How The Kenyan Government Controls The Media

Do you sometimes open the newspapers and find that some coverage you expected is either missing or despite its’ importance has been hidden in some obscure inside pages?

Expect more of this as we head towards the general elections.

And no it is not that the Kenyan editors are dumb or insensitive to public opinion. It is simply the reality on the ground where a newspaper has to survive under the regime of the day.

In the old dark days of government bullying control of the media was more subtle and direct. The editor would receive a call from State house with simple instructions not to publish, and that was that. Nobody would dare think of defying the order. In a way this kind of control on the media was better because everybody was aware of it and that is precisely why the BBC radio service became so wildly popular in those days. Kenyans just got their news from the BBC evening news. The more dangerous control is the current one which most Kenyans are not aware of.

By the way newspapers still receive calls from State house and some of those calls have intimidated the media to the extent where they have been forced to publish lies and fabrications (more on that in my earlier post).

Back to the BBC radio era. There was no Internet in those days so word went round to those who missed the BBC radio news via bars, usually in whispers, because you never knew who was around. The government seemed to have ears everywhere. A curious incident comes to mind here. In the early 80s, former parliamentarian (now deceased) George Moseti Anyona was having a quiet drink in the outskirts of Nairobi at a place called Dagoretti corner. His critical remarks of the government of the day got more reckless as he got drunker. One of the people having a drink in a nearby table slipped away for a few minutes and made a call from a call box. A few moments later Anyona and his colleagues at the table had been arrested, the next morning they had officially been detained without trial. I happen to know that man who “sold” Anyona and I have seen guilt eating away at him for years for some of the things he did for the government of President Moi, many of them against fellow Kenyans and close friends who made the mistake of trusting him as a friend. Sadly the reality is that, that is what intelligence work all over the world is all about, betraying the trust of your friends (sometimes, friends who are very close).

But let me give you a few examples of just how much the government controls the media in Kenya today. One big advantage that they have is that it takes only 2 telephone calls to kill a story in Kenya these days. The major TV stations with prime time news watched by most Kenyans are KBC (government owned and controlled). KTN and NTV. KTN is owned by Standard newspapers and NTV is owned by the Nation group who also publish the highest circulating newspaper in the region, the Daily Nation. So all it takes is a call to the Nation group and another to the Standard group and you have dealt with all the main media sources Kenyans rely on.

Here are recent examples of media control by the government;

(i) The government issues several press releases and even calls a press conference to introduce the President’s family. Strange don’t you think? Kenyans did not elect the first family, they elected the president who incidentally used to be seen with another woman at the time of the campaigns. Immediately he won election, another woman called Lucy Kibaki appeared on the scene. This is clear evidence that there are two women in the President’s life. Government bullying in this case has worked. No newspaper in Kenya can dare refer to Kibaki’s second wife as Mrs Kibaki or Wambui wa Munene (as she is widely referred to). Even the President’s profile in a recent Daily Nation report told blatant lies to the people of Kenya by indicating that Kibaki is married to only one wife, Lucy Kibaki. Isn’t the fact that a Presidential candidate is a polygamist a very important issue in a country where most of the voters are Christians wh believe in a man having only one wife. And in a country where the laws still allow a man to marry only one woman officially?

(ii) Coverage of Senator Obama’s visit to Kenya was clearly toned down. The idea seems to have been to downplay the pertinent issues raised by the senator and his popularity amongst ordinary Kenyans whom he seems to understand very well. (see separate poll results on what Kenyans really thought about the Senator’s remarks).

(iii) The coverage of crime by the media does not reflect the reality on the ground. When the true crime situation is portrayed by the media, then the effect is that the government looks weak and the public will realize that the police are losing the war against crime. To achieve this, the media’s access to police reports which was previously open, is now carefully controlled. For instance a file of occurrence reports from all the police stations in the city used to be open to the media. This is no longer the case.

Chances are that you are reading this in disbelief and you probably want to point to the Anglo Leasing expose’ by the Sunday Nation (Daily Nation On Sunday) and the Daily Nation, as an example of how free the Kenyan media is from government control. As I have said in many of my posts in the past, the circumstances under which that scandal was exposed is still a big mystery and the great help of certain external forces cannot be ruled out.

Besides it is a fact that government control of the media has increased tremendously between that time and the present.

If you want to know what is really happening in the country my advice is that you also read other dailies like the Kenya Times and The People and also regularly take in most of the excellent Kenyan blogs we have around.

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