Musings of a (Still) Free Press

My father—Philip Ochieng—took a week off from his usual commentary; it's not unprecedented (he’s been in precarious health of late). However, there is quite a bit of other interesting opinion-writing regarding the governmental raid of the Kenyan newspaper The Standard and the nation’s TV station, KTN.

Daily Nation Editorial, March 5, 2006 (I don't think that my father wrote this; it isn't in his writing style):

National Security minister John Michuki is trying very hard to back up his claim that that most brazen assault on the media since independence was in the interests of national security.

He is saying that the raid on the Standard newspapers and KTN premises - conducted by a shadowy police unit operating more like a private militia - had uncovered evidence of material that posed a threat to national security. Mr Michuki, however, was extremely economical with details on exactly what had been found. The most he could offer was that it was still being analysed.

This, to us, sounds like a desperate attempt to manufacture justification for a raid which has done incalculable harm to a government that was elected on a human rights and rule of law platform. The minister stated with his own mouth that anyone who provokes a snake must expect to be bitten.
We presume he meant that the Standard provoked the snake. So, anything else about alleged threats to state security can only be an afterthought. What happened was a blatant display of the coercive power of state machinery gone mad.

Mutuma Mathiu:

When a government turns loose hooded men on the population, when a government throws out the law, it ceases being a government and becomes an enemy of the people, an imposition willing to have its criminal way irrespective of the will of the people. [SNIP]

I don't think the government's criminal actions against the media was [sic] a punishment or revenge for an inaccurate story; rather, the story was merely an excuse, an opportunity to send a brutal message not just to the media but to the opposition and Kenyans, in general.

Gitau Warigi:

One thing was clear. This was not simply a bumbling operation by drunken officers. It was planned and deliberately executed. Could there be a cabal in government that has decided to throw all rationality out of the window and resort to bareknuckles in the name of combating imagined enemies of the State?

Lately, dark mutterings by State functionaries about there being "too much freedom" in the country have been on the increase. Soon, somebody in those circles is going to learn that such displays as we saw on Thursday are a suicidal way to demonstrate that the leadership has a backbone.

And if the intention was to send a message, violent as it were, to the Standard's owners, or its Board of Directors ... well ... that has been received loud and clear by everybody, even those it was not intended for. You can count the Kenyan voter right in there. When somebody in this government once told one [former Kenyan President] Daniel arap Moi to sit back and watch how a government is run, surely this could not have been what they had in mind.

(Don’t ask me how to pronounce the names.)

It appears that much of the country’s journalist population hasn’t be cowed by the government’s action against its colleagues. That’s a sign of hope. That Kenya’s media entities still feel free enough to slam its president and cabinet members for their apparent anti-liberal actions shows that they will not sit quietly while press freedom is violated.

As an additional twist to the situation, however, it's reported that the head of Kenya’s police agency officials wasn’t in the loop about the raids.

It has now emerged [that Kenyan] police commissioner Mohamed Hussein Ali was kept in the dark about the swoop, even though it was his own officers who masterminded the attack. [SNIP]

In the case of the raid on the Standard Group HQ and printing plant, it has emerged that final details of the raid were rehearsed during a meeting held at Harambee House [originally the official residence of the head of state, but, in practice, now the State House] on Wednesday evening. National Security minister John Michuki and CID [Central Investigation Department] director Joseph Kamau were reported to be present but Maj Gen Ali was not even invited.

Note to those who claim that free speech is clamped down upon here in the US: this is what real oppression looks like.

Comments

[Tim Worstall]

I hadn’t known you were of directly Kenyan background. Apologies for only just noting it and your trackback a few days ago to the story on the papers there.
My best wishes to your father at this difficult time. The defense of free speech and freedom is of course vital but we always rather hope that it won’t be us or our family that has to go through the process of actually doing it.
For whatever it’s worth, my regards to you both at a difficult time. Something I’ve not had to face directly myself, thankfully.
Anything (but what?) I can do, drop me a line.

[sigmund, carl and alfred]

Good post.

You are right, of course. In the great scheme of things, those who claim free speech is in trouble here, have trouble understanding the word 'triage.'

Prioritizing is anathema to many liberals. They would have to acknowledge that their shrill agenda, in the great scheme of things, is irrelevant.

[Dean Esmay]

Kenya's actually in pretty good shape compared to many other African countries. Check out this Freedom House report.

They're definitely a democracy, just not a liberal one yet. But they're coming along. Give them another ten years....

[bigger]

Kenyan names are easy to pronounce, unless they're Kikuyu (Ngugi waThiongo is, I gather, pronounced just as it's written.) Ochieng is "O-chee-eng," "Michuki" is "Me-choo-key." Daniel Arap Moi was Daniel Arap Moy. Kenyans got their Roman spelling from the British after 1907, because the British had guns and the Kenyans didn't, and Kenya was on the route to Uganda, the Jewel of Africa. The problem is tone. Swahili doesn't have it, and I gather is just about the only Bantu language that doesn't (it's a creole of various Bantu languages and Arabic, and tone got thrown out altogether. The grammar is Bantu, tone got dropped, and it adopted a lot of Arabic [kitabu-book], then English [motaka-motorcar], words.)
Kenya managed to get rid of Arap Moi without a civil war, which is a lot better than many other African and European states have done (Moi in fact retired when it became too hot for his kleptocracy to continue.)Their problem is the country's population is several times what it was at Indepenence and, while the economy was never as bad as Ghana's or Tanzania's, they are a lot less richer than they could have been without the kleptocracy.
However, climate change ecofreeks are claiming that east africa is going to get heavier rainfall, that Somalia will be flooded (and thus suffer even more malaria.) -- the Somalis and Kenyans will be thrilled.

[baldilocks]

My father tells me that the 'g' in Ochieng is rather silent, though I still pronounce it phonetically. :-)

[Mentalacrobatics]

The reaction of the Kenyan blogosphere to the raids has been equally robust.
You can catch a summary of some of the opinions expressed here