Why media protest is a waste of time

The world has changed a great deal since the days when nobody would dare print any negative story on one Jomo Kenyata alias Johnstone Kamau. Or even his wife, Mama Ngina.

This is the old world where Lucy Kibaki and company are stuck tight. Like somebody stuck in a time machine that has gone back to the 70s.

In those days people got all their information from Newspapers and the radio. (There was nothing on TV, and anyay very fe people oned Televisions).

Then something happened in the 1990s that still failed to wake up the then government to the new realities of media and information.

The Ouko murder had just happened and there were whispers all over the place but nothing concrete. Then somebody faxed a detail account of what they alleged had happened. Operation Bikini, they called it. Bikini came from Biwott Kiprono Nicholas. Wiuthin two days everybody in Nairobi knew in minute detail what how Ouko was murdered. So far this fax version has concurred quite closely with lots of information that has gradullay been made public.

Today we have mobile telephones that stretch and reach almost every corner of the republic. Not to mention the internet. There are cyber cafes even in villages now and the number of people with at least an email address has grown tremendously.

So what is this media that they are trying to control?

For sometime now Kenyans all over the world have been sharing and enjoying information on Lucy that exposes the Kenyan daily media’s coverage of Lucy for what it really is – self-censored-half-baked-reporting-controlled-by-fear. Better to report the whole thing as it is or not at all. As they have found out, they still got into trouble with Lucy after all the self-consorship.