Referendum politics will leave the media bruised, bleeding

Being away from Kenya even for one week feels like a year away from home. It gets worse when you are marooned in some remote parts of Northern Uganda, a war-zone that understands more gun politics and death by starvation or a slower HIV infection which the poor of the poor mothers and sisters are often forced to opt for rather than die of hunger!

It feels like a year away from home because these are no ordinary times in Kenya. We live in troubled times that are a cause for worry and fear among many people in our land.

The referendum politics, a normal human activity in many societies the world over is turning professionals and men of honour into turncoats and charlatans by their droves.

The politics of nationhood and principle has been thrown to the winds. And it has been thrown to the dogs by the high and mighty and the not so high and mighty in equal measure.

We are courting disaster and mayhem in magnum proportions, yet we seem helpless to do anything about it. Mob euphoria, fuelled by ethnic loyalty has totally obliterated reason and common sense. Nobody is innocent in this game of self-destruction. We all stand accused either as fuellers of the conflict or stand-by-do-nothings as our house is being set ablaze by arsonists called the media fraternity and the political class.

In recent weeks, we in Kenya have had a chance and reason to sit back and reflect if only the media had allowed us to consume and digest what Nelson Mandela and his wife Graca stand for when it comes to the doctrines of war, peace and reconciliation. Having been with us for two good weeks, did we even as the media bother to find out what it was that Mandela did to South Africa with his 27 years in jail and 5 years as President of South Africa? Did we even bother to find out from Graca Machel what it was like to fight a protracted liberation struggle in Mozambique for decades and that after losing her husband and comrade Samora Machel in the struggle, she opted to marry a one-term president and take up the mantle to liberate this continent from bad governance?

No, we didn't. It wasn't important. The mundane politics of ethnicity, local government councillors and politicians boycotting Graca's meetings were more important if not newsworthy than the larger issues that they were in the country for.

In the middle of this great couple's visit to Kenya, another major political event was unfolding in East Africa, capturing the imagination of the press from Pretoria, through Lusaka, Maputo and Dar-es-Salaam all the way to Kampala. Apollo Milton Obote , first president and founding father of Uganda as we know it today was dead.

As the Uganda government grappled with the complexities of bringing the body home and according him a state burial after being in exile for two decades, all we got, if we were lucky here in Kenya was a scanty story filed by foreign correspondents in Kampala or at best a Monitor staff reporter filing a quarter page piece for the Daily Nation.

To our Kenyan press, did it matter that the body of Obote was flown from South Africa, escorted by Zambian cabinet ministers and their Ugandan counterparts? Did it matter that former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda wept at Obote's funeral?

Did it matter that the return of Obote to Uganda, even in death provided an opportunity for all of us to learn from the mistakes of ethnic politics and a chance for reconciliation and atonement?

Did it even occur to our media to remember that Obote, despite his numerous mistakes in politics was larger than Uganda, a regional icon and a pan-Africanist to the core?

No, it didn't matter at all. Yes, to our media, Obote was just another dead African, a failed African leader who had spent his best twenty years in exile not worth the precious pages we set aside for our increasingly ugly ethnic and divisive politics. We were content to feast our readers on the exploits of the Banana-Orange debates on our airwaves and in our newspapers in equal measure.

As I delved into the pages of five Ugandan papers; the New Vision, the Monitor, the Obote Times Special, the Observer and the Red Pepper, I realised how our dream of an East African people that had driven my colleagues and me then at the Nation Media Group, had come a cropper. I remembered with nostalgia, the many terrains we traversed in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, first with veteran journalist Joe Kadhi and later with Joe Odindo and Gerry Loughran, just to understand East Africans and make them one people through the media rather than through a failed political leadership.

In those heady days of the 1990s, our desire was to create a conducive East Africa for all our citizens. In our efforts to earn support and acceptance from authorities in our region, we sold cooperation, freedom of movement and trade across our common borders, freedom of employment everywhere, exchange of personnel, skills and manpower and anything else that would return us to the pre-independence days of the East African Common Services. And to tell you the truth, we got a more ready and willing audience among our media colleagues and leading political leaders in Kampala, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. If you ask Onyango Obbo and Wafula Ogutu, then of the Monitor, William Pike and James Tumusime, then of New Vision, Patrick Quarcoo and Ezra, then of Capital FM Uganda, Reginald Mengi of ITV and Uhuru of Mzalendo publishers, they will tell you their story.

In those days we tried to explain that we were one people that had a chance to live a better life and be more prosperous if we united and created a stronger market for our services. We cherished the ideal of sharing in our resources, skills and manpower.

We advocated the merits of sharing in our successes, sorrows, joys and fears as one family.

Yet ten years later, the Nation Media Group staff of Kenyan origin face eviction and deportation from Tanzania, the Nation Group investments in that country notwithstanding.

Today, Uganda's father of the nation is dead and being mourned, yet our media is silent and no condolences are forthcoming from the political class, save for Daniel Arap Moi! Yet, we are talking of an East African Community, an East African Federation.

Isn't it a pity that at a time we should have taken a deserved break from the referendum politics even if it was for just one week to moan East Africa's fallen hero, this break would have given us a refreshing interlude to reflect better on our own political condition?

Coming back to the local media, two events that should have lifted our current acrimonious debate above parochialism that has become our staple food just helped to make things worse if not murkier.

First, we had the much-touted great debate between the Orange and the Banana combatants that was carried by all media to give Kenyans a glimpse of the real issues about our referendum.

Much as the intention was good, the idea came a cropper at the implementation stage. Everything that was supposed to go wrong went wrong. This gaffe must go directly to a group called the Media Owners Association, some of who have never really owned a back-street four-page newsletter nor a gutter broadcast station. Yet they sit there and masquerade as media owners!

The composition of the media owners aside, let us accept one fundamental truth. That when the media owners and managers finally came to terms with the fact that the media was getting the referendum debate wrong in more ways than one, they called a meeting to tone down the political temperatures they themselves had helped to fuel. As businessmen rather that news editors, they sensed danger of loss of profits in their millions. The meeting was called to stave off a commercial debacle that would probably caused casualties in mainstream media.

In deciding to have an all media debate, it was in bad taste and most unprofessional if not downright negligent to have a non-practicing journalist to chair a debate of that magnitude. It was wrong to pick on an innocent person who has never really participated in the opinion shaping fora to moderate the debate. It was even sinful to pick on the owner of an ethnic radio station whose stand on the ongoing debate is common knowledge within the media industry.

In this country we have leading journalists in very high positions in the media whose interactions with the political class would have added value to the debate. Wangethi Mwangi is editorial director at the Nation Group, Joe Odindo is the Group Managing Editor at the same company, Tom Mshindi is CEO of the Standard Group, Kwendo Opanga is the Editorial Director in the same company, Patrick Quarcoo splendidly chairs Cross-Fire at Kiss every Sunday, veteran journalist, Wachira Waruru heads KBC, Louis Otieno is at his best at KTN News Line. Why didn't Media Owners pick on any one of these people to moderate the debate?

In any case, political debates the world over are the preserve of veteran journalists and in most cases respected and seasoned television news anchors accepted by the larger society. The choice is never a boardroom affair.

Having watched a replay of what transpired, listened to callers commenting and reading letters to the Editors in the local press, I am very clear in my mind that it was a wrong move to get our dear colleague to moderate the debate. It hasn't done us, the media owners or herself any service. We have come out bruised and bleeding all over.

In future debates, this country would do better with Mary M' Mukindia of Kenya National Oil Corporation or John Sibi Okumu of Hill Crest High School just in case the Media Owners Association would not settle on one of their senior editors to chair the debate.

The second event has been the release of the latest opinion poll on the referendum by the Steadman Media Monitoring Group. As expected, the results have been many things to many people, regardless of their authenticity, accuracy and factuality depending on which side of the fence one sits on at the moment.

First, one must give credit to the Steadman Group for at least trying to undertake this kind of business at this time in the history of our nation for whatever reason whether they are driven by monetary interests or professional and political mileage.

A few things that come out which I feel are more important than even the figures already disparaged by both camps are the fact that thirty days to the referendum, 91% of voters targeted for civic education have yet to meet a single civic educator! If this is the situation, then where are our CKRC Commissioners, their civil society recruits and our billions of Shillings being spent on civic education? If this number has never seen the Wako draft then who holds the key to the 4 million copies the government recently contracted private printers to produce?

If 40% of Kenyans are saying they prefer the Bomas Draft to the Wako version whose advocates are a mere 24% then why is the government hell-bent on carrying out a referendum whose cost is in billions to the tax payer?

Both camps are crying foul that the figures don't make sense. Both camps feel the figures were doctored for one reason or the other. If these fears are being expressed even by the group favoured by the polls, then something may drastically be wrong with the process.

And the only honourable thing to do is for the Steadman Group to come out and explain the following:
· Who paid for the poll since we know the Group has never been known to be in the charity business?
· Were the figures doctored by the group when they realised it was too much in favour of the Orange team, as the team claimed?
· Were the figures doctored in favour of the Orange team as claimed by Paul Muite, a Banana campaigner when he claimed "he who pays the piper calls the tune?"
· During the Group's consultations with the teams before releasing the results, were these consultations done collectively or individually with each group?
Most reliable sources from the team that carried out the poll and who did the initial analysis, which we have reason not to disbelieve, have made some comments that may not be flattering to the pollster.

Given the delicate political balancing act this country is currently experiencing, the last thing we need is an unreliable pollster even if it came from the moon.