Although the Nation was where I grew up and matured, I never rose to the topmost rung of that group’s editorial ladder. What seems paradoxical is that, precisely when, at last, the door seemed open for me to move to the apex, I quit to plunge into the tempestuous sea of something called Kenya Times.
Even in 1984, when I returned to my country for a third engagement at Nairobi’s Nation House – more than a decade after I had completed a three-year tour of duty in Dar es Salaam – the ghost of “Tanzanian communism” was still haunting me with relentless fury. During my second engagement at Nation House – first as editorial copy reviser and then as chief sub-editor of the daily constituent – I was banned from all writing because of my “Marxism”.
During my third – as associate (editorial-page) editor – I was frequently called upon to write leading articles (the pieces better known to laymen as editorials). But Sean Egan, an Irishman who carried the title of “executive editor”, was detailed to go through all my drafts with a toothcomb to remove from them every whiff of “communism” and “Marxism”.
Thus, though my probation was supposed to last only six months, the board refused to confirm me in that post until two years later. Chaired by Albert Ekirapa, the board felt that I needed all that time in Purgatorio to remove every vestige of “danger” that might remain in me. Moreover my designation as associate editor was a misnomer. In most newspapers, the term “associate” refers to the chief editor’s chief lieutenant.
But how could I serve as the lieutenant to George Mbugguss – the group’s managing editor – when between him and me there lay not only the executive editor but also the managing editors of the Daily Nation (Joe Kadhi), the Sunday Nation (Chege Mbitiru) and Taifa (Robert Mwangi)? In our set-up at Nation House, while the native Kadhi was the de jure assistant to Mbugguss, the European Egan was the de facto one.
As a lowly sixth or seventh in the chain of command, I never enjoyed any real power. But I was determined to do my job with all the social knowledge and professional skill at my disposal. I, therefore, felt rewarded when, only a few months after my confirmation as associate editor, I received the news that I was being appointed managing editor of the Daily Nation.
Somebody must have convinced himself that Philip Ochieng – though unstoppable – either had always been innocuous or was a drastically “reformed” man. That was the opening to which I refer at the peg my story. Yet managing the daily would remain the highest position I ever held at Nation House.
From what I had heard Ekirapa say about Nyerere and about all those who had worked for him, I knew I had reached the end of the road at Nation House. But, very soon – only a year later – the newspapers reported a positive mention of my name in even more unexpected quarters. It was David Okiki Amayo – a ruling party hack – praising me for my “objectivity” in a column I had been writing on Kenyan affairs in a London-based monthly magazine called New African.
Years later, President Mwai Kibaki would confer the Order of the Burning Spear (OBS) on me with the same remark (about the objectivity of my still on-going Sunday Nation column). This was at last an official confirmation of what I had always stood for in my newspaper analyses.
But Amayo’s remark 20 years earlier was interesting because a ruling party has a hundred times greater reasons for fearing a “communist” more than an “independent” newspaper. Yet I would soon learn that I had been the subject of discussion in the highest council of the ruling party Kanu and that Amayo’s public comment had followed from that discussion.
A week after Amayo’s comment, I received a telephone call from Jared Kangwana, in his position as chairman of a newspaper which the ruling party had newly acquired. The Nairobi Times had belonged to Hilary Ng’weno, the proprietor of the celebrated Weekly Review and, later, Stellavision. On buying the Nairobi Times, Kanu had rechristened it Kenya Times and proceeded to twin it with the Daily Mirror, a London tabloid belonging to the frequently infamous Robert Maxwell.
Although, as part of the bargain, the Mirror supplied The Kenya Times with key personnel – including managing director Jerry Thompson and managing editor Ted Graham – the Times continued to need an urgent profession leg up. Yet it was because of Graham’s activities that Kanu came to discuss me.
Graham had arrived in Nairobi with all the arrogance which serves as the cloak of Fleet Street’s profound ignorance of the cultures and sensitivities of other human societies. For instance, Graham had begun to publish pictures of nude women on page three of the Kenya Times and, when accosted, had answered that he had been promised “all the freedom in the world”
He insisted that, therefore, the Times would continue with its “freedom to publish”. Kanu chaiman Daniel arap Moi hit the roof. Ted Graham was house-arrested till I arrived at Kingsway House, Nairobi, where the Times was located. Graham was then furnished with a one-way ticket for London, never to be heard of any more.
Following his phone call the week earlier, Kangwana had invited me to State House, Mombasa, to meet Moi. I accepted the President’s invitation to me to take over immediately. In those one-party days, John Kabaka, the Nation Publishers’ managing director, had accepted my resignation with a great deal of tribute, not to me, but “…to His Excellency…”
Soon Kangwana (as chairman), Jerry Thompson as (managing director) and I (as editor-in-chief) would form what, I later learned, was, for a brief time, the most formidable newspaper triumvirate in the region. And soon I had poached from the Nation and the Standard some of their best editorial hands.
Although we never managed to get anywhere near them in terms of advertisements, soon we would pass the Standard in circulation and cause a great deal murmuring at Nation House by our frequent “scoops”. Many of our scoops came from government departments. But the secret was not that the government gave us stories exclusively.
It could not be so because many of those stories did not flatter the government. The secret lay only in how you handled the President. He frequently phoned the editors of all the newspapers to ask them to kill a story. The two kinds of stories thus likely to end up in “the spike” included (a) opposition party activities and (b) corruption, tribalism and ineptitude in governmental and parastatal organisations.
Since the advent of desk-top publishing nearly three decades ago, “the TRASH basket” has done the Nation’s “SPIKE” to everlasting death). After I had punctuated each of the President’s lectures with a whole series of “Yes, sir”, I would pledge: “Yes, sir, I will kill the story. But, sir, please listen to what will happen against us if the other newspapers publish the story…”
He would chew my comment for a long minute, and then: “Oh, okay. If that is the case, hold on to it, till I call you again.” If he did not call back, it meant I could use the story. If he still wanted me to kill it, he would ask somebody else – Abraham Kiptanui, Franklin Bett, Lee Njiru or John Lokorio – to call me.
And, judging from the tone of especially the habitually overbearing Kiptanui, you had to kill the story. The point, however, is that the editors of the other papers never raised such arguments as I frequently faced the President with. They would “trash” the relevant stories without any argument. That was how The Times came to scoop them so often.
People had so demonised the President for so long that nobody knew any longer that there were occasions on which he could listen to reason and back down. But, of course, there was a limit to which even we could go. At one point MPs besieged the President with mendacious stories against us to try to prevail on him to order us to remove a parliamentary “roll call” which I had introduced as our contribution to fighting the frequent lack of quorum in the House.
For a long time I managed to convince the President that this was a necessary party service to the electorate. But the MPs were persistent and finally succeeded in convincing him to order us to put a stop to the column. My resistance was among the reasons Moi told Kangwana to fire me in September, 1991.
That brings me to the question I began with. Why did I leave a secure job at Nation House to accept an appointment in such an insecure outfit? The two reasons are actually just one. I have already mentioned both. First, I had skills – writing, editing and design – which, as a patriot, I thought I owed to a struggling newspaper no matter who owned it.
Experience in Dar es Salaam had already disabused me from the Western liberal prejudice that a party or government newspaper cannot enjoy any measure of freedom. Moreover, quite clearly, I could impart such knowledge and skills with the greatest impact only if I was the one in charge of policy implementation in any given publishing house, something I did not hope to enjoy at Nation House.
The Kenya Times’ offer would be my first and only opportunity to play such a top role in a newspaper – the role which the Nation had appeared so reluctant to give me. Even as managing editor of the Daily Nation, it was not clear that I would step directly or soon into Mbugguss’ shoes. First of all, there was the small matter of Joe Kadhi.
When I was appointed to take over from him in the daily, a new post was created for him – as deputy group managing editor – a fact which seemed to me to mean that he was the one earmarked to take over from Mbugguss. One day – when Ekirapa himself had long retired – he told me that, despite this arrangement, I was the one the board had had in mind to take over from Mbugguss “…at an appropriate time…”
But I had had no way of knowing this. That was another reason I readily accepted the Kenya Times offer. It would be my first chance to put to the test certain journalistic theories that I had cherished ever since I had entered Nation House as a trainee reporter in 1966. But the Kenya Times circumstances soon proved extremely trying.
Upon the whole, however, I do not regret my Kenya Times experience. The attitude I always assumed when I was editor-in-chief of the Kenya Times group between September, 1988, and September, 1991 was to support the broadest outlines of Kanu’s policies, especially as they were on paper.
But I never condoned its failings or those of its leading stars. As members of the sixth parliament will testify, I frequently wrote and published strong criticisms of the one-party leaders. That was why I did not understand this “quandary” in which the Ng’weno weekly news publication now thought I found myself.
Said The Weekly Review: “There may well be a move to rein in the relative independence of the party paper, but even more likely may be the realisation that the establishment of a theoretically independent party or government organ is impractical. The message seems to be that henceforth the party and the government’s communications channels would be the politicians [and not the party newspaper].”
If that statement represented wishful thinking then it was very sad coming from a publication which had campaigned for freedom of the press for so long. The headline was even more tendentious. It said: “Ochieng exceeds his brief”. Now I did not know what the publication imagined my “brief” to be.
I admit again and again that if I accept a job in a party organ then my right to criticise the system must be subordinate to a set of rules of procedure which I have accepted as reasonable, even if those rules be flouted as frequently as the party leaders themselves did. As The Weekly Review article admitted, at that time, the Kenya Times enjoyed “relative independence”.
In fact, however, I had received no official set of guidelines, oral or written. The only guideline I believed I had been asked to follow was the social truth if I was ever so lucky as to identify it anywhere in the higgledy-piggledy situation in which our country found itself. Even in normal situations, the social truth is among the most elusive of all commodities.
This is partly because what is true today is also apt to be false tomorrow and what is true in Nairobi can always prove untrue in Mombasa. Moreover – and this is the crux of the matter – all of us can and often do claim that we are the proud possessors of the truth. Since we know from reality that not all our claims can be correct, we must subject all such claims to the closest scrutiny to be able to separate false claims from correct ones.
It is only for that reason that freedom of speech is paramount. If I think that I have arrived at a highly important social truth but I am not allowed to express that claim, its truth (or falsity) will never be discovered by the collective and its great potential material usefulness will have gone down the drain.
But its truth can be discovered only after the whole claim has gone through the sieve – after, that is, there has been an exhaustive national debate on the claim. To me, that is the social significance of freedom of expression. At the formal level, at least, it is the essence of intellectual liberty and a free press.
That is why no editor of a publication should consider that he has been “roasted” whenever his or her own claims have been put under a microscope. He or she does not monopolise the truth. My “quandary” following the article I mentioned above was no more painful than a series of gaffes which once led the Daily Nation to being barred from covering Parliament and both it and the East African Standard from covering the proceedings of the commission of inquiry into the l990 assassination of foreign minister Robert Ouko.
My “quandary” was no worse than The Weekly Review’s own, some time in 1990, when it made statements claiming that Vice-President George Saitoti belonged to the Kikuyu community and was not a Maasai, statements whose necessity or social usefulness I do not know. Was our “quandary” to be likened to that of Finance, Society and the Post on Sunday, three of the publications which had long opted out of the province of journalism altogether and turned themselves into political heckling?
Freedom of expression, for me, cannot include the swagger, insolence and young-know-it-all-ism characteristic of the editors of Kenya’s self-professed “alternative press”. A sense of responsibility to society should forbid this kind of abandon in behaviour everywhere else in society.
In my time, then, there was something peculiar to Kenya’s single-party system. In three years chairman Kangwana, managing director Thompson and I had transformed the Kenya Times from a useless rag to what the Weekly Review itself, in the same article the day after I had been sacked, described as “essential reading”.
And we did so just by forcing the party leaders to accept a situation in which their own party newspaper could criticise them for their own frequent faux pas. Kangwana, who was our chief political shock absorber, just would not allow certain notorious political enemies of the press to come close to us.
He always directed politicians to channel their complaints to the president and encouraged us to publish freely on a commercial basis. There were, of course, certain exceptions, like Kipng’eno arap Ng’eny, then managing director of the government-controlled Kenya Posts and Telecommunications Corporation and later a cabinet minister.
But even in his case the complaints came to us through Kangwana who directed us on how to proceed. Such protection did not mean that the replies or reactions we got (and the present editors still get) from powerful party or government officials were/are always responsible, true or in good taste. In our time, many politicians, frustrated by an attitude like Kangwana’s, chose to make scathing blanket attacks on the press during public rallies.
Sometime in 1989, cabinet minister Burudi Nabwera climbed onto the podium of a political rally and dismissed the entire corps of Kenya’s journalists as “stupid” and “tribalistic”. Though – as is usual with such politicians – he denied it the next day, claiming that he had been “misquoted”, the attack was on tape and undeniable.
The denial that he had declared all of us numskulls meant, in fact, that he was still calling us liars. For if he had not said it, our reporters must have fabricated the minister’s story and were all liars! For, on refuting the “idiot” remark, he now declared the very opposite about us. We were now the “most educated” of all the professions!
But I hoped that no journalist was flattered by such fulsomeness. For it is simply not true either. He had alleged that we reported “well” or “badly” in accordance only with the tribal backgrounds of the politicians we wrote about. I cannot attempt to deny it. For, everywhere in the world, journalism shares with all the other walks of life – including politics – a strong dose of tribalism and corruption.
And reporters and editors may always be tempted to treat with unique favour the politicians with whom they share an ethnic background and even to accept money to lubricate such treatment. But that is all I am willing to stick my neck out for. Indeed, that’s the thing about many other Kenyan politicians.
Education and long years in the public service appear to have failed to teach them any form of civility. Few properly educated people were impressed by a man who can utter such a perfect untruth, that the entire body of Kenya’s journalists are venal scatterbrains and tribalists and yet, when besieged with questions to tell us more, to wax so embarrassed as to pour spurious praise on the press.
At about the same time, another politician – Mayor Mundia of Thika charged the profession with corruption and laziness. Here again I must stress that, in our society, these are not and cannot be the “prerogative” of any one profession. Corruption is to be found in all our institutions, every one of which contains an agonisingly large number of idlers, layabouts, vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells.
By the same token, every institution has honest and extremely hard-working operatives. So what could a highly placed leader in our country mean when he singled out a particular profession as monopolising venality and indolence? For that was what the mayor said of this country’s pressmen and women.
According to those present, the mayor spent the whole time allocated to him to address his people on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the “Nyayo Era” – Moi’s presidency – to deliver a deadly tirade on Kenya’s entire Fourth Estate. Apparently the mayor had a grudge against correspondents representing Nairobi’s three daily newspapers in that town.
What had they done to His Worship? It was difficult to say from the cryptic manner in which he couched his accusations. It was possible they had not, at one time or another, reported the “civic father” in very caressing light. But it is not a reporter’s duty to report everybody in bright light every time.
All of us are apt to err some of the time, causing the reporters to write words that darken in proportion to the seriousness of our errors. It was also possible, as the mayor alleged, that the reporters had, in one or another of the mayoral functions, spent all the time “eating and drinking” and not listening to and jotting down the mayor’s words, “leaving without covering the functions”, as Mundia put it.
As an editor, I will not say the mayor was bearing false witness here. Gate-crushing, I savvy, is a common activity by reporters. And some behave like sponges, imbibing so much of the stuff as to prove quite an embarrassment to their employers. Sometimes they are really sent over to cover a cocktail party. But some get so incapacitated by the “Ruaraka liquid” that they return with notes which they themselves can hardly decipher.
But so what? Were there no drunkards among Mayor Mundia’s councillors and appointed officials?Was there no rapacity or graft at Thika’s Town Hall? Answer it for yourself! Yet the Mayor said of our correspondents in his fiefdom that they should be “sent to [Nairobi’s] Mathare Mental Hospital for check-ups”.
Why? Because, he alleged, without adducing any evidence, that the scribes responsible for covering him had never done anything but report the mayor “negatively”. The editors of all the upmarket newspapers in Kenya, I can report, always struggle desperately to print a balanced story on every situation.
In normal circumstances, the rule is that, where a stringer files an unsavoury story on anybody, the editors do insist that the news desk get in touch with the subject to get his side of the story before printing that story. If they cannot do so but feel it necessary to print the story, anyway, they have to solicit a counter-comment from the subject the next day.
The chances are that he himself will call the first thing in the morning and then, in line with the right-of-reply rule, the newspaper will feel obliged to carry his reaction in the next edition. If we had consistently published negative stories on Mayor Mundia and had refused to give him his right of reply, then we were as guilty.
If Mundia had been able to show us this, we would have apologised to him in print. Since he didn’t, what was the vituperation all about? If he had had proper upbringing, would it not have restrained him, in his august position, from hurling such uneducated abuse on a whole profession?
Yet even the charge by politicians that journalists are corrupt – though there is much truth in it – is strikingly one-sided. What was the opposition politician Kenneth Matiba seeking to prove when he told a press conference in Nairobi sometime in the mid-nineties that he had given Mutegi Njau, who was until 2005 head of the Nation’s investigations desk, a car as a bribe to induce Njau to report the politician in bright light?
When the former presidential candidate said this, did he really see its implication? For what he proved was far less that the journalist was corrupt than that the politician was the corrupter of journalists. And it was a surprisingly foolhardy thing to say. He could have been taken court on two counts: the self-incrimination in bribery and, if there was no documentary evidence, the libel on Mutegi Njau.
It is probable, however, that many reporters and stringers and even editors are being bribed by the politicians themselves to write poisonous stories against the adversaries of those politicians. During the multi-party struggle in Kenya some writers and editors became very rich by accepting kickbacks from politicians to allow such stories into their newspapers.
Unfortunately, many people think in similarly blanket terms about journalists and other people who may stand face to face with them. About the same time as the minister and the mayor were excelling themselves, we saw an example of it at Butere (in Kenya’s Western Province), where a puny administration official whose name I remember only as Thuo averred that journalists who did not write stories that caressed him would be caned.
In reference to Idi Amin’s Uganda, British writer Dennis Hills in the late 1970s published a book called The White Pumpkin in which he dismissed Thuo’s type as “village tyrants”. Kenya’s Vice-President of that time, Dr Josephat Karanja, told a meeting of the Commonwealth Press Union in Nairobi that the press and the politicians needed each other desperately.
Many politicians – perhaps including the former mayor of Thika – have been heard to utter the perfect balderdash that “we do not conduct our affairs through the press”. Yet every politician knows that publicity is what makes him tick. Whenever a politician is about to do something intended to boost his image in the political market, the press is always paramount in his mind.
Yet this malarkey about not conducting your affairs through the press has been thrown onto our faces ad nauseam. To be sure, politicians produce some of the most exciting raw materials for our papers to process into headlines. As we gather the raw materials, we do make mistakes, sometimes extremely serious ones. We call it an occupational hazard because we have often had to pay very dearly for it. We expect our leaders to understand this because many of the blunders that we make stem directly from the fact that too many leaders are too cagey even with the most innocuous public information. This naturally forces news gatherers into the speculative mood.
But, although the Kenya Times which I edited at that time was the ruling party’s paper, we did not consider ourselves as servants merely of the ruling party stalwarts. We saw ourselves as servants of all members of the ruling party and, indeed, of all Kenyans who made news or who had views they wanted to put across.
This stemmed directly from the party’s own purport to be a servant of the whole people, not just of members. We never wanted to discriminate against anybody for any reason, apart from the well known ones of bad taste, unfair comment, libel, sedition, etc., which all upmarket newspapers universally claim to observe.
In the performance of their duties, let me reiterate, upmarket newspapers will continue to make mistakes. But it is clear that they never set out to offend anybody intentionally. If that is the passport to Nairobi’s Mathare Mental then the newspapers should prostrate ourselves in psychiatrist Mundia’s couch.
If not, then Mundia should have had the grace to apologise to the press. But he didn’t. And so we promised to continue to report him the way we had been doing all long, but with the warning that if he did not leave us alone, we ourselves might one day be tempted to do so – to leave him alone to seek publicity through other media.
If the Mombasa Kanu stalwart Shariff Nassir were alive, he would testify that – because he persisted in uttering pure nonsense about a certain daily, the editors of that daily decided – at the beginning of the millennium –to give a total blackout which lasted all the way till he died.
The press will always write about the politicians because their activities are part of our news sources and because they themselves will always seek us whenever they think they have a rosy story to be written concerning themselves. The press tends to write with great respect on those politicians who continue to render selfless service to the people, though such politicians are a rara avis in terra.
No politician should think that any but a prostituted journalist will write candy-coated stories about him whenever, in the editors’ opinion, he does not deserve it. Such a politician should leave me alone because, like Telemachus (in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”), Nabwera “…works his works, I mine…”
But the newspapers are here to stay. And in our age, freedom of expression presupposes, above all, the existence of free print media. Socially speaking, even the word of mouth can be considered free only if it reaches all or most members of the society concerned. But this is possible only if the word of mouth itself is channelled through some medium.
Free speech is, essentially, the publication of as many objective points of view as possible in as many information-packed newspaper articles as possible. A British newspaper owner once put it very powerfully: “A free newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself”. A free press is a country in which all members are freely discussing their business of collective survival and prosperity in security.
But the fact is that even a privately owned newspaper can easily mortgage away its independence. It can become equally or even more monolithic. And, in the Kenya Times Media Trust, we have seen a situation where at least a few stalwarts of the single party are genuinely interested that the party should enjoy a wide latitude of expression within the confines of one general basic premise to shield it from a decay.
To be sure, there were always would-be plutocrats within the party’s leadership whose aim in joining it was only to pursue personal interests. To be sure, they still chase after power with such ferocity that anybody else in the way must be bulldozed out of it. To be sure, should they worm their way into the nub and core of the ruling party leadership, they are sure to choke the party’s interstices and reduce it to a fossil.
— Continues in next issue.
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