Philip Ochieng
Playing it safe
to publish
Veteran journalist looks back on his career and the dicey ties
with State House in the era of single-party repression
Sunday Nation
December 29, 2002
All heads of government have a boiling hatred
for independent and free newspapers. President Moi has been no exception– he
had a bottomless dislike for the Press. For me, he is a special case only
because he is the head of the government I have been closest to as an Editor.
For three years (1988-91), I was the Editor-in-Chief
of the Kenya
Times (KT), an organ of the ruling party over which he had direct
and often dictatorial policy control.
I had also worked for President Julius Nyerere
(in Dar es Salaam's Daily News) and President Milton Obote (in an
erstwhile Kampala weekly called Sunday Times). But I had never had as much direct
contact with them.
In 1988 the prudes of State House began having
big problems with Kenya Times group Managing Editor Ted Graham, who
had just been seconded thereafter the paper had gone into partnership with
Robert Maxwell of London's Mirror Group.
Graham had insisted on importing every Fleet
Street licentiousness, including hardly authenticated state crimes, a lot of
muckraking and gory sex – all complete with pictures of nude women on page three.
I was Managing Editor of the Daily Nation when Kenya Times chairman
Jared Kangwana invited me to take over. After a meeting with the President at
State House, Mombasa, I accepted.
Why did I agree to leave a much more secure
job on a much more established and much more independent newspaper? Since
memory is so selective, many people do not recall that, in those days, it did
not matter a whit.
All-loving boss
Kenya was a single-party state. And the
single-party boss had become almighty, all-knowing, all-loving. For a good 10
years, everybody sang hallelujah to everything he did. Whatever he said, Cicero
never spoke better!
How was this unity by attrition reflected in
the newspapers? George Mbugguss and Joe Kadhi will testify that, we at the Nation, strained
our necks as much as did Kenya Times before publishing a certain category
of headlines.
Mitch Odero and Ali Hafidh will corroborate
that whenever State House wanted any story killed, The Standard killed
it with as much alacrity as did the Kenya Times. Hilary Ng'weno and Sarah Elderkin of The
Weekly Review might also admit it.
If you looked at it with the simplistic eyes
of liberal American newspaper editors – who claim that they cannot take part in
any form of censorship – you might say that we, the editors of the independent
press, were lily-livered cowards.
There was certainly much of that. Yet there
was also much practical wisdom in what we did. KANU had never been an
ideological party. And at independence, it had dropped all its Nationalist pretenses at journalism.
It hoped we can now say, to get along by patronising
the editors of the independent press. Such famous editors as George Githii, Joe
Rodrigues and Henry Gathigira often said with pride that, though free to
criticise the Kenyatta Government, their publications were "development
partners".
At the beginning, we were robust enough with
our editorial and personal criticisms of the Kenyatta system, Ng’weno blazing
the trail with a stinging column in the Sunday Nation in
the mid-l960s.
By the beginning of the eighties, however,
several years after Mr Moi had taken over, the reluctant tolerance which the
euphoria of independence had forced on the Government was coming to an abrupt
end.
In 1981, Mr Njonjo declared the Nation a Government enemy merely because Editor-in-Chief
Rodrigues insisted that we carry completely objective reports on a court case
in which Andrew Muthemba, a first cousin of the Minister, was accused of
plotting to overthrow Mr Moi.
Sometime that year, five senior editors –
Rodrigues, Managing Editor Kadhi, myself (Chief Sub-Editor) and senior
reporters Gideon Mulaki and Pius Nyamora – were hurled into police cells where
we rotted for long days.
Our sin was that Rodrigues had written an
editorial urging the Moi Government to allow Jaramogi Oginga Odinga his full
democratic rights when the dreaded dissident of Nationalist fame announced he would contest a
parliamentary seat in a by-election.
KANU headquarters issued an unsigned response
which Nyamora correctly described as "anonymous". We came to know
that flak on a rival newspaper poisoned Mr Njonjo's mind by telling him that,
by "anonymous", we meant that the President was a
"non-person"!
A year a later, the Moi-Njonjo power group
prevailed on The
Standard's board to fire Editor-in-Chief George Githii on the
spot because he had published an editorial attacking the Government for trying
to shut the mouths of those "trained to handle ideas".
He was referring not only to newspaper editors
but to the intelligentsia as a whole. He himself had hitherto been a fierce
Government hawk. But the intensifying police state was beginning to interfere
even with the special licence he was enjoying through his personal link with Mr
Njonjo.
Throughout the eighties, journalists were
among hundreds of intellectuals arrested and tortured for months in police dens
in connection with a subterranean putschist movement which, itself, was taking
credit for a series of terroristic attacks on the railway system.
Thus, by the end of the eighties, our backs
had been broken. The old Fleet Street maxim "Publish and be damned"
was no longer thinkable.
As long as this was the situation, the
independent Press now habitually took care not to antagonise the Government
unduly. With Mr Njonjo as the eminence grise, President Moi became more and more
tyrannical and ban-happy.
So we took the attitude that it was much more
beneficial to censor ourselves and live to serve another day than to dare the
devil and die forever – to exploit the latitude we enjoyed, exceedingly
narrow as it was, than to be muzzled altogether. Where, indeed, would the Nation now be had it allowed itself to be
proscribed?
It was with that attitude that I went to KT.
For, in any case, it needed a professional leg-up much more than the Nation did. For the first two years, indeed,
self-restraint – much more than direct orders from State House – was the norm.
Of course, the President (or one of his aides)
often called to order us either to trash a story or to use one.
I remember receiving a call from State House Controller
Abraham Kiptanui – who was never as nice and as easy to talk to as the
President – who called me names because I had splashed a story saying KANU had
chosen Mrs Francisca Otete as Maendeleo ya Wanawake's next chairperson.
The seat had been contested fiercely
throughout the day between her and Mrs Wilkista Onsando. In reality, however,
the contest had been between KANU stalwart Lawrence Sagini and security chief
Hezekiah Oyugi.
It depended on who was for the moment
politically the more important one for the President. Mr Oyugi called me at 9
pm to say the President had latched on Mrs Otete. And, so we went home knowing
we had scooped the other papers.
But I should have known better. For with the
President, there was never any long-term policy. Decisions were always taken
from moment to moment. At 9 Mr Oyugi had been right. But then the other side
had not given up and, by midnight, Mr Moi had changed his mind for Mrs Onsando.
However, it was too late for us. We hit the
street with the wrong story. The other newspapers, not being privity to what
was happening, carried stories to the effect that the fight was still on.
Early KT copies had reached the President's house at 4
am and he had called Mr Kiptanui to order me to change the story. When I told him
that that it was impossible, he uttered
some expletives and banged the phone on me.
The President himself was never so overbearing
and impervious to reason. I was told he could explode when angry. But I always
found him charming, chatty, jocund and amenable to reason.
I would say: "Yes, sir" whenever he
called me to spike or use a story. "But, sir," I would hasten to add,
"listen to the possible consequences."
Arguing back
I would then go on to explain my point. He
would listen patiently and then, after a moment of consideration, he would say:
"Oh, all right, let me give it more thought and call you back."
He would never himself call back. If no call
came back at all, you knew you had won. You knew he had discussed it with his
closest aides and they had seen the wisdom of your interpretation.
If a call came back, it would be from Mr
Kiptanui (or later Franklin Bett), and you knew you had lost the battle. I can
report that, in this way, I won as many battles as I lost.
I am told that my counterparts in the independent
newspapers lost every battle by not arguing back.
Then, in 1990, two events took place to harden
State House even more: the multi-party demand erupted and, to give it impetus,
Foreign Minister Robert Ouko was assassinated in circumstances which seemed to
incriminate the Government.
For the Press, it had at least three
consequences. It emboldened the hitherto timid independent upmarket newspapers
into beginning to reject "directives" and "advice" from
State House.
It gave rise to a proliferation of
anti-Government "alternative press" – including Society, The
People, The Nairobi Law Monthly and Finance –
characterised more by excitement than by information.
And it caused the Kanu hawks to demand more
and more that KT toe their line completely. I began to get
calls even from the likes of Joseph Kamotho, Prof Henry Mwanzi and others at
the party's headquarters directing me what to do.
Power-monger Nicholas Biwott formed the habit
of calling me every day to see how we were going to angle our report on the
judicial inquiry into the Ouko murder.
Fortunately, we had a board, and every time
one of them tried to order me about, I reminded him that I answered only to Mr
Kangwana, who, for his part, told him that if he had any complaint, he should
call the President.
That intimidated them for a time. But, as a
politician, the President always knew what pawn to sacrifice on the chessboard
and I became an easy pawn when such a time arrived.
The last straw came when we refused to
withdraw a daily report called "Roll Call", a public service which
had been inspired by a daily lack of quorum in Parliament. It was after a spate
of MPs' visits to the President to demand my head that he asked Mr Kangwana to
pay me off.
A week after my sacking, the President gave in
to the pressure and there followed the famous amendment to section 2(a) of the
Constitution, making Kenya a multi-party state.
And yet, at the same time, he launched a
four-pronged plan to subdue the media even more.
First, there was to be no more nonsense about
freedom in KT and
the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) and they have remained totally docile
ever since.
Second, he turned to personal advantage the
new demand that the airwaves be liberalised. He licensed quite a few
politically and financially indebted private individuals to run radio and
television stations
As S.K. Macharia will testify, beneficiaries
who tried to use their licences for any agenda that might harm the party and
the man were hit debilitatingly hard.
Applicants, like the Nation, which owed
no such debts were denied licences for a long time until ineluctable pressure
forced the Government to issue one. But up to now, the Nation cannot serve beyond Nairobi.
Third, private companies connected to the
President began to buy controlling shares in hitherto independent media, notably The Standard, and
to wrench from the Kenya Times Media Trust ownership of the Kenya Television
Network (KTN).
Fourth, the President launched a virulent and
sustained oral attack on media that he could not control – really only
the Nation. It
was to the Group's credit that it did not rush into replying in kind – by
trying to publish all the lowdown that it had on the President.
It continued to criticise the Government in
clear but measured language, often even praising it and the President when it
thought they deserved praise.
As we go to press, however, the President's
antipathy towards the Press – notably the Nation
Media Group – remains.
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