Colin McIntyre
A run-down sports stadium on the outskirts of Nairobi speaks volumes about the current state of journalism in Kenya. The stadium, part of a huge sports complex built by the Chinese in 1987, quickly fell into disuse as government neglect and rampant vandalism reduced it to a wasteland where wild animals roamed freely. Now managed by a new state company, the stadium and other facilities in the 1,000-acre complex are being renovated in the hope of attracting paying customers, particularly to non-sporting events.
The huge stadium’s VIP rooms have been spruced up in anticipation of a new lease of life by high-spending corporate guests. The presidential suite, complete with bed, is being marketed as a must-have honeymoon location.
But at the trackside, a visiting group of Kenyan sports journalists attending a training workshop organised by the CPU and the Reuters Foundation looked in vain for a press box. Eventually they were directed to a couple of rows of seats at the front, unprotected from sun, rain and crowd noise and totally devoid of any telephone or internet connections without which no serious journalist can operate in today’s high-pressure news business.
State-of-the-art facilities for journalists were probably not high on the list of priorities of the stadium’s Chinese builders in the mid-1980s. Nor for former Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, after whom the complex is named, whose government enacted tough press laws and regularly arrested and beat journalists during nearly a quarter of a century of autocratic rule.
But with Moi’s successor Mwai Kibaki taking over in 2002 on a promise to root out the high-level corruption that permeated Moi’s rule, there were hopes of a new dawn for journalists. Although the Moi-era press laws remained in force, a new climate encouraged the Kenyan media to wade in with guns blazing against both old and new corruption cases, and helped bring about the resignation of three ministers earlier this year.
This month, only a few days after the sports journalists’ tour of the Moi stadium, the government’s patience appeared to snap. Police raided the offices of the Kenyan Television Network (KTN) and its sister newspaper The Standard after smashing down the doors, briefly detained a number of journalists and set fire to thousands of newspapers. Police said they were acting on evidence that journalists were being bribed to write stories fomenting ethnic conflict.
If the aim of the raid was to intimidate the country’s newly-vibrant media, it failed, at least in the short term. The Standard called the police justification for the raid “a piece of laughable fiction that even they knew is complete nonsense”. The Kenya Times described the action, widely regarded as the worst attack on mainstream media since the country’s independence in 1963, as “state thuggery”.
As for the press box in the Moi stadium, its new managers said they would provide proper media facilities. The visiting journalists were not optimistic.
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