Independent Kenya TV
By David Karanja Posted Sat, Jan 1 2000
HARARE, ZIMBABWE – When the clock struck 8 p.m. on December 10 last year, Kenyan Vice President George Saitoti pressed a button during a grandiose ceremony in Nairobi’s Safari Park Hotel. Thousands of Kenya’s television viewers immediately witnessed the new Channel 42 come alive on their screens.
The occasion was one of the many paradoxes in the government’s treatment of Kenya’s media. By pressing the button, Saitoti might have triggered a new skirmish in the never-ending battle between the government and the independent press.
Channel 42 is owned by Kenya’s biggest media company, the Nation Media Group, publishers of the leading daily newspaper, Daily Nation. Since he took power in 1979, President Daniel Arap Moi has marked the newspaper as his enemy and never misses an opportunity to accuse it of working for his downfall. He has threatened to ban it on several occasions.
The Safari Park ceremony marked a brief cease-fire in the battle for media freedom, which during the past decade has focused on a campaign to free airwaves monopolized for many years by the state-owned Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.
The Nation Media Group applied for a license to operate radio and television stations eight years ago, as calls for the government to allow private participation in the broadcast sector gained momentum.
To appease its critics, the government half-heartedly relaxed broadcast licensing practices, granting licenses to ruling party cohorts but none to the Nation Media Group. More than a dozen TV and 20 radio stations are licensed, though only a few have started operations.
After a relentless battle by media freedom advocates, politicians, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and after legal action to press Nation’s case, the government finally bowed to pressure and granted the group a license in 1998. But unlike other licenses, Nation’s is restricted to a 60-kilometer radius in the capital, Nairobi. It cannot reach rural areas where 70 percent of the population reside.
The company’s radio station, 96.4 FM, launched in October last year, is already causing ripples. On November 22, Moi, who almost never grants interviews to local journalists, was interviewed by the deputy news editor to refute reports in a British newspaper that he has stashed vast sums of money in a secret Swiss bank account. He took that opportunity to unleash a tirade against the media group.
“Even you, Nation, don’t you realize that to finish Moi is to finish Kenya?”
he asked.
This apparent belief that the independent media harbors an agenda to “finish” him continues to prompt Moi’s government to muzzle the press.
The introduction of a multi-party political system in 1991 ushered in some political tolerance, which relaxed media repression. While earlier journalists faced torture, detainment without trial, banishment of their publications and confiscation of their printing presses, today’s war against the media has taken less draconian forms. The government is now using the judiciary to legitimize its campaign to silence the media.
This tactic began in April 1998 when Moi attacked the independent press. A trend emerged in which powerful individuals in government rushed to court to apply for orders restraining newspapers from publishing adverse information about them. Within three weeks, 10 prohibitory orders were granted restraining different newspapers from publishing defamatory information. Three editors were also charged for publishing alarming reports.
Even as Saitoti pressed the ceremonial button and pledged his government’s commitment to a free broadcast sector, media-watchers were pondering the release of an editor who had been jailed in a case that was seen as state persecution of the media.
On August 20, the Court of Appeal jailed Tony Gachoka, editor-publisher of the Post on Sunday weekly magazine, for six months for contempt of court after publishing an article alleging widespread corruption in the judiciary. It accused Chief Justice Zachaeus Chesoni of having received a US$400,000 bribe. The magazine was also ordered to pay a fine of US$14,000 or to cease publishing.
Three of the seven-judge panel had been mentioned negatively in Gachoka’s article, meaning in essence they were judging their own case. Legal experts saw the ruling as a travesty of justice, with the Law Society of Kenya alleging other irregularities.
“The Court of Appeal is sending the message that it is not willing to let the press and the public express themselves. It poses a great danger to the freedom of expression guaranteed by the constitution,” said Evans Gaturu, the law society’s vice chairman.
Faced with growing pressure, Moi ordered Gachoka’s release on November 3.
It was not the first time the Court of Appeal was accused of persecuting the media. In 1994, Bedan Mbugua, the editor of the weekly newspaper The People, and his reporter, David Makali, were sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of court after publishing an article criticizing one of the court’s judgments.
The attacks on media freedom have also taken on a threatening face. Makali who is now the executive director of the Media Institute, a freedom of expression watchdog, was kidnapped in February last year by a dozen men and tortured in a remote forest. The attack came after the institute’s journal, Expression Today, published an article linking a senior government official to drug trafficking. Fred Gumo, a minister in the president’s office who was implicated in the story, had earlier warned that journalists who wrote “nasty things” about leaders would be “beaten up.”
Because of Kenya’s high illiteracy rate, which limits the impact of the print media, the broadcast media may pose a greater threat to Kenya’s attempts to control the press. Statistics show that 78 percent of adult Kenyans have access to a radio receiver. Nation Media Group is investing US$6.7 million to offer Kenyans an alternative source of information. With television and radio broadcasts now in the hands of independents, the government may have reason to worry.
If nothing else, freeing the airwaves will test the limits of Kenya’s tolerance for a free press.