Kenya's press laws a colonial relic that should be done away with

Journalists at a past event. [File, Standard] 

Kenyans discard what no longer serves them with remarkable ease. We have buried courtship rituals our grandfathers swore by, swapped the payment mode in public service vehicles with mobile payment, and watched marriage customs that once took months get compressed into a single weekend ceremony.

Yet, despite evolutionary changes everywhere, journalism remains shackled to instruments forged for a Kenya that no longer exists. Newspaper publishers still answer to the Books and Newspapers Act, a 1960 colonial relic demanding publishers post a bond before they may print a single copy, as though a newsroom were a bar applying for a liquor licence. The Official Secrets Act of 1968 still hangs over any journalist who asks a civil servant a tough question, carrying a sentence of up to 14 years and offering no defence even when the disclosure serves the public good.

Sections of the Penal Code on sedition and alarming publications, tightened through amendments passed in the 1970s when the state feared little beyond a free press, remain available to any prosecutor looking to silence a story. These laws are, indeed, live ammunition against Kenyan journalists.

During the June 25, 2024 demonstrations, police shut down three broadcasters and barred live coverage altogether. Journalist Ruth Sarmwei of NTV took a rubber bullet in Nakuru while covering the first anniversary of Gen Z protests last year. At the Saba Saba commemorations days later, Citizen TV's Kamau Mwangi and his crew were set upon in town and their camera smashed mid broadcast.

In Majengo, officers cornered a Nation Media Group team and ordered them to delete footage of an earlier assault on a freelance journalist, pressing hard enough on a camera woman's wrists that she nearly lost her grip on the equipment. This happened last year, under a constitution that promises press freedom in its very first chapters on rights.

What makes the work harder still is the company journalists are forced to keep. A reporter chasing a story on missing capitation funds or a death in police custody rarely meets a source eager to volunteer the full picture. Government spokesmen decline interviews until a story is filed, then complain about being misquoted. Politicians offer half truths disguised as full disclosures, daring anyone to prove otherwise.

Editors are expected to extract balance from people who have no intention of being balanced, then carry the blame when the story offends one side or the other. Objectivity is a fine standard to hold a profession to, but it assumes both sides are willing to be honest. In Kenya, that assumption rarely survives contact with reality.

None of this, however, argues for sympathy as an excuse for sloppy reporting. Journalists owe the public accuracy regardless of how uncooperative their sources turn out to be. But the public, and the institutions that govern this trade, owe journalists a legal framework built for the Kenya of today rather than the colony it used to be.

Parliament should retire the Books and Newspapers Act and let the Media Council Act, which already exists for registration and standards, carry that load alone. The Official Secrets Act needs a public interest defence written into its text, protecting a reporter who exposes a scandal rather than one who sells state secrets to a foreign power. The sedition sections of the Penal Code, never fully scrubbed despite the High Court's 2017 ruling against criminal defamation, deserve the same fate.

Journalism, for its part, must evolve too. Newsrooms need clear protocols for handling a story when sources refuse to talk, house standards for labelling a politician's unverified claim as exactly that, and the discipline to report a source's silence as part of the story rather than quietly writing around it.

The next time a leader insists a journalist owes them gentler treatment, the honest response is that the law owes journalists better tools. Kenya has changed nearly everything about how it lives, courts, buries its dead and elects its leaders. Its oppressive press laws should not be the one inheritance that nobody in power is willing to bury.