Rebukes issued after attacks on reporters are lazy
By Print Reporter, July 18, 2024I am in the last category of millennials, so I have half of the bold Gen Z mentality that has shaken the Kenyan government to the core and forced President William Ruto to dissolve his entire Cabinet. So the words that I’ll state below will sting.
During protests on Tuesday, July 16, disturbing reports emerged that Mediamax Networks journalist Catherine Wanjeri Kariuki had been shot by police while covering demonstrations in Nakuru the same day.
The video clip that you’d have seen by now on social media capturing the last moments before the incident happened shows just how little has been done to punish the perpetrators for shooting the messenger.
In 2023, Kenya dropped from a ranking of 69 out of 180 in the annual Reporters Without Borders press freedom index to 116. Cases of harassment have mounted amid a surge in hostility, characterised by police brutality against journalists during public demonstrations, as well as overt antagonism from the government.
The Media Council of Kenya (MCK), which I’ll brutally address shortly, among others, termed March of that year “the darkest month for Kenyan media since the clamour for multiparty democracy” in the early 1990s. No fewer than 25 reporters suffered attacks from both rioters and the police. Among them was NTV’s Eric Isinta, who suffered burns and a fractured jaw after he was struck by a teargas canister.
This year, MCK, on June 18, condemned the alleged arbitrary arrests and attacks on journalists covering Tuesday’s protests in the centre Nairobi by armed police officers, highlighting that journalists, who were equipped with MCK press badges and press jackets for identification, were harassed, manhandled, arrested and assaulted by security forces.
In response to these incidents, MCK called upon the Inspector General of Police to take immediate action and ensure journalists were protected and to prevent further harassment in any work environment. A gospel that’s turned to a song that we’ve seen, read and heard about over and over again.
Do you want to know how MCK and all these other media bodies are being overtaken? On Sunday, June 30, in a roundtable interview with digital journalists at State House, President Ruto, responding to a clip that went viral capturing a plain-clothes police officer firing a teargas canister at a freelance journalist who was covering the protests, said: “The police officer who is roaming, I want the exact details of him, I will apprehend him and he will be dealt with per the law.”
Hate him or love him, it’s a whole President vowing action against an officer. He, instead of the media lobby groups responsible. Aren’t they supposed to know more than the President? I mean, this was a matter that directly affected their industry.
Anywho, MCK issued a press statement on the shooting of Wanjeri, followed by the likes of the Kenya Editors Guild, and Kenya Union of Journalists (KUJ), among others, and most of them had the same template: “We condemn…we call upon….”
I liked KUJ’s because at the end it says, “…[failing] which, we will institute private prosecution of the officer involved and the commander of the Nakuru operation”.
My point is that all those bodies should do better in their press statements than “we condemn…we call upon…” because they are toothless. For a whole year or more, we have become used to this pattern – a journalist is attacked on duty by a police officer and a statement is issued condemning the attack, and life moves on the following day.
Just like Gen Z is draining the government swamp, we must start draining the swamp in our entire media industry. That means that the media bodies need to take matters into their own hands instead of relying on government institutions such as IPOA.
— Marvin Chege is a digital journalist and the founder and editor-in-chief of Viral Tea Ke, a digital native media platform