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Wajir South MP Mohammed Adow is disarmingly amenable and humble. And he knows something about journalism.

So, while in a retreat between the National Assembly leadership and senior editors in Mombasa, his colleagues resorted to spend their nights in more swanky addresses, he elected to stay in the same hotel with journalists—for three days.

Before joining politics, the accomplished journalist worked for the BBC and Al Jazeera. We got to ask him what becomes of good scribes after they are elected to Parliament. There is a tendency by them to wage condescending wars against former desk mates. Currently, one of them is championing a law proposal that borders on criminalising advertising.

Adow had interesting perspectives. So, one of the evenings, he pulls us aside and we delve into a conversation that had been at centre of debate during the day. That of journalism training. “You guys must innovate or be wiped out. But who do you want to train journalists for you? It’s high time for you editors to get out and train journalists to suit your needs,” he told us.

The statement has kept us reflecting on the declining quality of journalism training. The question then becomes, who is teaching at the schools of journalism? There is evidence some of individuals purporting to teach, for instance, print journalism have never written a letter to the editor.

Few can tell the place of the quality editor in the newspaper production chain. They teach courses in newsroom management and structure yet they have never set foot in newsrooms. Our journalists are being taught by flashy intellectual featherweights with fake accents picked from nondescript foreign universities without an iota of newsroom experience. They are so appalling by their want of depth of basic journalism tools and the emerging discourses in the field.

There is a poignant nexus between our utterly ill-equipped journalism graduates and quality of their teachers.
A professor who is an assessor with the Commission for University Education that is mandated to accredit university programmes recently revealed that a number of journalism schools lack qualified teaching personnel. Some schools were offering bachelor’s and post-graduate degrees with no single lecturer with a PhD in the faculties.

Many parents are sending children to pursue journalism in colleges on the other side of Nairobi’s Tom Mboya Street domiciled on the rooftops of bars named after wild animals. The result is the disheartening situation of journalism graduates who can barely write a sentence in correct English leave alone tell Rigathi Gachagua and Kindiki Kithure’s first names.

Once these lecturers find they cannot sustain the rigours of the academy, they retreat to the comfort of government cubicles as media relations officers from where they churn out barely literate press-releases and invites. There is also a whole plethora of NGO wannabes purporting to be training journalists in “workshops”.

It’s apparent that there is a yawning gap between skills being trained in journalism schools and those required in the industry. This should trigger a conversation between stakeholders, especially trainers and the industry. The suggestion here is that there should be an intimate engagement between schools of media and newsrooms. If you manufacture toothpaste, you have an obligation to teach people how to brush teeth.

Maybe elders of the profession should spare some time, walk into lecture rooms, and train and mentor young people for the trade. Of course, more of the practical training can be done on the job.

But we are producing and financing journalism at a difficult time due to tightening revenue streams that have rendered most newsrooms unable to dedicate resources to training, which is the lifeline of any profession.

— The writer is the Political Editor at People Daily—[email protected]