out by independent African business people in the mid-1980s, there was a sense of pride in the fact that finally Africans would be running their own affairs, and getting to keep the money circulating amongst themselves. But after the dust settled, it soon became apparent that this crop of entrepreneurs were concerned only with clawing out and ring-fencing tiny turfs of their own; they had no intention of creating the cross-turf and cross-border networks that are so crucial in publishing. Moreover, they focused on educational publishing, which—though lucrative and safe—unlike fiction, says nothing about a region’s culture.

The few African writers who wanted to be published beyond their home cities and villages now either had to seek publishers abroad, or forget fiction all together. As for those who opted to play it safe within the system, they had to submit to the yoke of the censor, tailoring their books to the whims of the gatekeepers at the Ministry of Education. This is the reason why some of the best- known contemporary writers on the continent are all published abroad. By prostrating before the god of profit the publishers lost sight of what publishing is supposed to be, particularly in such a grossly misunderstood and misrepresented region of the world as Africa. According to UNESCO, Africa accounts for only 1.2 per cent of the world’s total book production.

The biggest indigenous publishing house in the region, East African Educational Publishers, started operations in 1986, having bought out Heinemann Educational Books (East Africa). Other multinationals like Longman and Evans would similarly evolve into locally-owned entities as the once vibrant East African Community disintegrated. It is this indigenisation that is at the heart of the problems currently bedeviling writers from the region and from other parts of Africa.

Walter Bgoya of Mkuki na Nyota Publishers of Tanzania asserts that indigenous publishers have a crucial role to play that can never be fulfilled by transnational publishers. “Autonomous publishing is the response to the crisis in the cultural life of a nation in the realm of education, literature and art,” he is quoted in the book Publishing and Book Trade in Kenya compiled by Ruth Makotsi and Lily Nyariki. “It is for this reason that no matter how well the transnational publishing house may perform and how appropriate it considers its books, it cannot be an acceptable alternative to autonomous publishing firms.”

Bgoya goes on to recognise the responsibilities vested in publishers and the important role that publishing plays in the development of regional cultures. However, in Hans Zell’s The Production and Marketing of African Books, Bgoya admits that the quality of the books that have been published since the exit of the multinationals, though improving, is still not satisfactory in terms of design, editing, proof-reading, indexing and paper quality. His contemporary, veteran Kenyan publisher Henry Chakava of East African Educational Publishers, avers, taking issue with the binding, printing and paper quality of the textbooks flooding the regional market.

“It is for this reason that no matter how well the transnational publishing house may perform and how appropriate it considers its books, it cannot be an acceptable alternative to autonomous publishing firms.”

Still, the blame for their lackluster performance cannot be put solely on publishers. Others have played a role. In order for books from Africa to compete with those from India and the West, they must compare well in terms of paper quality, the quality of the ink used, the binding technique, the printing technology employed, and so on. Strangely, while Africa is still very much what Zell refers to as a “bookless society”, African governments still insist on imposing heavy taxes on paper, printing ink and other raw materials that go into the production of books. This forces publishers to resort to the cheapest options available in order to stay in business.

But the business environment notwithstanding, the business practices of some of these indigenous publishers are also to blame for the dearth of new published work. Although they know very well that they do not have the capacity nor the understanding of cross-territory trade even within the region, almost all these publishers insist on new authors granting them world rights for their work, which makes them more of speculators than publishers.

These skewed contracts have ended up frustrating the careers of emerging authors, who have opted to either self-publish or look for publishers abroad. Yet if you speak to any of these publishers they will quickly blame their failures in publishing fiction on the prevailing business environment. They will tell you that fiction doesn’t sell. Which begs the question: how come Heinemann succeeded with the African Writers Series? What about the Onitsha Market pamphleteers of post-World War II Nigeria, still going strong seventy years on?

Publishing abroad has its challenges however. When Chinua Achebe finished writing his novel Things Fall Apart in 1957, he sent the only hand-written copy of the manuscript along with a postal order for £32—a princely sum at the time—to a London secretarial agency to have it typeset. That would probably have been the last time he saw the manuscript because, after receiving the money, the typesetter set it aside and forgot about the matter. Had Achebe not made a follow-up through a friend, who discovered the manuscript gathering dust in the typesetter’s office, it would probably have been lost.

Although they know very well that they do not have the capacity and understanding of cross-territory trade even within the region, almost all these publishers insist on new authors granting them world rights for their work, which makes them more of speculators than publishers.

Many African writers seeking to publish abroad have since faced similar challenges of access and have had to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to see their works in print. After her French publisher Fernand Nathan merged with Larousse in 1989, the series in which Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo had published her first novel, A vol d’oiseau (As the Crow Flies), was discontinued, and she not only suddenly found herself without a publisher for her well-publicised book, but she and a number of other writers had to team up to fight to have their terminal royalties paid. Thereafter she had to decide whether to take the novel to an Ivorian publisher or go shopping for one in France, where she had been born. In Charles Larson’s book The Ordeal of the African Writer, she says:

“My choice (of France) was due to the fact that Ivorian publishing was in a bad state after the financial collapse of the two main government-owned local publishers. The situation was more or less the same elsewhere on the continent. To publish in Africa would have meant to be confined within the borders of the country from where the publisher in question operated. It also meant the risk of having an editing job that wasn’t satisfying.”

And her misgivings proved founded, because shortly thereafter, when her author’s proof of a manuscript of poetry she had submitted to Ivorian publisher Les Nouvelles Éditions du Sénégal arrived in the mail, they had done such a shoddy job of the editing and layout that she refused to sign the contract.

Such stories abound and could make for a whole book if all the contemporary African writers published in the West agreed to share their experiences. But the truth is that, short of winning a major prize like the Commonwealth, Caine, Noma or Orange, the chances of an African writer attracting the attention of a good agent or mainstream trade publisher in Europe or the United States are very slim indeed. And even were they to survive and get published, they would still have to grapple with the complicated task of computing royalties. After the statutory government deductions of thirty per cent tax and the agent’s ten per cent, the cheque eventually banked by the author will have diminished alarmingly.

The African Publishers Network (APNET) was formed In 1992 to bring together publishers from 45 countries across Africa. Although a welcome initiative in the consolidation of the publishing initiatives by the emergent players on the continent, going by the catalogues put out by its active members, APNET’s main mandate was still educational publishing. In its 27 years of existence, APNET has largely failed to live up to the expectations of the region’s fiction writers.

In 1998, the African Writers-Publishers Seminar was held in Arusha, Tanzania to try to find a solution to the existing acrimony between authors and publishers. After heated deliberations, both parties resolved to work to make things better. Twenty years later, the situation remains the same, with most authors still in the dark about the status of books submitted to the publishers, and still having to fight to have their meager royalties paid.

A notable exception in this morass is Baobab Books of Zimbabwe, which gave us names like Chenjerai Hove, David Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera, Shimmer Chinodya and Yvonne Vera during the ten years in which the publisher was active before being put up for sale in 1998. Although criticised for the “density” of its publications, Baobab is an exception because of the attention its editor, Irene Staunton, paid to the editing process and the design and quality of her books.

But Baobab didn’t happen by accident. One of the reasons why its writers gained international recognition was the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, which has over the years gained international repute and the support of active sponsors based in Europe, leveraging the old established European networks that enabled the AWS to flourish in the past, and opening them to contemporary Zimbabwean writers.

Weaver Press, co-founded by Irene Staunton in 1998 after her stint at Baobab Books, is another notable Zimbabwean publisher of prize-winning fiction and specialising in books on political and social history, short-story anthologies and fiction by women writers. Zimbabwe and southern Africa have done considerably well compared to East Africa, thanks to active promotion by dedicated online portals like the Zimbabwe Reads website. Around the turn of the millennium there was a measure of excitement when new players like Kwani? in Kenya and Chimurenga in Zimbabwe came onto the scene, driven by a youthful crop of writers who wanted to do something to fill the vacuum left by the departure of the AWS, and who were disillusioned by the way indigenous publishers were handling fiction. Most of these writers had travelled or studied abroad and experienced the vibrancy of the literary scene there.

Chimurenga,—which identifies as a pan-African platform of writing, art and politics—was founded in 2002 by Ntone Edjabe as a vehicle to give voice to Africans both at home and in the diaspora. It runs Chimurenga Magazine, a magazine of the arts, culture and politics, together with a quarterly broadsheet called The Chronic. It also runs the Chimurenga Library, an online portal where pan- African periodicals and books can be accessed.

Kwani? in Kenya and Chimurenga in Zimbabwe came on the scene driven by a youthful crop of writers who wanted to do something to fill the vacuum left by the departure of AWS, and who were largely disillusioned by the way the indigenous publishers were handling fiction.

As for Kwani?, it was started in 2002, the brainchild of its founding editor Binyavanga Wainaina, who put out its first literary journal the following year. In addition to the annual journal, Kwani? would later branch out into publishing book-length fiction and pocket-size booklets under its Kwanini? series in the same spirit as the Mini Modern Classics that Penguin put out on its fiftieth anniversary in 2011.

Over in Nigeria, writers have also played their part to fill the vacuum. One of the publishing firms that emerged on the scene was Parrésia Publishers, founded by writers Azafi Ogosi and Richard Ali in 2012, and which runs a number of imprints Including Cordite which is co-owned and edited by Helon Habila, winner of the 2001 Caine Prize. But Parrésia has had to contend with the harsh realities of the market, which allows it to put out only five fiction titles a year through the traditional publishing model. The rest of the catalogue is put out under a subsidy arrangement with the authors, who fund the production of their own books.

Although these new players have attempted to fill the vacuum left by the departure of Heinemann’s AWS, they are lagging behind in the creation of a pan-African catalogue of fiction comparable to the AWS series. One explanation could be the marketplace, which is riddled with cartels, compounded by the rampant piracy facilitated by modern technology that makes it easy to access and share book files online for free. Cheap printing technologies and lack of policies and laws to safeguard legitimate publishing eat further into the profits of legitimate businesses.

All the same, attempts have been made to find a replacement with a pan-African offering similar to the AWS but they have yet to bear fruit. Sometime in 2012 Kwani? put out a call for entries for the Kwani? Manuscript Prize, an Africa-wide project that was to be judged anonymously by an international panel. The initiative generated considerable excitement among African writers but in the end Kwani? failed to publish all the shortlisted titles.

The unique thing about African publishing is that the success of publishing houses is attributed to the tenacity of individuals rather than to an institutional framework and culture. The AWS owes its success to its editor Alan Hill and to Chinua Achebe, who selected the first 100 writers in the AWS catalogue. For Kwani? it was Binyavanga Wainaina; Irene Staunton for Baobab. In 2014 Binyavanga was charged with coming up with what many thought would be that long-sought-after successor to the AWS. He compiled a list of 39 authors from all over Africa who were then aged 39 years and below. As we converged on Ken Saro-Wiwa’s hometown, Port Harcourt, we thought that it was finally going to happen, that the publisher of the ‘Africa ’39’ project, Bloomsbury, was going to rise to the occasion and ask for our best manuscripts for a book series. It did not go as we had anticipated.

But perhaps the biggest threat of fragmentation is that, with every player pulling in their own direction depending on what best suits their business model, it makes it impossible to have a central reference point, especially to an outsider looking in trying to discover new writing from Africa. This makes it difficult to establish and maintain standards in the business, and makes it even more difficult for new experimental writing to break through, further stifling innovation and leaving the doors wide open to duplicity and mediocrity.

These are hurdles that have already been overcome in Western markets, which naturally appeals to those African writers who want to rise above the mediocrity in their own backyard and make something of their craft.

That said, much as publishing in the West offers the African writer the much needed exposure and commercial success, and accords them the peace of mind to embark on their next project, in the long run it is not the panacea to all their problems, as Yvonne Vera found out when she decided to abandon her thriving and promising literary career in Canada in the late 90s and return to her native Bulawayo. “I did not want to be interpreted but to be heard,” she told Ish Mafundikwa in an interview for Skyhost. “I find that immediacy very vital.”

After the awards are bagged and fortunes made, there’s always that nagging question of who a writer truly writes for. This is because the novelist occupies a totally different perch from that of the Hollywood stars. Writing is very much about identity, about the politics of who we are individually and collectively, and what space we occupy in the global order. As we say here in Africa, everyone’s umbilical cord is buried somewhere, even that of the much-fêted African writer abroad. That is what was tagging at Vera’s heartstrings, forcing her to trade in her “global citizenship”. For Véronique Tadjo, the solution to straddling these two worlds was two-pronged: a joint publication where one edition is produced and priced for the Western market, and another for the African market.

And so, sadly for African writers, talent is not enough; unlike other writers elsewhere, the African writer must go the extra mile to get their work on the market. But despite the hellish conditions under which they work, these writers still bedazzle us with a literary gem every now and then.

Stanley Gazemba’s latest book, Dog Meat Samosa, is published by Regal House Publishing in the US.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Patrick Gathara

“The North is by far the largest of the seven kingdoms, and can fit the other six inside it – not that the others care. Cold and damp, that’s how the southerners see the North. But without the cold, a man cannot appreciate the fire in his hearth. Without the rain, a man cannot appreciate the roof over his head. Let the South have its sun, flowers and affectations, we Northerners have home.” – John Snow, Game of Thrones.

Media coverage of Northern Kenya is an invisible and very destructive war. A quick analysis of this coverages reveals how the war is being fought. The focus of the story is similar: sometimes the story is of an enchanting landscape but an unruly people; other times it is of prevailing peace shattered by an underlying atavistic impulse; in other cases, it is how it “almost” attained modern ambition but was in flux because of tribal conflict. Stories of narrow escapes, unexplained and barbaric murders and massacres. Its only variant is the story of a hidden gem in an unruly world.

The narrative comes with its own conventions. Television feature stories are almost always apocalyptic and mysterious: a collage of skulls, crows, clouds, gunshots, parched earth, blood, carcasses, freshly dug graves, a mound of an old grave, a woman crying or a child dying. Their tone, the unsteady camera shots, a reporter seated in the front of a 4X4 land cruiser on a rough road, turning back to the camera in the back seat, feigning surprise, or sympathy, or a reporter emerging from behind a traditional hut or the 4X4 land cruiser. The reporter as commando, camera stand on shoulders, propped like an AK47 in sync with the theme of violence. The soundtrack of suspense and text in blood sets the tone of these feature TV documentaries.

Think about these titles: Desert of Death, Death in the Desert, Oasis of Death, Road of Death and Terror, Manyattas of Death, Death Merchants, Turkana: Living by the Gun, Sun and Guns, Marsabit: Where Guns Rule, Turkana Killings, Uwanja wa Maafa Turkana na Pokot Mashariki, Wajir Mourns, Bleeds and Burns, Mkongoto wa Bunduki, Inside the Killing Fields of Marsabit, The Kapedo Slaughter Field, The Killing Fields of Kapedo, Wajir, Marakwet, Valley of Death.

You can create new versions of this. Any takers? Desert of Terror? Terror and Death in the Desert? Njia ya Mauti? These have appeared on NTV, Citizen, BBC, the Guardian, KTN, Capital FM, Daily Nation, Standard, K24 and many other media houses. These are the titles of media feature stories over the last ten years covering state oppression, diseases, terrorism, ethnic conflict and resource competition in Northern Kenya. NGOs, government policies, comedic clichés and media frames have produced and reinforced a flattened image of Northern Kenya as a place of misery, rebels, guns, deaths, and deserts.

In Desert of Death, a KTN feature story on cancer, Dennis Onsarigo, one of Kenya’s leading investigative reporters, describes the landscape as “an amazing piece of art” with great touristic potential. Onsarigo reminds us that the people are constantly moving in search of water and pasture and rarely have the time to sample the beauty and splendour since something else is hunting them down. His first story in 2013 is titled THE INSIDE STORY: Desert of Death – The Mysterious Silent Killer in Mandera County, even though the coverage is of a village in Marsabit County.

***

In 2015, Miles Warde of the BBC did a podcast titled The Road of Terror and Death. Warde or the BBC borrowed this title with a slight iteration from a Kenyan reporter who in the podcast introduces us to the Isiolo-Moyale road.

“My name is Judy Kaberia, a reporter working with Capital FM. In 2012, I had a traumatic experience on this road. We call it the road of terror or the road of death, that’s how it felt, from every corner, you could smell death. There was a lot of noise and gunshots and at that time I started realising there was trouble, these are the bandits, we call them shiftas, and I said Oh My God…the shiftas are coming…very young energetic men …for me. I thought we were going to die…we will never get out of that place…there was no communication…you can’t call anybody…you can’t text anybody…..that place is very dry…very hot…very dusty…and very rocky…we were really moving very slowly and it was really scary, just praying that we don’t get a puncture because a puncture meant death! We came across a lorry and the driver of the lorry was dead and hanging to the ground…”

We first meet Judy Kaberia in her 2012 feature aired on Capital FM under the title Marsabit Road of Death and Terror. In the feature story, Judy says “Capital FM news is just lucky to have escaped the attack that lasted about 15 minutes”. She informs us that the 120 kilometers of untarmacked road between Merille and Marsabit was very rough and in a pathetic condition and that “a person walking was faster than the one driving”.

She speaks of meeting an Administration Police officer who told her that “in a single day, not less than two people are killed on that road”, which another local had informed her was a “death trap”. The officer and the nameless informant sounded so much like the Swahili-speaking passenger we meet in The Guardian who had told Paul Thoreau, “No, they don’t want your life – they want your shoes.” In Desert of Death, a KTN feature story on cancer, Dennis Onsarigo, one of Kenya’s leading investigative reporters, describes the landscape as “an amazing piece of art” with great touristic potential. Onsarigo reminds us that the people are constantly moving in search of water and pasture and rarely have the time to sample the beauty and splendour since something else is hunting them down.

In the 2015 BBC podcast, they enact a somewhat familiar setting, a narration interspersed by Somali, Borana and Samburu women singing in the background. It is in this Northern scene that we meet Michael Kaloki, who had helped set up the trip for Miles Warde. We gather that Kaloki is an eccentric man with hobbies like ice carving. He speaks in the polished English often deployed by educated Kenyan city sophisticates. He references the changing vibes as one nears Isiolo and the waning perceptions of belonging. He likens Isiolo to outer space – “a town whereby you’ve reached the edge of…some have called it, maybe I am stretching it, but an edge of civilization in some way and you are moving on to an unknown world…”

When the two men, Kaloki and the white man Miles Warde, arrive in Isiolo, they get surrounded by “an interesting collection of people”. A man in the crowd asks: “What is the value of this information that you are taking from us as a marginalised community who have been under mistreatment for such a long time? What is the value of this to us?”

Kaloki, the ice carver, answers: “We want to show people what life is like in Isiolo. People always talk about Nairobi, people never come out to Isiolo, so we decided, let’s come out and hear the people of Isiolo”. (Kaloki’s good intentions are lost in the unoriginal title of the podcast.)

Something more lies in the cavalier tone that expresses the exaggerated lies of walking being faster than driving in this area, or of two people dying every day, or a car puncture leading to death. All of these stories have a familiar arc. A departure from this kind of misery-filled narrative does pop up occasionally, but even then these stories reiterate the same old clichés: an enchanting landscape of godly splendour, cue Lake Paradise, the salt gem of Chalbi, Mt. Ololokwe or the praises of a cruising road trip.

Or it is the promise of immense potential: LAPSSET and Northern Kenya as the future of Kenya; Northern Kenya as the land of culture. The narratives oscillate between extremes of negativity and of positivity. Old narratives packaged in a new case labelled “Use with Caution”. The positive vibe is cautionary: Beware that this wasn’t possible a few years ago, beware that this joy is temporary, is new, is possible only because of LAPSSET, or because the fighters have gone for a short break.

Culture and the Environment and the story of triumph over FGM. Escape from early marriage is an appealing departure but its sentimentalism, its repeated tropes, its throwback feel, its revisionism, is still a confirmation of preconceived notions. There is nothing markedly different in any of these coverages; when the timelines are removed, it is hard to say when the featured events had happened.

The media portrays the North as a featureless place with a cartographic sameness. In her novel, Dust, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Kenya’s best contemporary writer, describes it as “…massive canvas of glowing, rocky, heated earth upon which anything could and did happen.” In this context, particularities seem unnecessary and often the media invents non-existent communities to populate the place as The Star did in July, 2019 by claiming that Marsabit is inhabited by amongst others, the “Gendile” and the “Rajuni” besides Gabra, Burji, Rendile, and Borana. Another non-existent community called “Bingi” is often copy-pasted from one site to another (here, and here). This invention is part of the “anything can happen” storyline. With this imagination, Mandera’s plight is projected as Wajir’s and Garissa’s fears are projected as Marsabit’s.

The cost of this violence

At the Pastoralist Leadership Summit held in Garissa in March 2019, Ali Korane, the Governor of Garissa County, stood up and spoke about how while Northern Kenya shared the threats of violent extremism with the rest of the country, for Northern Kenya there was also:

“A more serious concern of not only the real threats but also of perception. While the rest of Kenya only suffers when there is an attack, we (Northern Kenya) are always under pressure to fight perceptions of threat even where there is no insecurity. Anyone who hears about the North of this country will feel an element of fear that those areas are not safe and secure for investment, for travel, for tourism, for trade. We have these perceptions which haunt us day and night.”

Ali Roba, the Governor for Mandera County, was blunt with his disappointments.

“There are more people dying in Nairobi, Kisumu, Nakuru, Eldoret from other criminal activities than there are people dying in Isiolo, Marsabit, Moyale, Mandera from terror- related activities but the same approach as applied to Northern Kenya is not being used. Proclamations of closing the border, removing all the teachers, asking all the doctors to leave never happens wherever terror attacks happens anywhere but it will only in Northern Kenya because of poor policies of government directed towards pastoral communities.”

This perceptual threat has been at work for a long time. In 2015, specialist doctors turned down job offers in Marsabit, citing insecurity, even when the county government told them, “We are ready to pay a salary of up to Sh500,000 and provide decent housing.” The then-Governor, Ukur Yatani, spoke about how “wrong perceptions about insecurity in Northern Kenya are to blame for the lack of interest”.

But these threats go further. The media simplification of stories on ethnic conflicts and their ignorance about who the players are and what the issues in contest are, has meant that reporters use simplified explanations that often favour their informants’ political needs.

Bilinda Straight, in her paper “Making sense of violence in the “Badlands” of Kenya” points out the effects of media effacements and media marginalisation that “contributes to what is effectively a war (however unintended), not on poverty, but on the poor and marginalized”. In this paper she discusses the media in relation to violence in Northern Kenya where “media representations tend to focus on cultural stereotypes that tacitly legitimate ongoing violence by explaining it away as timeless and cultural.” Bilinda points out features that wave away violence in Northern Kenya as routine, acceptable, dismissible, and forgettable.

***

In The Forgotten People, a 1999 Kenya Human Rights Commission report, various media misdemeanors were pointed out. Many examples were curated on how media houses and journalists intentionally twist the truth, how acronyms are muddled, how place names are misplaced, how names of people are frequently misspelled. An example from the Daily Nation’s “Watchman” column of 26 July 1999 illustrates this.

“And still on matters media, Sam Akhwale points out the following variations on the name of our Foreign Minister, all of which have appeared at some time or another: Boyana Godana, Boyana Gonada, Bonaya Gonada, Bonada Goyana, Bonana Godaya, Boyada Gonana, Bodaye Gonaria, Bodana Gonaya, Bodana Goyana, Bonada Gonaya, Bonaiia Goyada. Remember colleagues everywhere, it’s Bonaya Godana.”

The report concludes that these inexcusable errors “indicate not only unfamiliarity with the areas but also disinterest, if not downright contempt”.

If in the 1990s poor transport and communication networks were accepted as passable excuses, now, with fairly developed infrastructure, one can call people on the ground and even google to confirm details about places, names and concrete details. The persistence of the same mistakes indicates disinterest and deliberate simplification. All along there has been something more at play; disinterest and contempt are definitely in the mix, but the region has been flattened out and its complexity reduced.

***

The foundation of this narrative lies in the British colonial era in Kenya. The British had fenced off the Northern Frontier District (NFD) and sat on it with no concrete vision of what they wanted. Gunther Schlee, in his book Identities on the Move, writes that the British wanted nothing “…but they did not want to leave this nothing to anybody else”.

NFD, which comprised six districts, was conceived as a buffer zone against Emperor Menelik’s expansionism and later to fascist Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia. NFD kept hostile imperial powers “at a distance of a few hundred miles of semi-desert away from the White Highlands, the Brooke Bond tea plantations and the Uganda railway”.

In post-colonial Kenya, NFD has grown beyond terra incognita into a mysterious place which Parselelo Kantai, in a book review for Chimurenga Chronic, says is “… an outer darkness that generates the ultimate fear: absolute alienation.”

The North has never escaped nor transcended this otherness. A permanent narrative has emerged over the years to keep it where it was. In school texts, the Arabic names beloved by the Muslim Northerners became synonymous with various misdemeanors that Kenyan children were taught to avoid. “These people, we were taught from the earliest days of primary school, were backward, primitive,” writes Kantai.

Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the country who had dismissed the residents as “herders by day and shifta by night” had authorised the military to unleash terror to tame the unruly people. Military operations defined Northern Kenya’s relationship with the state’s core. The post-colonial state gave carte blanche powers to rogue officers who supervised mass murders through state-ordained military operations. They gunned down camels, raped women and forced “villagilisation” during the anti-shifta operations. Pastoral nomadism, the engine of the region’s economy, was curtailed. The vestiges of this plunder continues to haunt places like Isiolo where slums – Bulas – around the urban centre house stories of destitution.

***

The Kenyan media, it seems from these stories, do not have any moral regrets. Such media practices as fidelity to authenticity, corroborations, timing, and context are disregarded with no professional consequences. The only fidelity they uphold is to the government and to the narrative. The combined assault on the already battered image of the North continues unabated.

Even where communication has improved and roads have “opened up” hitherto unreachable areas like Moyale and Marsabit, the narrative persists, emerging again and again from the remission it occasional sinks into. Conflicts are seasons of rehashing clichés, of harvesting stereotypes, a season that gives one an opportunity to engrave the narrative, adding a personal voice to a script that is passed from one hand to another.

These stories are repeatable props necessary to illustrate and embellish officialdom. These are the justifications to continue with draconian ways to continue vetting Northerners, to continue making it impossibly hard for Northern Kenya to progress in the country Kenya. Fodder that reduces people to second-hand subjects and often objects of state pity. The region is a canvas devoid of complexity, events are inflated out of proportion in keeping with the narrative sustaining the tradition.

The new post-colonial elite have also inherited the colonialists’ fear about the place. A conflicting complexity has led to the adoption of a meta-narrative that, according to Emery Roe “…is, in short, the candidate for a new policy narrative that underwrites and stabilizes the assumptions for decision making on an issue whose current policy narratives are so conflicting as to paralyze decision making.”

Sessional Paper No. 10 was thus adopted as a safe gamble that allowed for Northern Kenya to be branded the land of the shifta where adverse government policy and propaganda were marshalled to justify the state’s oppressive marginalisation of the people. These ideas were sold on radios and in National Assembly chambers. These ideas have become the default and attendant discourse on Northern Kenya.

Meanwhile, the Kenyan media has continuously pilloried the North through freeze-framing it as a region where nothing good can or does happen.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Patrick Gathara

In the run-up to the August 2017 elections, the Star newspaper carried a short news item in its inside pages that stated the Jubilee Party had contracted a company known as Cambridge Analytica to help it win the elections. Most of the other Kenyan mainstream media outlets ignored the story, which seemed strange considering that the company was embroiled in various scandals that suggested that it had manipulated British voters in the Brexit referendum, and that it might have used unethical means to get Donald Trump elected as President of the United States in 2016. Steve Bannon, who was then Trump’s chief strategist, was the company’s Vice President at the time of the Brexit referendum.

The company, owned by billionaire Robert Mercer, was known for running campaigns that amounted to “psychological warfare”. Some claimed that the data mining company’s operations might even be construed as being illegal as they crossed boundaries of privacy that should not be allowed in a democracy.

I subsequently wrote in my column in the Daily Nation about how this company might be manipulating voters in the 2017 Kenyan election, but my column did not generate much interest among my fellow journalists, even though I had warned Kenyans that this controversial company’s dirty tactics amounted to social engineering and could lead to the spread of hate speech and fake news during the election campaign period.

Not even an explosive exposé of the unethical practices employed by the company, which was published a year later in the UK’s Guardian and Observer newspapers, led to further investigations by the Kenyan media or by Kenya’s electoral body, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). It was as if Cambridge Analytica, despite its tarnished reputation, had successfully managed to buy the silence of Kenyan journalists and electoral officials.

The Kenyan media’s puzzling lack of interest in Cambridge Analytica’s dirty tactics was mind- boggling. No Kenyan journalist or electoral body official investigated whether the company was behind the uthamaki movement that saw Uhuru Kenyatta win by a landslide in Central Kenya. No one bothered to find out whether the company was behind a social media campaign to instil fear about a Raila Odinga presidency – and Luos in general – even though undercover reporters in the UK had recorded the company’s top managers admitting that they dug the dirt on their clients’ political opponents, and often hired spies and sex workers to obtain potentially embarrassing information. What dirt did they have on Kenya’s opposition leaders? And was the fear of this dirt being exposed a reason for the “golden handshake” between Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta last year? Again, no one to date has bothered to find out.

Dirty tactics

The unethical tactics employed by Cambridge Analytica were revealed last year by the whistleblower Christopher Rylie, who claimed the company harvested Facebook data from millions of people around the world and then targeted them with political messages and misinformation without their knowledge or consent.

This was confirmed by a series of articles known as “The Cambridge Analytica Files” published in the Observer, which showed that Cambridge Analytica used data from sites such as Facebook to manipulate people’s emotions, and get them to vote in a particular way. One former employee told journalist Carole Cadwalladr — the author of the series — that the aim of the company was to capture every voter’s information environment, from magazine subscriptions to airline bookings, and to use this data to craft individual messages to create an “alt-right news and information ecosystem”.

The unethical tactics employed by Cambridge Analytica were revealed last year by the whistleblower Christopher Rylie, who claimed that the company harvested Facebook data from millions of people around the world and then targeted them with political messages and misinformation without their knowledge or consent.

Cadwalladr says that Cambridge Analytica’s tactics were not just about combining social psychology with data analytics – they were much more sinister. The company was not ideologically neutral and had strong links with well-heeled right-wing groups and politicians in Britain, the United States, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Its campaigns thus propagated a distinctly ultra-right agenda. Later investigations into the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia prior to the 2016 elections also raised the question about whether Cambridge Analytica facilitated these links.

These revelations led to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitting that 87 million Facebook users’ data had been mined. He was subsequently hauled before the US Congress and fined $5 billion for privacy violations. Britain’s parliament referred to Facebook as “digital gangsters” and the UK government has since started an antitrust inquiry into the company. France, Australia, Japan, India, New Zealand and Singapore are also considering passing new laws to regulate giant Internet platforms like Facebook.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal not only impacted the fortunes of Facebook, whose share prices plummeted, but also Cambridge Analytica, which went bankrupt and was forced to shut down. However, in Kenya, no inquiry into Facebook or Cambridge Analytica took place and no laws or regulations to protect people’s online privacy have been passed.

Why now?

Having ignored this story for so long, it seems odd that now, nearly two years after the 2017 election, the Daily Nation’s editors feel that news about a high-profile British MP admitting to the UK’s Channel 4 News that she worked for Cambridge Analytica in Jubilee’s election campaign in 2017 deserves front-page treatment. In its 17 July 2019 edition, the Daily Nation splashed the story of Alexandra Phillips telling a journalist that she was secretly employed by Uhuru Kenyatta as a political communications consultant. The newspaper also carried a photo of Phillips donning a Jubilee cap. In the leaked video clip where she admitted to working for Jubilee, Phillips also said that she loved Kenya. (Why wouldn’t she? Her contract was valued at £300,000 per month and her job description, she claims, including writing speeches for Uhuru.)

The Jubilee Party denied any links with Cambridge Analytica, but a few days later, in its Sunday edition, the Nation revealed that it had seen leaked emails that linked State House operative Nancy Gitau with the disgraced company. Apparently all communication between Cambridge Analytica’s consultants working in Kenya had to be copied to Ms. Gitau, who also offered suggestions on how the election campaign should be conducted.

Why did this story merit newspaper space and why now? Perhaps it has to do with the politics of the 2022 elections. Uhuru Kenyatta will not be running in these elections, as he will have come to the end of his second and final term. Moreover, the Jubilee Party is no longer what it was, with the in- fighting between the two principal parties of this coalition becoming more vicious by the day. So a story like this is not likely to have any significant impact on the 2022 elections. And it will also have no effect on the fortunes of Cambridge Analytica, which has already closed shop, thanks to the many scandals it was embroiled in. Which is why it seems odd that the Nation chose to highlight this story now.

But what the story did reveal was the extent to which Uhuru Kenyatta and his Jubilee Party were willing to go to win the 2013 and 2017 elections. Uhuru is not averse to paying foreign PR companies huge amounts of money to manipulate voters and the media. In the run-up to the 2013 elections, when he was facing charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC), he hired the services of a London-based PR firm called BTP Advisers to manage his election campaign. The PR company, whose slogan is “We deliver campaigns that change hearts and minds”, advised Uhuru to use aggressive propaganda tactics that cast the ICC as racist and its supporters, including local civil society organisations (which his propagandists dubbed “the evil society”), as puppets of the West.

On its website, BTP Advisers revealed the winning strategy that delivered the presidency to Uhuru in 2013: “By exposing the weak and flawed nature of the ICC case against him, we made the election a choice about whether Kenyans would decide their own future or have it dictated to them by others.” By framing the ICC cases as a sovereignty issue for Kenyans, the strategy cleverly undermined both the ICC and the case against Kenyatta. As fate would have it, the ICC would later drop charges against Kenyatta and his fellow indictee and running mate William Ruto due to lack of sufficient evidence.

Uhuru also hired a group of bloggers and journalists dubbed “The State House Boys” who carried out an aggressive propaganda campaign on social and other digital media to whitewash Uhuru and his party. The so-called Presidential Strategic Communications Unit was built by Johnson Sakaja – a young man with political ambitions who would later become Senator for Nairobi County – who recruited the likes of Dennis Itumbi and David Nzioka to build Brand Uhuru. Although this roguish bunch of propagandists have since been sidelined and now work for Deputy President William Ruto, their vitriolic rhetoric and misinformation campaign had a lasting impact on the 2013 and 2017 elections.

Digital surveillance

Did President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Jubilee party win the 2013 and 2017 elections fairly, or did a UK-based political consultancy company called Cambridge Analytica help them win by using unethical means? This question surfaced again after the release of an explosive documentary aired on the UK’s Channel 4 News in 2018 that showed the managing director of the company, Mark Turnbull, admitting to stage-managing the last two elections in Kenya, from rebranding the Jubilee party twice and even writing its manifesto and speeches. In the Channel 4 News documentary, Turnbull is shown telling undercover reporters that the company uses people’s deep-seated hopes and fears to manipulate them. “It is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts, because actually it is all about emotion,” he said.

The question Kenyans must ask is whether Cambridge Analytica undermined our democracy and made a mockery of our elections. Is the company responsible for deepening ethnic divisions in our society? The deliberate manipulation of people’s fears and emotions also raises ethical questions. In a country like Kenya, where ethnic-based tensions have led to violence and bloodshed in the past, was Cambridge Analytica being highly irresponsible by stoking these tensions?

Other African countries have been more diligent about employing companies that create divisions and disseminate misinformation. For example, in the wake of the corruption and “state capture” scandals involving former South African president Jacob Zuma and the notorious Gupta family, the UK-based PR company Bell Pottinger was accused of initiating a cynical campaign on behalf of the Guptas that pitted South Africa’s whites against blacks. When details of the “economic apartheid” campaign were exposed, the PR company lost credibility and collapsed. But in Kenya, not a single investigation has been conducted to expose the unethical actions Cambridge Analytica was involved in that might have impacted our elections and polarised the country along ethnic lines.

The question Kenyans must ask is whether Cambridge Analytica undermined our democracy and made a mockery of our elections.

Going forward, can we expect similar campaigns in the run-up to the 2022 election? Are there other companies such as Cambridge Analytica that are marketing themselves to Kenyan politicians? Such companies have found a ready market in poor and corrupt countries where leaders will go to any length (and pay millions) to win elections. Might Ruto, the presidential candidate in 2022, also hire a company like Cambridge Analytica for his election campaign? Ruto has loads of money and the contest in 2022 will very likely be a high stakes game. Cambridge Analytica may have closed shop, but other companies might be waiting in the wings to make money during the 2022 election campaign period? Might they now have their eyes on Ruto? And will the Kenyan media be more diligent about such companies or will they wait for foreign media to expose them?

We must also ask whether the introduction of the Huduma Namba (the newly rolled-out National Integrated Identity Management System) in the absence of regulations that protect privacy could also impact the elections. Could the personal biometric and other data that has been captured by the Huduma Namba be manipulated by electoral officials? Was electoral official Chris Msando’s murder prior to the 2017 elections linked to his knowledge of such a scheme?

We live in scary times. Information technology, which was once viewed as “the great leveler” that would deliver true democracy to the world’s people, is now being used to manipulate elections, subvert democracy, and promote authoritarianism.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Media Ethics in the Internet Age

By Patrick Gathara My earliest encounter of the word homosexuality in the Kenyan press was in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to the magazines Drum and True Love, which were published out of South Africa at the time. There was the Dear Dolly advice section, which offered advice on relationships and what I thought then were ‘adult’ things. The mainstream press occasionally carried out an ‘expose’ on areas of Mombasa Island that were notorious for homosexual activities. When it came to TV, I remember there was a couple of male sex workers who were used as the standard representation of all things gay. This seemed to suit the narrative that all gays were sex workers and effeminate. Any queer reporting had to be sensational, and inevitably leading to an AIDS-related life or death.

Even today, in most cases, whenever there is a ‘gay issue’ that cannot be avoided, the pictures used in the local media will be of cut-off jean shorts or the most dramatic photo that can be found off the wires. It’s all aimed at creating the ‘hawa watu’ (these people) feeling. ‘Gayism’ – a term that doesn’t exist in the English language until our newsrooms birthed it – is rarely portrayed in a way that normalises same-sex relationship or depicts queers’ identities in a positive way.

I cringe when I remember the Standard’s coverage of the UK-based Kenyan gay couple who got married back in 2009. Once the story was picked up by other media houses, they hot-footed to the unsuspecting parent’s home in Murang’a, and sought a reaction that was anything but shocking. No one really cared to ask whether she even knew what homosexuality was.

Do we ask the same of women in heterosexual relationships?

“The responsibility for the news rests with consumers as well as producers, or rather when we accept and repeat statements, we too become producers of the beliefs that shape this world. It behoves us to do so with care.” The majority of the media houses are guilty of regurgitation of the lie that homosexuality is illegal and that Repeal 162 was about gay marriage. This has not stopped the public to from asking the same media houses: ‘if homosexuality is illegal, then why are gay people allowed to walk around freely in the country?’ The gay marriage line has kept being weaved into stories even after the petitioners of the case repeatedly stated the case was not about marriage. Sadly, we have become a public that simply consumes without question. Media audiences in Kenya are severely malnourished! There is a lot more reporting than real journalism from our media houses. One might even say there is a lot more misreporting than reporting taking place. And this extends beyond ‘hawa watu’ issues.

Sadly, many notable stories on LGBTQ Kenyans or allies are falling off the radar of our media houses and being picked up by the foreign press. I must say the Daily Nation is in the habit of covering LGBTQ Kenyan stories through news agencies like AFP. I could be wrong but I have not seen a local interview done with Rafiki film director Wanuri Kahiu on any local platform. The film remains banned in Kenya. Another banned film is Stories Of Our Lives, and producer Jim Chuchu told me that no local media house approached their team for an interview even as the movie was receiving accolades and screenings at film festivals across the globe. There are writers who are getting recognised for the queer literature that is being produced in this country. Junior Nyong’o’s non- binary but very stylish fashion sense has led to questions about his sexuality, instead of being applauded for its uniqueness. They aren’t even letting him shine! There are visual artists whose work portrays queerness in a way that celebrates us as Kenyans. Work is being created that is showcasing our varied tapestry as a people and narratives being created that are ours, Kenyan. But journalists who have been trained to report on the issues by LGBTQ activists point the finger at their editors and editors in turn are in fear of the media owners. Plus, there is also the fear that covering a good queer story or even humanising a queer might be seen as an assertion of queerness. And what is wrong with that? Why can’t stories be told without being moralised? Doesn’t the Kenyan reader, listener or viewer deserve the right to make their own judgement?

Chinua Achebe in his essay, Spelling Our Proper Name, says, ‘The telling of the story of black (insert LGBTQ) people in our time, and for a considerable period has been self-appointed responsibility of white (insert patriarchy or moralists) people and they have done it to suit a white (insert patriarchy or moralists again) purpose, naturally. That must change and is indeed beginning to change, but not without resistance or even hostility. So much psychological, political and economic interest is vested in the negative change. The reason is simple. If you are going to enslave or colonize somebody, you are not going to write a glowing report about either him before or after. Rather you will uncover or invent terrible stories about him so that your act of brigandage will become easy for you to live with. ‘

Our media for many years was lauded for being the most vibrant, ‘free’, daring at one time, and most professional in the region. And many editors, journalists and even photographers paid the price, some with their lives, for choosing to fight with the pen and protect the integrity of the fourth estate. Fortunately, we no longer see arguments about homosexuality being un-African or a western import, because ‘hawa watu’ are us, Kenyans of the soil. It is increasingly difficult to sustain the ‘western influence’ argument. There are fewer images of stereotypical gay bodies used to depict gay narratives. There is more discourse. However, it needs to be a discourse that honours the strength of the Constitution and the dynamism of our Kenyan human-ness. I hope that soon when I encounter media coverage of LGBTQ issues, it will recognise and acknowledge that there isn’t one single narrative to our ‘gayism’, which actually isn’t even a proper word.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Patrick Gathara

“The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy so he can’t fathom the real intent.” – Sun Tzu (Chinese war leader, strategist and philosopher)

On New Year’s Eve 2016, President Xi Jinping of China sent a congratulatory message to the China Global Television Network (CGTN), which had rebranded and relaunched its former label, the China Central Television (CCTV).

“Tell China stories well, spread China stories as well, spread China’s voice well, let the world know a three-dimension colourful China and showcase China’s role as a builder of world peace,” extolled the president while inaugurating the channel’s newly enlarged and sophisticated production studios in Beijing.

CGTN, which is the biggest news network and production house in mainland China, sustained its operations by beaming and broadcasting news as CCTV, just like before, and therefore was not affected by the rebranding. It has continued to telecast news and make documentaries and news programmes tailored for local consumption that are sanctioned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. CGTN is the equivalent of the state-run Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), but with the clout and financial muscle that makes KBC look like one of its many news production departments.

But it is the CGTN’s operations and manoeuvres geared to cast China as a global phenomenon in the 21st century and beyond that the Central Committee is really keen to see. It would like its wings to spread worldwide so as to, “showcase China’s role as a builder of world peace”, as President Jinping mildly put it more than two years ago. Delivered as a message to a world that is undergoing tumultuous political shocks, it was a statement that camouflaged China’s real and serious global expansionist intentions as we enter the third decade of the 21st millennium.

That statement, as innocuous as it sounded, is a characteristic of Chinese foreign policy lingo that deliberately seeks to not frighten or scare its neighbours, such as India, Japan and South Korea, into alertness (military or otherwise), or to not arouse suspicious feelings (which might lead to heightened escalation of global drums of war) among fellow world economic powers, such as Germany, Japan, the United States and the militaristic Russia. Such a statement also serves to calm and reassure countries in Africa and Asia that China hopes to extract raw materials from.

It is a philosophical underpinning that was underscored by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese post-modern reformist leader who ruled between 1978 and 1989, who famously stated in the early 1980s: “Observe development soberly, maintain your position, meet challenges calmly, hide your capacity and bide your time, remain free of ambition, never claim leadership.”

Yet, beneath the carefully crafted and worded statements by the president and the senior Central Committee members that portray China as a humble and benevolent Big Brother – whose only agenda is world peace and harmonious co-existence – is a hidden, subtle, and ruthless ambition and pursuit of global power that China hopes to use to conquer the world and re-establish China as the dominant civilisation that it once was in the centuries gone by.

CGTN is a consolidation of six carefully picked foreign-language operations. Apart from Chinese, the channel broadcasts in Arabic, English, French, Russian and Spanish. It is a convergence of print, radio, TV, and online (new media) publication. In 2009, the Chinese government had already set $6.5billion aside for CCTV’s rebranding and expansion into CGTN. In November 2018, CGTN opened a state-of-the-art bureau in Chiswick, a wealthy London suburb. That bureau is supposed to cover the length and breadth of continental Europe.

The One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative is the combination of railway lines (belts) and (silk) roads that are supposed to link mainland China with the rest of the world, collapsing distances for a hungry China in need of raw materials for its economic quantum leap and eventually its world political power. It is China’s latest massive agenda, which it hopes will catapult it to an economic power house that rivals every other world economic power within 25 years.

Italy, Portugal and Greece are among Europe’s rancorous democracies that have bought into the idea of OBOR. China will be building a road and railway line into Italy and with that link, create trade routes and have access to continental Europe’s goods as it taps into its engineering and technological advancement. The newly opened CGTN bureau in London, one of the biggest financial hubs in the world, will, among other things, capture and tell the story of the entry and success of OBOR in Europe.

Nairobi and news out of Africa

However, it is the CGTN’s Nairobi bureau that continues to elicit excitement and which is being closely watched (pun intended) by Western powers who once totally commanded and controlled the information flow entering and leaving the country and region. The bureau officially started broadcasting from Nairobi on January 11, 2012 as CCTV. On December 31, 2016, the bureau launched its CGTN operations and was made the biggest bureau in Africa, whose operations cover the entire continent, especially in regions that China has a keen interest in. Just around the same time, Xinhua, China’s largest news agency, signed a pact with Nation Media Group (NMG), ostensibly to trade news, but really for Xinhua, to have access to tell its stories in the largest newspaper in the region.

“Nairobi’s geopolitical strategic location – its nearness to the Horn of Africa, the Great Lakes region, the Indian Ocean littoral and maritime connection, its physical infrastructure and communications advancement and the fact that it’s the diplomatic corps’ hub in the region, easily persuaded the Central Committee of the Communist Party to make Nairobi the centre of its media operations outside of Beijing.”

Other CGTN bureaus in Africa exist – in Johannesburg, Lagos, and Cairo. The other major bureau outside of Beijing and Nairobi is the Washington DC bureau. The Washington bureau gives the Chinese an opportunity to show the Americans that they can also operate on their soil. However, in terms of strategic significance, geopolitical importance and long-term plans, the Nairobi bureau far outflanks the Washington bureau.

The re-organisation of the state-controlled CGTN in Nairobi did not go unnoticed by the Western media based in the city. At just about the same time, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), another state-run media conglomerate, was also expanding and moving its Nairobi operations from the central business district offices at Norfolk Towers to the quiet suburb of Riverside Drive. Its first move was to raid CGTN’s experienced staff – editors, reporters and mainly producers – and to hike their salaries and remunerations as an incentive to luring them from the heavily-funded Chinese media house, where money was the least of its problems. In its expanded offices, the BBC Nairobi bureau, which has been reporting on Kenya and the East African region for the last five decades or so, employed 300 journalists (four-fifths of whom were locals) to boost its image and presence.

“Our most important investment,” opined the Director of BBC News, Francesca Unsworth, “will be training the next generation of African reporters and producers to world class standards.”

This dramatic shift in the BBC’s policy does not surprise Gray Phombeah, who was the BBC’s Nairobi bureau chief from 2006 till 2008. When he became bureau chief, the BBC’s Nairobi office was tiny, comprising only around ten people. By the time he left in October 2008, it had expanded to more than 30 staff members, the majority of whom were Kenyan journalists. “It was during this time that the BBC broadcast for the first time the Swahili programme, Amka na BBC, from outside its London headquarters,” he says.

However, Phombeah is aware that “Africanising” the BBC bureau in Nairobi does not necessarily mean that Kenyan or African stories will be told from an African perspective and without bias. “We have to remember that the BBC World Service is Britain’s soft power, and so who controls and manages its bureaus abroad is part and parcel of that. The fact that the BBC has recognised the importance of having African journalists telling the continent’s stories is a good thing, but we must also accept the fact that only those stories that are palatable or acceptable to the British ruling class and Foreign Office mandarins get told.”

Clearly CGTN’s serious rebranding and infusion of more money by the state for its expansion and penetration into the African continent merited the BBC’s re-evaluation of its operations in Africa – whether by default or design. The BBC also “relaunched” in November 2018 to position itself as the premier global broadcaster that takes the African continent seriously.

Two decades ago, in 1998, the BBC World Service had already opened its office in Nairobi. “The BBC began by moving its operations from Johannesburg to Nairobi,” said a senior BBC editor, who is not authorised to comment on the BBC’s Africa media plans. “Several things mitigated the shift: labour issues – the trade unions in South Africa are very powerful and strong – the worrying issue of escalating xenophobia and the fact that Johannesburg oftentimes is far removed (geographically and its heartbeat) from the continental issues that are central to the rest of the African countries.”

Africa is as important to the BBC as it is to CGTN. The BBC, in a project it is calling World 2020, in which its strategic expansion plans in Africa from its Nairobi headquarters are expected to have reached their zenith, is also expanding into Asia, building networks and partnering with local radio and TV stations to create as big a BBC audience as it possibly can.

“The Kenyan journalists working for CGTN have no say whatsoever on content development or editorial matters,” said an editor, who has since left the global television network. “That’s the prerogative of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party.”

“Today, the United Kingdom’s best known and strongest foreign policy brand is the BBC,’ said the BBC senior editor. “With the Brexit imbroglio, the UK must look outwards and reach out to countries that it has had past relations with.” (Many of these countries, it goes without saying, are former colonies.)

The Propaganda Department

CGTN currently employs 150 local journalists who work as camera personnel, studio technicians, editors and producers, but the managerial and editorial decisions remain solely in the hands of the expatriate Chinese staff.

CGTN is not in the business of making profits, but countering what it considers to be the Western media’s distortion of the Chinese presence on the continent, said the former CGTN editor. “The major agenda for CGTN in Africa is propaganda, that is propagating China’s interests in Africa, through its own voice and medium.” To this extent, said the editor, “the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department heavily channels inexhaustible funds to CGTN as part of it global information warfare.”

But a senior assistant director of news at CGTN, a Kenyan, refutes the assertion that CGTN is an out-and-out self-censorship propaganda channel. “True the Managing Editor is Chinese, but his substantive editors are international staff, and they are anybody else but Chinese. CGTN only controls news that touch on Chinese interests and its foreign policy, its Asian neighbourhood, and major state conferences, like the just concluded One Belt, One Road International Forum that took place in Beijing last month…every other news is fair game.”

The most boring time to work for CGTN, said the director of news, is the month of March. “It’s the political season in China. That’s when the executive committee of the Communist Party meets and deliberates on issues. It also the time Parliament does the same, as it passes legislative laws deemed appropriate for the country. On these matters, nobody is better placed to handle them than the Chinese staff themselves. You easily could lose your job for ‘misreporting’ these events.” Misreporting here meaning reporting impartially and being critical, if need be.

CGTN may not be as thorough as the BBC, but by and large it is building its content for its Africa coverage, said the director of news. “China has a 100-year-long term plan for Africa and a fully- fledged news coverage of Africa is part of the plan. When CCTV started in 2012, it used to have only 30 minutes of African news. Soon, it was broadcasting the one-hour lunchtime Africa Live. Africa Live soon had two editions – the lunchtime one between 1 pm and 2 pm and the 8pm one. Now, they even have Global Business Africa, a one-hour programme dedicated to African business news daily between 9pm and 10pm.”

Other programmes include the weekend shows, Face of Africa and Talk Africa. Face of Africa, a documentary, is shown on Sundays for 30 minutes, while Talk Africa is televised on Saturdays, between 8.30pm and 9pm. Talk Africa touched on various African issues, be they economic, political or social. There is also 30 minutes of African sports reporting on Saturdays. CGTN’s goal in Africa is to eventually sell China’s brand image to every corner of the continent, said the director of news.

In this current world of media explosion and Internet influence, if you can control the information warfare globally, you have half won the battle against your adversaries, said CGTN’s former editor, who added that China has taken this dictum extremely seriously. China believes that it is only by controlling and telling its narratives through its own kaleidoscopic lenses that it will achieve its own goal and pursuit of ultimate power and influence in the world.

But more than telling its own narratives and controlling what kind of news comes from its channels, the Chinese also realised that the Western media in Africa does not report positively about the continent. “They understood there is a gap they can plug in, even as they plot on how to maximize and rationalise their presence on the vast continent,” said the CGTN news director.

“In Africa, CGTN is competing with the Americans especially, whose media presence in the continent has been waning. The Cable News Network (CNN) and the Voice of America (VOA) are the only American news media outlets that report anything on Africa and when they do, it’s not all positive. Even then, CNN has one single correspondent dedicated to the whole of Africa.” The director of news said many American journalists consider being posted to Africa as a downgrade – in their minds Africa is still this backward, backwaters continent.

In the information warfare in Africa between America and China, “America has unfortunately been losing the (propaganda) war,” said the CGTN producer. “Today, when CNN wants to report on Africa, it relies on just one leanly-staffed bureau based in South Africa, and if it needs support, it flies in one of its various correspondents, who jet in in the morning and by evening have jetted out.”

For example, when David McKenzie, the CNN reporter stationed in Johannesburg, or Nina Elbagir, the Sudan-born CNN foreign correspondent, report on Africa, it is usually about a tragedy and generally bad news. “The only time CNN reports big time on Africa is when a calamity has taken place…CNN’s model on reporting Africa has remained the same since the days of Jeff Koinange – who was also the sole reporter from Cape to Cairo, Dar es Salaam to Dakar, Luanda to Lagos. Hence, with the exception of BBC, the Western media doesn’t have a major presence in Africa,” said the director of news.

Natural resources diplomacy

The decision by China to pick Nairobi as its continental operational base was a well- calibrated move and a “diplomatic coup” to bolster its grip on the country’s and the continent’s strategic extractive resource materials. China, through CGTN, views itself as a friend of Africa and enabler of its developmental progress and peacekeeping force, hence, its “favourable” reporting on its working relations with some of the countries it is directly dealing with.

The producer observed that “CGTN will not do ‘human rights stories’…the kind of stories that Al Jazeera, BBC and other international media organisations are wont to doing in Africa because the Communist Party has a clearly spelt out non-interference [foreign] policy that states that China will not seek to influence any country’s domestic politics.”

“China opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti in July 2017 – People’s Liberation Army (and) Navy (PLAN) – from there it coordinates its peace keeping missions in Africa,” said the CGTN producer. “Nairobi is close enough to be reporting (positively) on the Chinese force working in trouble spots such as Mali and South Sudan, helping to stabilise those countries (peacefully) without China necessarily interfering with their domestic affairs.” According to the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank, China in 2017 contributed about 2,500 troops and military experts to six United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa.

Hence, “China’s entry into Africa – with its value-neutral ‘natural resources diplomacy’ – has outflanked the West and forced a donor retreat from democracy,” recently wrote Wachira Maina, a constitutional lawyer.

To shut its (Western media) critics, CGTN has ostensibly been reporting good news coming out of Africa, such as innovation and technological advancement in relation to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and business concerns all over Africa, said the CGTN producer. “CGTN content is heavily slanted towards their investments in Africa – mainly in infrastructure and telecommunications, light industries (solar panels and green energy), mobile telephony assembly, mobile gadgets customised for Africa, and heavy commercial vehicle assembly in South Africa.”

China’s First Auto Works (FAW), the long distance truck engines and body works, opened its first plant in Johannerberg and CGTN never ceases to report about how China is partnering with Africa to build and develop its future production plants. Until Huawei, a Chinese telecommunication company, entered the African market in 1998, Africa’s telecommunication industry was controlled and dominated by Western multinational corporations, such as Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia. A dozen years later, the stiff market competition triggered by Huawei and other Chinese private companies have altered the terrain completely. The cost of telecommunications equipment and rates have gone down drastically.

Five months after CGTN was inaugurated in Beijing, in May 2017, Kenya launched a $3.2 billion standard gauge railway line funded by China, linking the capital Nairobi to the port of Mombasa, arguably making it the biggest infrastructure project in Kenya since independence in 1963. Popularly known as the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), the railway line is part of the OBOR project. That railway line is supposed to run all the way to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), passing through Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. It is also supposed to divert to South Sudan and Ethiopia.

The East-West media war

“Under the One Belt, One Road initiative, China is investing nearly $900 billion in what it thinks of as a trunk silk-road. One trunk is an overland network of rail, road and power grids that link China’s industrial heartland to the vast oil, natural gas and mineral resources of Central Asia and on the market of Eastern and Western Europe,” observed Wachira. “The second trunk is a maritime silk road with two branches – an Indian Ocean link to sub-Saharan Africa and a Red Sea link to North Africa and Europe where ‘maritime road and overland belt’ converge.”

China, an emerging global power, and Britain, a retreating and politically troubled former colonial power, will channel their “media wars” from their bases in Nairobi. It will be a battle between a new Eastern power that hopes to gain a foothold in the continent’s unexplored extractive sector and a nostalgic Western power keen not to lose its control over African and Asian Commonwealth countries. Either way, both have decided to use the media as soft power to endear themselves to the continent.

In China in Africa: Power, Media Perceptions and a Pan-Developing Identity, Shubi Li and Helge Ronning argue that China’s media presence in Africa has increased in the last couple of years. “The country’s major media representative, Xinhua News Agency, added five more branches in 2011.”

The authors point out that 150 journalists and 400 local staff in Nairobi dispatch 1,800 pieces of news in English every month. “Radio has been an indispensable means of transmitting soft power, especially in a continent where half of the countries have a 30 percent illiteracy rate,” says the book’s authors. “In February 2006, China Radio International (CRI) launched is first overseas FM radio station in Nairobi with a schedule of daily programmes for 19 hours in English, Kiswahili and Chinese,covering China’s economic, social and cultural development.”

But China’s penetration of the Africa media scene has not been without criticism: “China has a record of jamming transmissions that it finds unpalatable,” said an editorial in the Zimbabwe Independent, which is quoted in the book. The editorial said that China also passes this technology to its (African) friends. Said the editorial: “China’s strict control of media and the Internet is not helping when it attempts to offer media aid in Africa.”

On the other hand, observe Li and Ronning in their book, “Chinese media following instructions from the Central Propaganda Department has been educating the public about the importance of building up soft power internationally and exporting the Chinese development model.”

China’s growing global dominance in the last quarter of a century has grown significantly. Indeed, the recently concluded One Belt, One Road International Cooperation Forum in Beijing further cemented Chinese dominance as a fast-rising global superpower. The country’s media presence in Africa is its latest strategy for global supremacy.

However, unlike that of other superpowers, the Chinese model of world domination is more subtle, as observed by the great Chinese war leader, strategist and philosopher, Sun Tzu, who said, “The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy so he can’t fathom the real intent.”

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Media Ethics in the Internet Age

By Patrick Gathara

BBC Natural History has just announced a new series, “One Planet, Seven Worlds”, fronted by veteran broadcaster David Attenborough, to tell “the fundamental truth about what makes each [continent] unique.” I’d be astonished if it covered one of the most important aspects of the “fundamental truth”, which is the way local people have enhanced biodiversity and shaped “nature” since time immemorial, and what happened and is still happening to those people who have largely escaped being subsumed into the mainstream by colonialism and industrialisation. (These minorities are now labelled as ethnic, indigenous or tribal, depending on the regional context.)

Like most families in rural Britain, we got our first television towards the end of the 1950s. Every five o’clock came Children’s Hour – rather dull puppets, some excellent cartoons, and of course “nature.” My earliest memory is that of Armand and Michaela Denis filming “Pygmies” and constructing a rope suspension bridge in Africa (entirely faked, why would they want one?), and a boyish David Attenborough in fuzzy black and white chasing down wild animals to capture for the London Zoo. It was the start of something big: The BBC’s Natural History Unit has gone on to become the world’s biggest producer of wildlife films.

In the decades since the rope trick bridge, the BBC Natural History Unit has also presented a single, unshakable view of wildlife and conservation. No one doubts that it works magnificently; it’s the corporation’s biggest money earner. It formed and still shapes the public’s view of what conservation actually means in distant continents. This specialised BBC unit shows us a pristine wilderness full of photogenic beasts whose existence, we are told (usually by the same David Attenborough), is endangered by loss of habitat, human overpopulation, and of course “poaching” – such threats apparently emanating from Africans or Asians.

The same narrative is also peddled by the big conservation organisations, which thrive in financial symbiosis with the BBC’s orthodoxy as the corporation makes money from its programmes and as donations from the viewing public flow to the NGOs. Each presents the complex question of conservation in exactly the same way, and each proposes the same, simple – and entirely wrong – solution. It is“fortress conservation” with more and more“brave guards” and increasing military force and weaponry to defend the animals against the human killers (who are never white).

To anyone who knows the other sides of conservation, the bias is obvious, but the BBC unit’s ideology is relentless and impacts the wider BBC as a whole. The corporation’s website, for example, almost always features a news story about poaching, illustrated with grisly pictures of mutilated animals, or it did until recently.

“Massacre” in Botswana

Then, in September2018, something new happened. It began with BBC News breaking a story on elephant poaching in Botswana (“Dozens of elephants killed near Botswana wildlife sanctuary”) which, as usual, gathered in hysteria as it rolled around the web. It became a“genocide” and even one of the “worst mass poaching sprees” in Africa.

But the tale unraveled when scrutinised, and no one who’s followed it can now sensibly believe it was true. There was no “massacre”, it turns out that the story arose at least partly from the power struggle between the country’s former President Khama, an army general known for his implacable support for “fortress conservation,” and his successor, President Masisi.

In spite of a great deal of evidence to that effect, the BBC journalist who broke the story, Alastair Leithead, stood by it, though the corporation itself quietly changed its tune. For example, over eighty per cent of BBC Africa tweets reported on poaching in the month prior to the “massacre” but there was only one story (about shellfish) in the following three months. Leithead’s source for Botswana was Elephants Without Borders, an NGO with a vested interest in supporting ex-president Khama, and which would have raked in donations as a result of the story. Leithead was doubtless unaware of how he had favoured one political faction over another; he was presumably just supporting the BBC’s traditional conservation model in the run-up to the Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference due to take place in London the following month, October 2018.

That’s speculation, but what’s certain is that films that show a completely different side of conservation, such as the excellent “Unnatural Histories,” can be counted on one hand and are relegated to non-mainstream channels, like BBC4. The wholly different narrative they expose begins with the revelation that protected areas were never “pristine wildernesses” in the first place; they were home to local peoples who actually created the “wild” ecosystems, and who were then thrown out and destroyed when parks were imposed by national governments. The grass plains of the Serengeti, the Amazon rainforest and so on, were all formed by vigorous human intervention over thousands of years. Experts now accept this, but it remains little known among the general public. Why? Because very few BBC nature viewers have ever been told the real history: After all, it profoundly undermines the fake one.

The destruction of the original landowners, the creators and curators of the world’s “wildernesses”, is criminal in several respects. One is that they were often far better at maintaining biodiversity than the incoming, usually white, conservationists. The latter often fail, and usually blame the locals when things go wrong.

Another point is just how protected these areas really are. They usually include an infrastructure specifically aimed at only the richest tourists. Most of the African parks marketed as “pristine wilderness” include roads, hotels (called “lodges,”to make them seem smaller), luxury “camps”, artificial water holes and salt licks to attract animals, airstrips, and so on. I have been in one where a leopard appeared every evening in perfect view of the hotel dining room, just as food was being served. The excited guests rarely stayed long enough to question what might lie behind this spectacular coincidence, but of course the tourists weren’t the only ones being fed by the hotel staff.

Protected areas are not only landscaped for elite tourism, some of the animals which fill our screens have been transported there. That doesn’t always work out well, and some pay with their lives. For example, at least ten rhinos died in Kenya in 2018 as a result of being moved into a park. That’s more than were poached in either of the previous two years. Sadly, it’s not an isolated incident: Some twenty per cent of “endangered” cheetahs routinely die while being transported in South Africa by conservationists.

But artificial landscaping and importing animals are just two aspects of what has become partly a film set: Protected areas are often home to mining (such as the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana), logging, destructive monoculture, such as teak and oil palm, and trophy hunting (such as around Lobeke National Park, Cameroon). Much of this happens in government-approved concessions and some of the companies involved work in close partnership with conservation NGOs. Since the Botswana elephant “massacre” was exposed as a sham in September 2018, I’ve noticed a quiet shift at the BBC: I haven’t been scrutinising rigorously, but I can’t remember seeing a single poaching story headlined since.

Pitting people against nature

However, now there’s a new development, this time concerning India. It began with a BBC news report in 2017, “Killing for Conservation”, by correspondent, Justin Rowlatt. His film exposed the atrocities committed in the name of conservation in India’s Kaziranga National Park – cinematically visited by Prince William and Kate – where rangers have “shoot on sight” orders and are never prosecuted for vigorously deploying them. They killed around twenty so-called poachers a year, sometimes more than the number of animals poached.

Some “animal liberationists” may raise a cheer at this gruesome news, but Rowlatt filmed testimony from innocent locals who had been devastated as a result, including relatives of a man with severe learning difficulties, fatally shot as he was rounding up cows near the park’s edge, and 7-year-old Akash Orang, crippled for life when rangers fired on him by mistake. His father told Rowlatt, “He used to be cheerful, he isn’t anymore. In the night he wakes up in pain and cries for his mother.”

Killing for Conservation was about Kaziranga in Assam, but many other atrocities have been reported from dozens of protected areas across India. At the time of writing, no less than 280,000 people, mostly tribal Adivasis,* face illegal and forced eviction from tiger reserves, usually from places where they’ve lived successfully in close proximity to the big cats for generations.

Rowlatt’s film attracted a fierce outcry from the conservation establishment. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) clamoured for retribution, so the Indian government responded by banning the BBC from all protected areas for five years. In a stroke, the wildlife filmmakers were deprived of their most iconic non-African star, and all because BBC News had exposed an inconvenient truth about what“conservation” actually meant for local people.

At the end of 2018, the story took another twist when a letter received by the NTCA was leaked. It was seemingly written by Julian Hector, head of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, but had no date or addressee. Hector expressed“regret for any adverse impacts” caused by the Rowlatt film. He noted the “successful efforts” in Indian tiger conservation, and was concerned that the work had now been “made harder”. He proffered apologies for his failure to approach the tiger authority earlier. Stories quickly appeared in the Indian press falsely claiming that the BBC had apologised for, and even retracted, its film.

Given the letter’s missing date and addressee, Survival International initially suspected a hoax. We asked Hector’s staff if it was genuine, but they weren’t saying. We turned to the head of the BBC, Tony Hall, to ask whether or not the BBC stood by Rowlatt’s film. The BBC boss quickly replied in the affirmative: It turns out that the letter really had been written by Hector, but the corporation was certainly not retracting its report that innocent people have been shot, tortured, and some killed, in the (supposed) conservation of Indian protected areas. This was encouraging because we knew Rowlatt’s report was just the tip of a monster iceberg: For years, Survival International has been reporting harrowing testimonies about atrocities committed against the Mising, Baiga, Jenu Kuruba, and many other tribal peoples in the name of conservation. Hector’s letter was simply an attempt by BBC Natural History to get back to filming tigers – irrespective of the atrocities Adivasi people face in the reserves.

One can understand its desperation, of course. BBC Natural History was launching a new flagship series, “Dynasties”, and it was as spectacular as expected. Its wonderful episode on tigers, broadcast in December 2018, repeats the usual old falsehoods. Viewers are lectured (by the very same David Attenborough!), “In India today there are new pressures, making it harder than ever [for tigers] to rear a family.” This simply isn’t true. According to the Indian authorities, tigers are increasing in numbers, albeit slowly, and so wasn’t it really “harder than ever” for them during the British Raj’s tiger massacre (starting in around the 1870s and carrying on in independent India)? This “sport” lasted a hundred years and killed tens of thousands, taking the animal to the edge of extinction.The blood from that slaughter lies on the hands of the parents and grandparents of many of today’s British viewers, but it’s always safer, and supposedly less “political,” simply to blame poor villagers in today’s India.

What needs to be done

What all this highlights is the bias at the heart of the BBC’s Natural History Unit. It relentlessly promulgates the foundation myth of Western conservation, that “wildernesses” must be defended against the Africans or Asians who actually live there. Never mind that national parks in Europe often include working farms and even towns; in other continents the locals must be thrown out, and then shot if they try and go back in. Such pitting people against nature may be the metaphorical lifeblood of a conservation industry that relies on the TV portrayal of natural history, but it’s an entirely false antagonism that drains the real lifeblood from indigenous, tribal and other local people.

We should be shown how protected areas are the result of thousands of years of human habitation; how local, especially indigenous, people, have enhanced both the landscape and wildlife; how evicting and mistreating them leads to biodiversity loss; and how it is they who must be returned to the forefront of protecting wildlife, in all its forms. You don’t need environmental qualifications to realise that the people defending their own land and resources are going to be better guardians than the hired, underpaid rangers who are easily tempted by corruption. We should be listening to them, the locals, much more than to the environmentalists and broadcasters (with their own sky-high carbon footprints).

Things must change, and not only to respect the law and human rights. If they don’t, we could soon be facing the end of protected areas and their wildlife. The local backlash against them is gaining increasingly angry momentum and is bound to prevail, especially in Africa where “our” cherished conservation is increasingly seen as nothing more than land-grabbing colonialism. The BBC, with its millions of viewers, really should play a leading role in the conservation of nature, but it’s not the one currently acted out on our screens: In the long run, the images now transmitted into the comfort of our living rooms are deeply counterproductive for conservation, irrespective of their undoubted beauty and the money and accolades they gather.

(*”Adivasi” is a term used for many of the 700 or so unique tribal peoples in India, numbering over 100,000,000 individuals. Some may not be more “indigenous” to the subcontinent than many mainstream Indians, and the government doesn’t use the term “indigenous.” They do, however, retain their own separate identity, are often largely self-sufficient, and maintain a strong attachment to their lands. They are widely discriminated against. I go into the fraught question of “correct” terminology in my book Tribal Peoples for Tomorrow’s World.)

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Media Ethics in the Internet Age

By Patrick Gathara https://twitter.com/OdipoDev/status/1068444741560356865

Odipodev is a data analytics and research firm operating out of Nairobi. They can be contacted on [email protected]

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Media Ethics in the Internet Age

By Patrick Gathara Dear Kenyans, this is just a reminder that a majority of the mainstream media you consume is either owned by or has owners closely aﬃliated to politicians.. pic.twitter.com/xT3NtTdTBP

— Odipo Dev (@OdipoDev) October 30, 2018

Odipodev is a data analytics and research firm operating out of Nairobi. They can be contacted on [email protected]

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Patrick Gathara

No less than six denunciatory commentaries have been published in the Nation Media Group’s publications regarding the departure of eight long-serving columnists, myself among them. They include a Page One editorial, a public editor’s comment and opinion pieces by another four regular columnists.

These opinions belie the crisis in Kenya’s media. For an event that was barely reported on the Nation Media Group’s platforms, the resignations have been a subject of fairly hefty comment, which begs the question: on what facts were the opinions and commentaries based?

News – a collection of the day’s intelligence on events — is the lifeblood of public debate. If the news is not reported honestly and accurately, with all the available facts presented, even the best analysts and columnists would be working with flawed and incomplete raw material.

Many of the commentaries and editorials have sidestepped the facts of the matter, misstated the reasons for our resignations and constructed new arguments, which they have then gone on to canvas.

It bears repeating that when cartoonist Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa), and editors Dennis Galava and Mugumo Munene, among others were dismissed from the Nation Media Group in 2016, seven columnists wrote to the Aga Khan, the NMG’s principal shareholder – he holds 44.6 percent of the stock – and copied the letter to the editorial board and the editor-in-chief. In it, we raised concerns about those staff departures and the manner in which they had occurred. We feared that the NMG’s reputation as a defender of media freedom was being eroded. We urged for a change of course.

News – a collection of the day’s intelligence on events – is the lifeblood of public debate. If the news is not reported honestly and accurately, with all the available facts presented, even the best analysts and columnists would be working with flawed and incomplete raw material.

The NMG editorial board wrote back to each of us acknowledging the letter, and promising action and discussion, neither of which ever happened. Perhaps we should not have been surprised. The Nation Media Group, notably in its relations with the Yoweri Museveni government in Uganda, has been willing to weed out those journalists perceived to be troublesome in exchange for the Aga Khan’s other business pursuits in that country. It did not take very long for Charles Onyango-Obbo, a fierce Museveni critic and co-founder of the Weekly Monitor, which had been acquired by the NMG, to land himself in trouble with State House, reputedly because of questions he raised about the death of Dr John Garang in 2005. Spirited off to Nairobi and a new exalted, if substantially neutered role, there were murmurs that his departure from the Monitor had been on the express orders of State House. Another Ugandan journalist, Daniel Kalinaki, was ‘exiled’ to Nairobi after the Monitor once again ran into Big Man trouble. He was only recently granted re-entry into Uganda, four years after his departure.

In the meantime in Nairobi, other significant changes in the editorial department, seemingly routine, have had the effect of sidelining and marginalising editors and journalists with a reputation for independence.

Early this year, the Nation clumsily sent one of its most popular columnists, Dr David Ndii, a “non- renewal of contract” email, in response to a direct inquiry to the board chairman, Wilfred Kiboro. His email to Mr Kiboro was prompted by a swirl of rumours that his contributions to the Nation stable had to stop because they were discomfiting to the Executive. Reader views on the termination of Dr Ndii’s column, shared with the editorial leadership at the Nation, were dismissed offhand.

Just before that, Nation Broadcasting Division head and chair of the Kenya Editors Guild Linus Kaikai left after a public disagreement over his insistence to cover live the January 30, 2018 swearing in of Raila Odinga.

The Nation Media Group, notably in its relations with the Yoweri Museveni government in Uganda, has been willing to weed out those journalists perceived to be troublesome in exchange for the Aga Khan’s other business pursuits in that country.

Over the years, and to its credit, NMG has held regular forums with columnists to assess the context in which they write and share ideas. Recently, however, these forums have become increasingly rare; in the past year, for example, none has been held. When some columnists suggested a meeting with the editors early this year, the editor-in-chief rebuffed them, saying there was no time for it.

These details have been elided from public discourse, in my opinion, because of the original sin — compromised and less-than-honest reporting. If the reporting is not honest, and is compromised, it’s impossible to expect much better from the analysis and opinion flowing from it. It’s a Catch-22 situation — and not just of the news cycle, but also of the nature of the public discourse it produces, with all the attendant political consequences.

As columnists, we started to reflect seriously on whether or not our individual comforts were more important than the health of the media environment in which we worked. Privately, I have been informed that our decision to write directly to the Aga Khan in 2016 offended some managers at the Nation who believe, and rightly so, that staff decisions are an internal management issue that should not be escalated to the shareholders. All the same, this attitude is likely to waste the opportunity for the NMG to reclaim its rightful place as a champion for truth. Proof of the Nation’s loss of independence is evident in the Public Editor’s Notebook. On a clear matter of public interest, the supposed reader’s defender has become the Nation Media Group’s consiglie

Numerous straw arguments have been constructed to discredit us: that we were never censored; that we had been writing too long anyway, and needed to leave space for younger people; that we all work for the human rights movement. The questions for which we have repeatedly demanded accountability from the Nation Media Group remain. They continue to be answered with digressions.

We left to make a statement on freedom — not our own freedom directly, but that of those at the frontline of delivering the news, of the daily struggle to tell the truth freely. We did not leave because we as individuals were being censored. It is also worth noting that our resignations were all voluntary; no pressure was made on those who opted to remain to join us.

Proof of the Nation’s loss of independence is evident in the Public Editor’s Notebook. On a clear matter of public interest, the supposed reader’s defender has become the Nation Media Group’s consigliere.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Media Ethics in the Internet Age

By Patrick Gathara Senior managers at the Nation Media Group have tried to underplay the significance of the joint resignation of columnists Maina Kiai, Kwamchetsi Makokha, George Kegoro, Nic Cheeseman, Gabriel Lynch, Muthoni Wanyeki, Gabriel Dolan and myself by claiming that the withdrawal of our columns was prompted by a hysterical “political activism” moment rather than a genuine concern about the newspaper’s editorial independence and integrity.

In a front-page editorial published three days after our resignation, the Nation newspaper’s editors took great pains to explain to readers that the NMG’s publications were non-partisan, independent and “committed to telling the truth”. The Nation’s Public Editor, Peter Mwaura – he appears to have abdicated his role as the neutral arbiter between the newspaper’s readers and its editors – defended the NMG by saying that there appeared to be an “unspoken reason” for our “groupthink”, suggesting that we had made the decision to resign en bloc for political reasons.

The Nation’s Public Editor, Peter Mwaura – he appears to have abdicated his role as the neutral arbiter between the newspaper’s readers and its editors – defended the NMG by saying that there appeared to be an “unspoken reason” for our “groupthink”, suggesting that we had made the decision to resign en bloc for political reasons.

“The independence of the media…is determined by reporters or editors, not columnists,” he wrote, adding that columnists “can only bask in the sunshine of that independence. They cannot bestow independence to [sic} a news organisation.”

Perhaps the Nation’s Public Editor is not aware of the fact that media independence – a hallmark of democracy – is not bestowed on columnists by individual reporters or editors; freedom and independence of the media is guaranteed by Article 34 of Kenya’s constitution. Through his ill- informed defence of the NMG, Mwaura betrayed another truth – the very reason for our resignation – that NMG’s editors have taken it upon themselves to decide who, just as much as what, is politically acceptable to publish.

The flimsy and unconvincing reasons given for the removal of the cartoonist Godfrey Mwampembwa (Gado) and economist David Ndii also suggest that it may not even be senior editors who make decisions about who to hire or fire, but influential and powerful individuals within government.

The NMG emphasised that none of the eight columnists had been censored by their editors and even issued a statement stating that each of us had individual contracts that the group had dutifully honoured, adding that editors had not tampered with our opinions “except to correct basic errors” – an obfuscatory tactic portraying us as petulant writers, easily upset by the heavy hand of the editor.

I must admit that initially I was conflicted about whether or not to resign…I am also deeply aware that as a woman – and an Asian woman at that – such privileges are hard to come by in our male-dominated media. Female columnists are rare in our newspapers; in fact, I was the only female op-ed columnist in the Daily Nation.

If the NMG’s senior managers had listened to us carefully, and read our press statement, they would know that none of us claimed to have been censored by our editors; on the contrary, I made it a point to state at our joint press conference that we were not resigning because we felt that we were being individually censored but because we could no longer remain silent and watch our colleagues being fired on flimsy – and what appeared to be politically-motivated – grounds. By glossing over the reasons we gave for our resignation, the NMG made us look like spoilt troublemakers, old farts stuck in their ways who needed to give way to younger, less jaded (and perhaps less opinionated) columnists.

I must admit that initially I was conflicted about whether or not to resign. I realise that having a column in the country’s largest-circulating newspaper is a great privilege and honour. I am also deeply aware that as a woman – and an Asian woman at that – such privileges are hard to come by in our male-dominated media. Female columnists are rare in our newspapers; in fact, I was the only female op-ed columnist in the Daily Nation. Before making the decision to resign, I wondered if giving up my column was not an act of ceding to reactionary forces who would be only too happy to see me go. However, I also know that the privilege of a column cannot be enjoyed in a vacuum. The context within which I left the NMG is critical to understanding the reasons for my resignation.

In our joint statement, we emphasised that past attempts by some of us to get the NMG’s Board of Directors to address what we felt was “a systematic process to constrain independent voices within the company, contrary to its stated editorial policy” had borne little fruit and that we had resorted to this radical measure when the NMG went ahead and fired the economist and Nasa political strategist David Ndii and NTV’s Linus Kaikai, who had spoken out against collusion between the Executive and some media managers to block the television station live coverage of the mock swearing-in of opposition leader, Raila Odinga.

Weighing in on the matter, retired op-ed editor Magesha Ngwiri, who edited my column for nearly a decade (with a very light hand, I might add, even though we held politically divergent views), insinuated that the majority of the columnists who had resigned did so because they belong to human rights organisations and so must “earn their keep”.

The answer to Ngwiri’s question is that our conscience did not allow us to “clothe the loss of editorial independence and media freedom at the NMG with respectability”. Some of us, and I include myself in this category, resigned because we no longer wanted to be associated with a newspaper that was increasingly looking and feeling like a government mouthpiece. Ngwiri, one of the Nation’s most experienced editors, rightly stated that “if an editor purports to slant the views of a writer towards the conventional, then he or she is doing a disservice to the profession.” Indeed, the publication of diverse and diametrically opposed opinions is what lent the NMG’s publications credibility – credibility that has been seriously eroded in recent months. Ngwiri then went on to describe the columnists who wrote for the Saturday and Sunday editions of the Nation as individuals “who go hysterical every weekend in the belief that he is making an impression”, dismissively adding that these columnists were living in “cloud cuckoo land”. He went on to ask what could have induced others in the group to join “a cabal of rebels without a cause”.

Having fought so hard for the freedoms we enjoy under a new constitution – freedoms that were denied to us in the past – we could not sit back and watch our media, particularly the newspaper we wrote for, return to those dark days of subterfuge, censorship, silence and intrigue. What legacy will we leave behind for future columnists and journalists if we do not resist state capture of the region’s most influential media organisation?

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Media Ethics in the Internet Age

By Patrick Gathara Times change and with them, the ways in which we think about media freedom and editorial independence. In early part of the 1990s, the struggle to end military dictatorships and what had always been (or had become) one-party states was being waged across Africa. Central to that struggle was the struggle for an independent and pluralistic media. There were many aspects to the meaning of ‘independent’ and ‘pluralistic’ as concerns the media.

In Kenya, as elsewhere, ‘independent’ meant freedom from ruling party and state (at the time, synonymous) control over the media. Some independent print media houses existed – think here of Hilary Ngweno’s the Weekly Review and, later, Gitobu Imanyara’s the Nairobi Law Monthly. They provided a platform for those critical of the excesses of the dictatorship of the Kenya African National Union (KANU). They persisted – as did the privately-owned daily newspapers like the Nation, the Standard and, later, the People – despite attempts to bring them down that included not only the more obvious arrests and laying of criminal charges of sedition (or defamation or libel) against their journalists. But also, more crudely, the raids on and destruction of their property. And, more subtly, the threats of removal of their sources of revenue – including the then most important source of state advertising.

It’s slippery slope. Times change. The impulse to silence dissent, however, never does. Just the ways in which that impulse is realised

Broadcasting, however, remained in the hands of the state (read the ruling party). What were meant to be ‘public’ broadcasters—like the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) then the Voice of Kenya (VOK) – did serve up educational and entertainment programmes. The KBC probably, as a result, now has the biggest archive of Kenya’s musical traditions as well as its early musical pioneers. But its political programming reflected the poor understanding of ‘public’. It was, in effect, a party/state mouthpiece. With licensing denied to any and all attempts at private broadcasting until the Kenya Television Network finally broke through.

Fast forward to the present. The ‘public’ broadcaster is largely irrelevant in terms of audience share (and) with few exceptions, ownership of the private broadcasting scene is dominated by key political figures and families

The agitation for media freedom and editorial independence thus included demands for the removal of criminal charges of sedition. Protests at the ever-skyrocketing payments awarded by a then- compliant judiciary for defamation and libel to the party/state figures of the time. Attempts to build a more diverse advertising base. And demands to open up the airwaves.

But there was awareness, even then, of the dangers of a media landscape dominated by private owners – and of the dangers of equally monopolising cross-media ownership. Hence the demand not only for ‘independent’ media ownership – meaning, at the time, independence from the party/state. But also for ‘pluralistic’ media ownership – meaning a genuinely ‘public’ broadcaster and better regulation of the same, regulation too on cross-media ownership as well as allowances for genuine ‘community’ broadcasters (not understood then in ethnic terms).

Fast forward to the present. The ‘public’ broadcaster is largely irrelevant in terms of audience share. We have private broadcasters. With few exceptions, ownership of the private broadcasting scene is dominated by key political figures and families. We have community broadcasters. With equally few exceptions, what presents as being ‘community’ broadcasters are really private broadcasters that operate in local languages – not media produced by, for and on behalf of the communities they serve.

What presents as being ‘community’ broadcasters are really private broadcasters that operate in local languages not media produced by, for and on behalf of the communities they serve

As for the print media, it is not that obvious and crude attempts at controlling their content no longer exist (think the Artur brothers). ‘Brown envelope’ journalists are common. As are ‘brown envelope’ editors who decide to run, slant or spike stories depending on their paymaster of the day. But ‘brown envelope’ journalists and editors, who do it for money, are not the worst of the lot. The worst of the lot are the journalists and editors who believe in and propound the political (and ethnic) divisions of the day.

Then there are the managers and owners. Or those who act on their behalf. Some of whom, no doubt, genuinely believe the political pressures they are subjected to on this or that sometimes require ‘small’ sacrifices. If a Tanzanian President is so outraged by a political cartoon that sales of one of their outlets are not allowed for months on end, it may be considered that the departure of that particular cartoonist is just such a ‘small’ sacrifice – necessary to keep the whole ship on track. Ditto if a Ugandan President is so outraged by a particular editor that their operations and licensing are all at risk – it may then be considered necessarily expedient to remove that editor from all of those Ugandan operations. Another ‘small’ sacrifice for the greater good.

‘Brown envelope’ journalists are common. As are ‘brown envelope’ editors who decide to run, slant or spike stories depending on their paymaster of the day. But these are not the worst of the lot. The worst of the lot are the journalists and editors who believe in and propound the political (and ethnic) divisions of the day

We may not agree with those ‘business’ decisions. We may understand that, in the minds of some of the managers and owners, a delicate balance is being maintained. But we also understand that after one ‘small’ sacrifice is made, a second one becomes easier. The demands and political pressures for such ‘small’ sacrifices only increase with capitulation—they don’t go away. A weakness is sensed—and all political operators are like carnivores that have caught the scent. Once they have, they move in for the kill.

The weakness is also sensed internally. The political operators know- by the successes they have – who supports them in this sort of assault internally. Who is doing this not reluctantly but because they are believers. Not in their mission as members of the journalistic profession. But in their mission to advance their political (ethnic) cause.

If a Ugandan President is so outraged by a particular editor that their operations and licensing are all at risk – it may then be considered necessarily expedient to remove that editor from all of those Ugandan operations. Another ‘small’ sacrifice for the greater good

Therein lies the danger. Not only that the ‘small’ sacrifices demanded are usually of the best of us, the most excellent—so that it is truly critical thinking that ends up seeing the door. Not only that ‘small’ sacrifices slowly become big ones. But that the media houses themselves become sites of political struggle internally – rather than playing, to the best of their ability, their role as more than recorders of events, as more than analysts of events, but also their role as defenders of the very rights on which their existence is founded, predicated. Betraying their audiences. Betraying too the compact upon which they seek revenues from and based on those audiences.

It is a slippery slope. Times change. The impulse to silence dissent, however, never does. Just the ways in which that impulse is realised.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.