Kenya's media is noteworthy given the continent's history that has
had a devastating effect on the industry. At independence most African states
had media that could have been developed into vibrant institutions (de Beer,
Kasoma, Megwa & Steyn, 1995). In most cases, however, African nations
engineered systematic schemes that decimated the industry as G.B.N. Ayittey (1992,
1999) chronicles. What sets Kenya apart is her ability to travel this tortured
path behaving like every other African media bullying nation, yet maintain one
of the few, by African standards, vibrant media outlets
But circumstances are changing. Kenya emerged as a state a little
over a century ago, suffered colonialism, then experimented with hardly defined
ideologies for a generation, but is now set to enter another epoch—since the
constitution barred Danielarap Moi from standing for another electoral term when
his last one ended in 2002. In Africa where government policies are subject to
the whims of the leader, this new shift will be fundamental.
Kenya lies on Africa's eastern seaboard neighboring Somalia,
Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania. With a population of about thirty
million, the parchment of 45 tribal groupings, that Peter Mwaura (11) calls
"separate mini-states," came under British colonial control in 1884
following the Berlin conference to partition Africa (Maloba; Hachten). In 1963,
the country gained independence from Britain under the Kenya African National
Union (KANU) government. The then opposition party, Kenya African Democratic
Union (KADU) maintained a token presence in parliament for a while, then
dissolved to merge with KANU. KANU has been in power initially under the
nation's founding father, Jomo Kenyatta, until his death in 1978, when Moi took
power in a constitutional succession. He was president until 2002.
Both towards the end of Kenyatta's reign and especially during the
Presidency of Moi, the executive branch progressively excluded competitors from
the government. In the late 1980s people excluded from mainstream politics
began to demand participation through alternative political parties. Kenya had,
until 1982, been a de facto one party state, but in that year Parliament enacted a law making
the country a de jure one party state. KANU assumed greater influence in setting
national policies and at one time considered itself superior to parliament. By
the end of the decade, civil unrest in the country forced the party, in 1990,
to repeal the law criminalizing multi-partism. Today there is just a little
under fifty political parties in the country. About ten of them are represented
in parliament but there are only a handful of serious parliamentary parties.
While Kenyatta's reign from 1963 to 1978 had been characterized by
less stringent control of the media, at least from the President himself, the
press in Kenya, under Moi, was very different. This is not to say that there
were no efforts to control the press under Kenyatta's regime. Those around the
President, as P. Ochieng, Frank Barton and Gunilla Faringer demonstrate,
frequently called newsrooms ostensibly on behalf of the President to demand the
spiking of a story. But such control may have emanated from government
functionaries than from, or through, the sanctioning of Kenyatta himself.
Barton (86) tells of an encounter between Kenyatta and Kenya's then three
leading Editors-in-Chief: Githii, Young, and Singh:
The three men sat together in a room waiting for Kenyatta to call
them in. When at last he did so he told them: "I have Uganda's President
Amin here, and I am very angry with him because he has banned your newspapers.
And when I say your newspapers, I mean Kenyan newspapers, and although they are
privately owned, they are still Kenyan newspapers and if they are Kenyan
newspapers they are my newspapers"… "So,' he went on, "that
means that if he has banned my newspapers, he has banned me—and I don't like
it." (86)
George Githii tells of another encounter with Kenyatta. The Nation had been
running editorials that contradicted the debate on detentions without trial
then taking place in the country—which were supported by the executive branch.
As a consequence a reporter with the paper was deported. Githii went to see
Kenyatta on the matter. He writes:
Personally, I found President Kenyatta very, very tolerant. Once
my newspaper printed editorials against preventive detention, which angered
some members of the executive…. Eventually, I made an appointment to see the
President. His reaction was: "Those were your views; now remember to print
ours." (63)
Moi, on the other hand, even while Vice President, had pesky
relationships with the editors. Barton notes that:
Vice-President Arap Moi began to make regular phone calls to Young
complaining about things in the Standard . Young found that the servility which was needed in some African
quarters was not the best line with the Vice-President, and so he replied to
Moi with as much vigour as Moi used to him. Things often ended up virtually a
shouting match between the two. (87)
Kenyatta had assured the media that "Kenya's press need have
no fears regarding curtailment of its freedom…" (Faringer 60) as long as
the media exercised responsibility. While the media in Kenya was then foreign
owned they generally supported the government. Probably as a result the
government saw no need of owning a medium of their own. But those around
Kenyatta, Barton notes, were very keen on owning a newspaper (82). When Moi
came to power his government purchased then Nairobi
Times and
christened it Kenya Times. It was managed by Kenya Times Media Trust (KTMT).
Print Media
The print media can be divided into four sectors: the regular
daily newspapers, the magazines, the regional newspapers, and the printed
sheets that also seek to pass for newspapers in the urban centre streets.
Kenya has four daily national newspapers in English and one in
Kiswahili all published in Nairobi with a combined daily circulation of almost
400,000. Relative to other nations, even those of Africa, the history of the
press in Kenya is rather recent. Literacy started in Kenya following the
arrival of Protestant missionaries nearly a century and a half ago (Church of
the Province of Kenya). The missionaries embarked on teaching new converts how
to read and write primarily so that the new converts could read biblical
literature for themselves. The initial publications carried religious
materials. To date, the church is still involved in some magazine publishing.
The oldest mass circulating newspaper is the Standard founded
in 1902 by a Parsee migrant, A. M. Jeevanjee. The British settlers who came to
Kenya had brought in Indians to work on the construction of the railway line
from the coast to the interior to open up the countryside for settlement. Most
of the Indians settled in Mombasa and engaged in commerce. Standard catered
for these civil servants and business community. But two years later, Jeevanjee
sold his interests to the partnership of Mayer and Anderson who renamed it East
African Standard marking the beginnings of the European press. The Standard became
the largest and most influential publication in colonial East Africa (Hachten).
In the hands of Mayer and Anderson, it was a typical European people's paper
concerned with the happenings in Britain and urging subservience to the
settlers, a tune that for a long time remained the tone of other settler
controlled media including Mombasa
Mail and Nairobi News (Abuoga
& Mutere, 1988; Maloba, 1992). Change in the Standard to identify with the aspirations of Africans was painstakingly
slow even after independence. Over the years the Standard changed hands until Lonrho acquired it in 1967 (Faringer 35).
Lonrho had a lot of business interests in Africa and the paper
served more of a safeguard of these interests. Barton (88) notes that for
Lonrho "newspapers were only a means to an end, the end being the much
more profitable business of packaging, breweries, transport, mining and other
ventures in different parts of the Continent." Following Tiny Rowland's
death in the mid-1990s and the reorganization at the Lonrho headquarters in
London, it is understood that the Standard may once again have been sold, this time to a group of Kenyan
political businessmen who then gained control also of the television channel
KTN. It is not clear who owns this media establishment, whether Lonrho East
Africa or these Kenyan businessmen. The Standard today, with a daily circulation of 54,000, has outlasted other
competitors. At one time this media house published a Kiswahili paper called Baraza . Besides
the Standard and KTN, this media house also operates Capital FM currently
licensed to broadcast in Nairobi. The Capital FM launched operations in
September 1996.
Prior to the founding of the Nation published by Nation Media Group (NMG) Kenya had a very vibrant
nationalist press. Faringer (10) categorizes media in Kenya at independence
into a three tier system with the European press at the top, the Indian in the
middle, and African at the bottom. Although Rosalynde Ainslie (99) says that
the press in Africa was a European creation, which is true, African
nationalists adapted the press very much to their struggle. By 1952 Ainslie
(109) reports that Kenya had nearly 50 newspapers. However, the speciality of
these publications was not news as much as it was essays that agitated for freedom.
Most of the contributors were nationalists, with no journalistic experience,
who later became post independence leaders. All these papers folded up with the
coming of independence.
The Nation, with a circulation of 184,000, is Kenya's most widely circulated
newspaper today according to Lukalo and Wanyeki. It was first registered in
1959 by Michael Curtis and Charles Hayes (Ainslie 104) both newspapermen in
London and Nairobi, respectively. The spiritual leader of the Ismaili community
Aga Khan purchased the Nation a year later. The paper was the first to adopt a policy of
Africanization (Hachten; Abuoga & Mutere; Faringer). Besides the English
language Nation the NMG also publishes a Kiswahili edition Taifa Leo .
Taifa, with a
35,000 daily circulation, is an abridged version of the Nation . Taifa does not
have a separate group of reporters. It uses the same pool of reporters as the Nation . While
the Aga Khan is still the majority shareholder in the NMG, the firm is
currently traded at the Nairobi Stock Market.
Kenya's press has always been private and foreign owned. The NMG
publishes the Daily
Nation and Taifa
Leo on week days, and Sunday
Nation and Taifa Jumapili on
Sunday. Both the Saturday and Sunday editions have pullouts including a
children's magazine. On the other days of the week they carry special sections:
education on Monday, business on Tuesday, society on Wednesday, real estate on
Thursday, and entertainment on Friday. The Nation , although targeting the Kenyan market, is also distributed
throughout the East African region. NMG also publishes the EastAfrican , a
conservatively designed weekly newspaper focusing on economic news in East
Africa. They also own Nation TV, and Nation FM Radio both which for the moment
do not have a license to operate throughout the country. They were licensed in
1998 and went on air a year later, only to broadcast in the capital Nairobi as
are other radio and television stations.
The People , owned by Kenneth Matiba, started as a weekly, but turned daily
with a Sunday edition in December 1998. In 2002 it had a daily circulation of
60,000. Initially founded to serve as the voice of the opposition politics and
to report materials that Nation and Standard feared to touch, the People has since landed on lean times. How long it survives may depend on
the outcome of its appeal against multimillion-shilling judgments that courts
have returned against the paper in libel cases. But other challenges the paper
faces may relate partly to the difficulty in attracting sufficient advertising
revenue and partly because it has never really shed its image as a partisan
newspaper trumpeting the opposition point of view.
In 1983 KANU bought Hilary Ng'weno's Nairobi
Times and named
it The Kenya Times (Abuoga & Mutere; Ochieng). Ng'weno, the first African editor
of the Nation , founded Nairobi
Times intending
it to be a quality afternoon paper. He was, at the same time, publishing Weekly Review , a quality
news weekly that in the late 1970s used to be known for its incisive
commentaries and two children's magazines. With diminishing revenue from
advertising Ng'weno sold the Times . As Kenya
Times the paper
has suffered an identity crisis, and not without a cause, often seen as the
mouthpiece of the ruling party and government. While there is no independent
verification of its circulation, its internal figures say that it has a 50,000
daily circulation. The Kenya
Times until
recently was not a member of the ABC but even after joining the bureau seldom
discloses their circulation figures. This makes it difficult to independently
establish its market performance.
A.S. Kasoma De Beer et al notes that the Kenya Times "often
reflected official government policy" (238). But a former Editor-in-chief
of the paper, Philip Ochieng, submits that the "only thing which stands in
the way of The Kenya
Times is its
false identification in the public's mind with the ruling party, a fact which
weighs very heavily upon it, many people claiming, despite absence of evidence,
that it publishes only what the party and the government want it to
publish" (154). But Ochieng's is a lone voice. Hachten (24) notes that in
a one party state a party newspaper is often indistinguishable from a
government paper. Kenyan newspapers do not have any ideological leanings that
would differentiate them. Even in the case of the People the distinguishing factor is not so much ideology as the stories
they choose to print possibly with the intention that such stories may
embarrass those in the government. These often expose some of the corruption
deals government functionaries may be involved in. And not too infrequently
these stories have landed the people in legal trouble. One government minister
has been awarded a total of Ksh. 60 million in court rulings. If these fines
are executed then some of the newspapers may be forced to close shop. Possibly
because of thisKenya Times has
remained at the bottom of the ladder in terms of circulation figures,
advertising revenue, operating capital base, trained personnel and influence
amongst the major newspapers in the country. KTMT also used to publish a
Kiswahili edition Kenya Leo. Kenya Leo was in many ways similar to Taifa Leocarrying
a summary of stories in the Times .
Besides the national daily newspapers there are several weekly
publications circulating in the Coastal town of Mombassa. Because they only
focus on issues of the coast their readership is confined to the coast and they
are hardly of any national influence.
An emerging trend in the Kenya media scene is the publication of
what, in Kenyan terminology, is called the gutter press but would be best
described as "now-yousee-them-now-you-don't" press. The sheets are
sold on news-stands and often on street corners for less than half the price of
the daily newspapers. They are poorly written, poorly edited, poorly laid out,
poorly printed, and contain poor pictures. Generally they have no fixed
address, no known publisher, and tend to focus on rumour sometimes making very
spectacular claims. They have no clear frequency, will appear out of the blue,
make some spectacular claim that regards either sexual or corruption scandal
involving a prominent personality, then disappear. They may only occasionally
write on current affairs. These are likely to be found in most major towns and
in mainly the major languages besides English and Kiswahili. It is said that
sometimes they are sponsored by politicians who use them to launch a smear
campaign against their opponents. But there is no way of proving this. These
papers have drawn the anger of the Kenyan government in no small way. As a
consequence the government is moving to pass a Statute Law (Miscellaneous
Amendments) Bill 2001.
There has been a proliferation of other media in the country. The
magazine industry has been vibrant not so much in its longevity as much as the
frequency of magazines that have come up and gone under. The Weekly Review,
probably the region's premier newsmagazine with a distinguished style of
journalism during its lifespan was founded in 1975 (Abuoga & Mutere;
Hachten). Published by Hilary Ng'weno's Stellascope, the weekly in the late
1970s and early 1980s had the best analytical and investigative journalism in
the region (Faringer). As a consequence of its analytical reporting the
government instructed firms in which the state had interest to cease
advertising in the paper. This eroded the papers ability to survive
economically. Later it toned down its critical re-portage and, in 1998 before
it folded up, had become a mere shadow of its former self. Ng'weno chose to
retire the title and focus on his other business interests including
television.Financial Review and Economic Review , both
now defunct, made a major impact in business journalism in the country until
the former was proscribed and the latter disappeared from the news-stands in
the latter part of 1998. Today, however, there is no towering news-magazine
that would offer compelling reading like the Weekly
Review did.
An interesting phenomenon is that in spite of the poor economy
there has been quite an increase with diversity of media outlets in the 1990s
that had not existed before. The changing political environment in the country
with increased civil activism could be a contributing factor. Whereas
previously the government could simply ban a publication with a single edict
from the minister in charge, and this happened many times, the potential that
such a ban would now be vigorously argued in court is much higher. A Nairobi
businessman S. K. Macharia was, in the mid-1990s, through his firm Royal Media,
licensed to operate Citizen radio and Television station. But he seems to have
fallen foul of the government and his license to operate was temporarily
withdrawn. He has got it back after a court petition, however, both his FM and
TV stations are still off the air at the time of writing.
The church, through the National Council of Churches of Kenya
(NCCK), at one time had its own publications Target and Lengo publishing in English and Kiswahili respectively. Target ,
especially in the later part of 1960s and early 1970s was very analytical, an
approach that often put it at odds with the Kenyatta government, but more
specifically with the then Attorney General who accused the paper of having
sympathies for communism. The paper, following an internal reorganization,
seemed to lose its objectives and funding and finally in 1997 folded up. NCCK's
verbal exchanges with Kenyan government have a long history. When they
published Beyond again they ran into trouble with the government, when in its
analysis of the 1988 general elections, the paper said that the elections were
a "mockery of democracy" (Faringer 66). The government proscribed the
magazine and imprisoned its editor. Most of the other publications that the
church has been identified with published social issues and not news.
Economic Framework
De Beer et al (209) observe that "Africa's economic situation
has declined significantly in the three decades of post-colonialism."
While Kenya's economy grew steadily in the years following independence, the
1990s have been truly economically lost decade for Kenya. According to the Central
Bank of Kenya after the economy contracted in the early 1990s it grew by 5
percent in 1995, by 4.6 percent in 1996 and recorded only a 2.7 percent growth
rate in 1997. This fell further in 1998 to 1.6 percent before recovering
minimally to 2 percent in 1999. In 2001 the economy grew by 0.8 percent.
Investment in Kenya fell 10 times between 1978 and 1998 from
nearly (Kenyan Shilling) (Ksh.) 250 billion to a low of just over Ksh. 24
billion. In 1993 the country attracted a mere $2 million in investment. Although
in 1999 over $42 million was invested in Kenya that pales in comparison to $183
million and $222 million invested in neighbors Tanzania and Uganda,
respectively— countries that a decade and a half earlier found it nearly
impossible to attract a fraction of what was being invested in Kenya. Today,
Uganda produces nearly all the products that, less than a decade ago, it
imported from Kenya.
There are several factors that account for Kenya's poor economic
performance. Since the late 1980s, the country's political leadership took to
rather rambunctious exchanges with diplomats accredited to Nairobi and
officials on international financial bodies. It is at times difficult to
understand who enunciates government policy on international relations. When it
is to their convenience KANU leaders compete in making uncoordinated, often
bellicose, statements on all manner of policy. The result is a public relations
disaster. The abortive military coup against the Moi government in 1982 did not
help either. But rather than address the eventual public relations damage the
government sat on its hands. In the early 1990s, the country was ravaged by
internal ethnic clashes and increased insecurity countrywide impacting tourism
and agricultural sectors, Kenya's cash cows, negatively. The agricultural
sector has performed dismally from a combination of factors including falling
prices in the world market and neglect from the government. With less money in
the economy domestic savings fell from Ksh. 106 billion in 1996 to Ksh. 61
billion in 2001.
The single biggest factor that has affected the Kenyan economy is
corruption. In the 1992 general election the ruling party is accused of having
printed money to finance the elections thus worsening the rate of inflation by
nearly 60 percent. The involvement of the state in the business enterprise has
not been helpful. It has especially been hurtful to the extent that it has
eroded investor confidence in the economy. Some of the specific actions have
been the government's sponsorship of politically correct banks, which were
founded and run without reference to the appropriate banking regulations. Some
of these banks collapsed with people's savings.
As a consequence the volume of trade at the Nairobi Stock Exchange
has fallen. Between 1999 and 2001 about 140 investors pulled out of Kenya, 106
shut down their investments, 15 sold their investment, and nearly 20 were put
in receivership. Over the same period, while the number of job seekers entering
the market increased by one and a half million people, the economy only
generated 30,000 jobs. Still the economic sector has been impacted negatively
by government corruption, by the wear
and tear
of infrastructure, and by the cessation of aid to the country by the donor
community limiting the available hard currency for imports. The advertising
revenue fell, in a country where over 60 percent of the economy is service
based, the remaining 40 percent distributed between, industry, manufacturing,
and agriculture.
More than 70 percent of Kenya's population 15 years and above is
literate. Increasingly though more children are not completing primary
education. Several factors account for this: high fees, inflation, lack of
learning materials, labor disputes, poor pay for teachers and falling
educational standards. The AIDS scourge is another factor. As many as 700
people die in a day as a consequence of AIDS related infections.
Kenya's is an oral society and the reading culture is yet to take
hold. This is complicated by the high cost of books. The nation has a national
library but it only operates in the eight provincial headquarters, some located
more than a day's journey away. But they are also poorly equipped.
One out of every other Kenyan lives on just a dollar a day. With a
newspaper costing about half a dollar few can afford it. Then with 45 different
languages and papers published only in English and Kiswahili, language becomes
yet another hindrance. The other challenge is infrastructure. The teledensity
is only eight telephone lines per one thousand people (Lukalo and Wanyeki)
although mobile phone systems are catching on fast. The road network is equally
poor. Many of Kenya's far-flung districts are inaccessible at the best of times
and impossible to reach during the rainy season. It is a near impossible task
to distribute newspapers throughout the country. The postal system is another
hindrance in the circulation of newspapers and magazines. Kenya does not have a
home mail delivery system. This makes it difficult to develop a subscription
base thus denying newspapers and magazines the opportunity to have a dependable
readership and a pool of cash to draw from. The few subscribers often end up
receiving their magazines long after the issue is already on the newsstands or
may not receive it at all, the issue having disappeared in the postal system.
Kenya's newspaper publishers have their own distribution networks.
The country has a paper-manufacturing firm, however, the Kenyan produced paper
is expensive relative to imported paper. While the big advertisers may seek to
influence the coverage of news that affect them the major influence on
editorial policies usually come from politicians. Senior politicians seldom let
pass an opportunity to cultivate a symbiotic clientele relationship with
journalists especially those from their own ethnic communities. It is not
uncommon for politicians to call journalists from their own tribe when they
have a story to break.
Unions
Most reporters in Kenya are members of the Kenya Union of
Journalists. Reporters with the government associated media ( Kenya Times , KBC,
and the Kenya News Agency) are not allowed to join the union. The union has
occasionally succeeded in negotiating better terms for its members. There are
several organizations in the country that seek to bring journalists with common
interests together. These would include the Kenya Education Writers'
Association, the Kenya Professional Journalists' Association, the Association
of Media Women in Kenya, the Network for the Defence of Independent Media in
Africa, the Media Institute, the Association of Food and Agriculture
Journalists, the Media Development Association, and the Kenya Correspondents'
Association and Foreign Correspondence's Association. However, their
effectiveness remains in question.
Journalism as a Career
Most journalists tend to negotiate their pay on an individual
basis. While the annual gross national per capita income in Kenya is around
$360, most journalists earn well above that per month. However, there is quite
a disparity between journalists employed by the government and those working in
the private media. Those working in private media earn far better that of
journalists in the government controlled media.
Press Laws
Strictly speaking Kenya does not have a press law. Even what
passes for press law is a carry over from the colonial governments' regulations
in respect of press freedom. Critics have argued that the law, even if it was
not good for the operation of the media, served the new rulers well by giving
them a tool with which to control the media. What passes for media law in Kenya
is a general section 79 of the constitution that states:
Except with his own consent, no person shall be hindered in the
enjoyment of his freedom of expression, that is to say, freedom to hold
opinions without interference, freedom to receive ideas and information without
interference, freedom to communicate ideas without interference (whether the
communication be to the public generally or to any person or class of persons)
and freedom from interference with his correspondence.
There is nothing in the constitution that refers explicitly to the
media. The section that seems relevant to journalism would be the clause
referring to "freedom to communicate ideas without interference."
However, such freedom could be withdrawn "in the interests of de-fence,
public safety, public order, public morality or public health" according
to Section 79 subsection (2) paragraph (a) of the constitution.
Parliament has just passed a Statutes Law (Miscellaneous
Amendments) Bill 2001, which is awaiting presidential accent. President Moi has
already signalled that he will sign the new bill into law. Briefly, the new
bill will require any newspaper publisher to increase their bond from the
present Ksh. 10,000 ($125) to Ksh. 1,000,000 ($12,500). A publisher who fails
to comply with the requirement will be liable to one million shillings fine and
up to three years jail term. A second time offender will be liable for up to
five years' jail term and will be barred from printing or publishing a
newspaper. The bill also criminalizes selling a book, a magazine or a newspaper
whose publisher has not deposited the bond, has failed to file returns, or has
failed to comply with the law in any form. The section of the law that the bill
is amending is a carry over from the colonial laws, and it is interesting that
the Kenyan legislators have chosen to make it more punitive that the colonial
government did.
Kenya's judiciary is supposedly very independent. The President
appoints all the senior members of the bench including the Chief Justice. They
enjoy security of tenure and can only be relieved of their duties on
incapacitation, on achieving retirement age, or on advice of a committee
appointed to review a member's performance. However, Kenya's judiciary has
lately come under severe criticism. Besides being seen as lacking independence
from the executive, the general public tends to view the bench as corrupt. In a
recent survey by Transparency International Kenyan Chapter, the public
perceived the judiciary to be among the most corrupt institutions in the
country, only a little better than the worst, the Police department. Members of
the bench from the Commonwealth countries who recently visited Kenya told the
judiciary to clean its act so as to restore public confidence.
Censorship
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is charged with the
task of censoring the media. But in reality media in Kenya have to deal with
different departments, among them the Attorney General's Office, where
newspaper returns are filed, and the Ministry of Information, which accredits
journalists. But it is the sleuths in the Office of the President who scare the
press most. While publishers are required to register a publication and file
returns with the AG, most publishers often ignore the requirement either out of
ignorance or for whatever other reason, at no cost. The AG will only follow up
an offending publisher for reasons that may not be strictly related to the
offence. For example in 1989 the editor of the magazine Beyond , Bedan
Mbugua had published the magazine for a while without filing the returns and
nobody bothered him. However, it was only when the magazine ran a commentary on
the 1988 elections and said that the elections had been rigged that the
government charged it with the violation. Obviously there were other magazines
that were not following the regulation but since they had not rubbed the
government the wrong way, the government chose to look the other side.
Although the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting licences
journalists, many journalists operate without accreditation. However, the
sleuths in the Office of the President can arrest or detain, without providing
any reason, any journalist who publishes a story that they do not fancy. The
Ministry of Information censors films and movies to ensure that they are
keeping within the cultural norms of the country. But Kenya's biggest censors
are the editors themselves seeking to be careful to avoid problems (Ochieng).
Kenyan journalists have not been proactive in putting in place a
media council that would serve to receive and arbitrate complaints against the
media. In mid-2002, the formation of such a council is in place, but given the
Bill awaiting the President's approval, this council may not find much to do.
It is hard for a Kenyan journalist to walk to any official and get
information that may be useful. It is often a frustrating experience for a
reporter at an accident scene whose need may only be to confirm the number of
victims injured. But the police would not speak, constantly referring the
inquirer to the headquarters. While at the moment there is a Police
Spokesperson, other government departments do not have similar positions and as
such it is not easy to get information from them.
State-Press Relations
Kenya subscribes to the development communication paradigm based
on the notion that given that the nation is a developing one then every agency
in the country, the media included, should focus on development activity and
not criticise those in power. Government officials would insist that the
government welcomed positive and constructive criticism. But of course it is
left to the government to define what is positive and constructive criticism.
Over the years the freedom to criticize the Kenya government has greatly
improved. In a recent cartoon published coinciding with the 2002 Oscar awards,
the cartoonists gave several government functionaries awards. President Moi was
awarded Best Director Award, but then the cartoonist changed his mind, crossed
off the word Director and replaced it with Dictator with all the letters in
upper case. The Nation carried the cartoon. It was quite a statement of how far the
country has come.
The Kenyan government has not, however, always been tolerant.
Publications that did not in the past please government functionaries were
simply proscribed and sometimes this included past issues as was the case with Beyond , Development Agenda , and Nairobi Law Monthly Magazines.
The Nation was, in 1989, suspended from covering Parliament, ostensibly for
the claim of having been disloyal to the country.
Kenya has a news agency, Kenya News Agency (KNA), founded soon
after independence and has, over the years, had offices and field reporters
throughout the country. Graduates of government owned Kenya Institute of Mass
Communication have almost automatically ended up in this outfit as field
information offices where they effectively became the reporters in the field
for the agency. Their assignment has been to file at least a story a week from
their beat. This has provided an easy way to cover the entire country as
newspapers and KBC could rely on KNA to cover the rural areas for them. But it
has also served another purpose in that KNA reporters are trained to see news
in the way that the government wants them to. So the stories are uniform. In
the same way, for a long time, reporters from the newspapers were not allowed
to cover presidential functions. Both the President and the Vice President have
press units detailed to cover their activities. The press unit staffs have been
KIMC trained and schooled in the government's way of presenting news. As
Ochieng (43) puts it "We in the newspapers received only one
interpretation of what the President was supposed to have said or done on any
particular occasion: that of the Presidential Press Unit, relayed to us through
the Kenya News Agency (KNA)."
Attitude toward Foreign
Media
Kenya requires foreigners to have work permits. This does apply to
international correspondents working in the country. The government issues
accreditation to foreign correspondents whether they are working for
international media or local media houses. An international correspondent would
have little difficulty working in Kenya as long as they do not begin reporting
on Kenyan politics in a manner that displeases those in the executive. That
means always praising the executive. Both foreign correspondents and foreign
reporters working for local media have been deported whenever they have written
stories that did not please the executive. For instance in 1987, the government
barred journalists from Sweden and Norway from visiting Kenya after papers in
their countries had carried critical stories on Kenya's human rights record.
Three years' later international journalists covering civil unrest in Nairobi's
Eastlands district were detained and, after release, received threatening calls
most probably from state security (Faringer 67). This is a fate that has fallen
even on Kenyan reporters working for international press. A Kenyan Reuters
correspondent was once picked up and held for nearly 13 hours for having filed
a story to the effect that members of the public had thrown stones at the
presidential motorcade. Local media reporters had been scared to cover the
incident when the Reuters story began to print in the newsrooms. Philip Ochieng
recalls how several editors from the Nation , including himself (he was a sub-editor then), were once detained
for having attributed a story to an "anonymous" source.
Due to government repression of coverage of local issues Kenyans
have, during moments of sensitive developments in the country tended to rely
mainly on international news outlets especially BBC which broadcasts both in
English and Kiswahili. Other channels include radio Deutsch Welle, Radio South
Africa and Voice of America. Often people, even in rural Kenya, would tune to
BBC Network Africa and Focus on
Africa news
programs for breaking news. There is a general feeling that the only
trustworthy news items from KBC radio and television stations are death and
time announcements; everything else is KANU propaganda. Conversely, there is a
tendency to believe that everything on Kenya in international media is true.
This is a consequence of the govern-ment's own control of the media. It would
not allow dissenting views to be carried in the local press, would not allow
opposition activities to be covered over KBC and would not allow civil unrest
to be covered in the local media even when people are aware that something is
happening in a part of the country. A reporter who broke the news in a KTN
report that the then Health Minister, Mwai Kibaki, had defected from KANU to
launch an opposition party lost her job.
While government has had little control of electronic media it has
at times sought to control international print media by confiscating the issues
that are shipped to be sold in the country. These would be when such media have
stories written on Kenya that the government did not like. All Kenyan media
houses subscribe to international news agencies mainly Reuters, AFP, AP and
Gemini. Prior to the end of the cold war Kenya was a member of the non-aligned
nations and subscribed to news agencies associated with the movement. Through
arrangements with the then USSR's TASS it made it possible to access a pool of
stories from other third world capitals.
Television stations in Kenya also relay international news
programs from western stations. KTN for example relays CNN international news
while KBC sometimes relays BBC news bulletin and Deutsch Welle television news.
However, when these stations carry a story critical of Kenya then the relays of
that day may be left out. Kenya does not have restriction on foreign ownership
of the local media. Until the launching of Kenya
Times the print
news media in Kenya were foreign owned with the exception of the Stellascope
publications owned by Hilary Ng'weno. Even the Kenya
Times at one
time was co-owned by British media mogul Robert Maxwell.
Broadcast Media
For a long time the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) dominated
Kenya's electronic media scene. Formerly the Voice of Kenya, the station,
founded in 1927, runs a nation-wide television service, two radio channels
broadcasting throughout the country, in English and Kiswahili, and 16 regional
ethnic language stations (Abuoga & Mutere 100). Today, it also has FM
station covering the city and is planning another FM station for the Central
Province, home to the populous Kikuyu community. KBCTV's news presentation
format has always been predictable especially in the last decade and a half
beginning with the 1982 attempted coup. The lead story has been on the
president's activities including Sunday church attendance. The radio has not
been any different.
Although KBC is publicly owned in the same format as the BBC with
its budget drawn from the Treasury, the government exercises control in the
appointment of management to ensure that KANU receives favorable coverage.
KBC's television station broadcasts throughout the country in both English and
Kiswahili. Its 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. news bulletins are in Kiswahili and
English respectively. It has two parallel radio stations: the general and
national service broadcasting in English and Kiswahili respectively. KBC,
through its other regional stations, broadcasts in 12 other regional languages.
However, this reporting style has been nominally challenged by the
launching of other stations. These stations, six in all, have not challenged
KBC's dominance significantly. Other stations launched recently include KBC
Channel II a subscriptions only cable network whose main shareholder is a South
African firm, MultiChoice; Citizen TV, Nation , Family, and Stellavision. These stations, except the Nation TV,
due to constitutional, financial and logistical limitations, have not been able
to compete appropriately in news coverage. While Nation TV, with its financial
muscle, could offer the biggest challenge to the two stations it is licensed to
broadcast only in Nairobi. Its application for a nation-wide broadcast has been
pending government approval for nearly a dozen years now. While it is not clear
who the main shareholder in KTN is, it is understood that it is owned by the
publishers of the Standard who are part of the Kenyan political establishment (De Beer et al
229).
Television has not made an impact in Kenya's countryside (Mytton;
Ochieng; Bourgault; De Beer et al). To start with, the cost of a television set
is prohibitive for rural people. A 21-inch colour television plus a VCR, for
example, would cost at least five to 10 times the official average income of a
primary school teacher. As a result television is a low priority for rural
population that can ill afford it.
Owning television is complicated by another factor: the rural
electrification programme. Most of the rural areas have little access to electricity.
Rural folk run their televisions on batteries and solar systems. They can only
receive KBC and even then the reception is often poor. Television is sadly
still an elite media. Even in terms of content they tend to cover only urban
events. Ochieng dismisses television as being of little communication
significance to Kenyans for two reasons. He says, "Television, is out of
reach for the majority of the people because it is urban-oriented and
urban-based and because TV receivers are too expensive. Secondly, both
television and radio deal with selected ideas which have to do with the
strengthening of the security and integrity of the state, and not necessarily
with social enlightenment as such" (108).
Most Kenyans have greater access to transistor radio receivers.
Transistor radios today are cheap and available at nearly every street corner
from hawkers. J.B. Abuoga and A.A. Mutere and G. Mytton suggest several reasons
that make the medium popular. These include the low rate of functional
literacy, the poor economy, the poor communication network, transport system
and the people's lifestyles. Experience indicates that the largest single
groups of media consumers in the rural are the teachers and agricultural
extension workers (Wilcox; Quist). They are comparatively well educated, have a
regular monthly income, are more interested in current affairs and are often
opinion leaders. However, most schools are located in far-flung regions that
are inaccessible so that this one single large market does not have an
opportunity to buy newspapers. The alternative is mainly the radio.
The government knows only too well the strength of this medium and
used it for political expediency. The government is familiar with the daunting
task anybody who wanted to reach the entire country has. Only radio can reach
all these people. Unconcerned with the language and distance barrier of the
newspapers, the radio reaches the Maasai in his manyatta, the Somali herdsman
in the outback in the north and the expatriate in his air-conditioned Nairobi
home, all at once. To monopolize access to these people the government controls
the radio. The initial FM radio stations to be licensed were allowed to
broadcast only in the capital, Nairobi.
Overall there are at least six radio stations licensed to operate
only within Nairobi. Apart from this there is the Family FM radio and
Television station in Nairobi, but this is a religious broadcast relaying
primarily religious content. Another station worth note is Kameme in Central
Province that broadcasts in Kikuyu. However, its broadcast does not include
news. Recently in an answer to a question in Parliament the Information
Minister said that over 30 licenses for FM stations had been issued. But
generally they would be given to politically correct individuals some of who
would be holding them only for commercial speculative gain.
Electronic News Media
All the major news houses are available on the Internet. The Nation newspapers,
the Standard newspapers, and KBC web pages are updated daily. The Nation web-site
has searchable back editions going to 2000 while the Standard has only
up to a week. They are, however, not indexed. The EastAfrican is also available online. Although Kenya
Times is online
it is seldom current. Both
the Nation and KBC
websites are much easier to navigate. The KTN website had not been updated for
the first six months of 2002.
Education & TRAINING
There has been, in the last couple of years, an increase in the
number of universities starting departments of communication and journalism
education. Besides the School of Journalism at the University of Nairobi, that
has been in existence for the last two decades, other public universities such
as Kenyatta, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Moi, and
Maseno all have either courses or departments of communication or journalism
being developed. The same is true for private universities. Probably the oldest
department in the private universities is at Daystar University, which began,
in the late 1970s, offering graduate degrees in communication theory. The
department expanded beginning in 1984 when it launched undergraduate
communication courses with tracks in print and electronic media, public
relations, and communication theory. But now there are departments of
communication or journalism at United States International University-Nairobi
and at the Nazarene University. There are also smaller colleges and institutes
that offer training in media and other associated areas of interest. For
example there is a school recently launched in Kenya in memory of the late
award-winning photographer Mohamed Amin in Nairobi specialising in television
journalism.
The Kenya Institute of Mass Communication for a long time was the
main training institution for Kenyan journalists. It offers nine to 12 month
courses in print and electronic media leading to certificates and diplomas in
journalism. Philip Ochieng, one of Kenya's brightest journalists, complains of
the calibre of Kenyan journalists lamenting their training. While Ochieng's
comments may be true as far as they apply to the period he was writing about, a
case can be made that the situation is greatly changing so much so that the problem
now is getting employment for many Kenyans trained in journalism and mass
media.
While the number of the institutions and courses being offered
continue to rise, the same can not be said of the faculty, the literature, and
academic journals. In many instances it is difficult to find teachers for the
courses that are being offered leave alone finding people who are going to
conduct research in mass media.
Summary
Moi has towered Kenya's political scene since the late 1970s and
greatly impacted the direction the media took both through his relations with
the media and the policies that his government put in place. His legacy will
continue to influence the direction the media take. During Moi's presidency the
executive reigned supreme, but there is just a glimmer of hope that some of the
powers the office enjoyed will be trimmed in the new government. However since
some of those poised to take over are a carry on from Moi's system, the
question looms regarding what direction the system will take. Kenya's media
has, through the last decade, developed muscles that may come useful in a new
dispensation. The personnel are at the moment more educated that at any other
time. The civil society has greatly become more active, more critical of the
judiciary, and more demanding of the legislative.
