Muzzling the media is not a recent thing

My only meaningful training as a scribe was when I served as State House Spokesman Manoah Esipisu's briefcase carrier in Form One (oh yes, I know people).

Manoah back then was a tiny Form Five student but a fearsome and erudite debater whose gaze and voice dripped with cutting intellect and wicked sarcasm.

As the esteemed chairman of the journalism club, he wrote gripping sports stories about perennial football arch-rivals Kakamega High School's Green Commandos and Musingu Boy's The Scorpions that were so good we read them over and over like a love letter.

My job, as the Club's assistant organising secretary (I never really got to understand what the actual job description was) was to tail the old master with a pen and note book and learn.

By the time he left school two years later, I had risen through the ranks to secretary general of the club. The beauty about this job was that it had awesome perks. I was required by law to cover ALL school functions, notably the outings to girl schools where the real agenda was not the woolly 'mother is better than father debates' but the kamata dame dances that followed.

Anyway, it is about this time that a major scandal that would have shaken the school to the core erupted – if I, as the distinguished secretary general of the journalism club, had not the sense to sit firmly on the story.

Moments after walking through the school gate on opening day, one of my most trusted sources whispered to me that the games master's wife had caught him red handed engaging in extracurricular activities with a staff mate's house help (they were called maids then).

I gasped with horror. Back then, our hormones were literally on fire. As a cheeky journalist once said, even reading the word "sex" in a dictionary was enough to send our hearts thudding. And that very thing was happening rampantly right beneath our noses?

But more was to come. The games master's wife was understandably so upset that she not only packed her bags and left, but started carrying on openly (romancing as my mother would say) with a bushy-chinned primary school teacher right across the school fence. I knew it was the truth because my source (the watchman) had an impeccable source. The games masters' house help was his girlfriend.

Proof that the story was legit came that very night when the games master staggered through the school gate holding onto what appeared to be a kilo of meat wrapped in a newspaper and woman with a whorish halo. Bingo!

I would be lying if I said my headmaster ordered me not to file that story, complete with a cartoon, on the school's noticeboard. It is just that for once, I exercised the very thing my mother always claimed I lacked – common sense.

I knew in no uncertain terms that if I as much as attempted to write that silly story in my mind, I would be expelled from school the very next morning and my father, the retired policeman, would have welcomed me home with a 21 gun salute.