Kenya's political elite has its own warped perception of what journalism should be, not necessarily what it was designed to be.
UDA Secretary General Hassan Omar Hassan last week got all pumped up and went ballistic against an innocent journalist and the Standard Group for asking him a question on the Ol Kalou Constituency by-election loss. His response, that the Standard Media Group is a quack organisation, was pure drivel. His puerile attack on Gideon Moi and Standard Media Group's Chief Executive Officer Chaacha Mwita, individuals who had nothing to do with UDA's whacking in Ol Kalou, was a reflection of Omar's capability, or lack of it, as a party SG.
When pressed on UDA's loss, a bewildered Omar groped in the dark. He took a detour through other constituencies and recited a list: Malava, Banisa, Mbere, Isiolo, Emurua Dikirr, Baringo, Magarini, Kasipul and Ugunja, as if a scoreboard from other contests could erase the question asked of him.
And even as Omar claimed victory in these constituencies, he conveniently forgot to mention that he, personally, had nothing to do with them. Those wins were as a result of local leaders teaming up with a silent, tenacious, non-political operative who possesses better organisational qualities than Omar, loquacious presidential advisors, some CSs and mouthy UDA politicians put together.
The same man who dismisses Standard Group as a quack organisation behaves like the quack physician of old, the one who cannot diagnose his own patient's fever and instead accuses the thermometer of lying. UDA's loss in Ol Kalou was the fever. Omar's job as the SG was to read it honestly. Instead, he reached for the KTN journalist's throat, muttering that professionals should be treated as professionals but 'quacks dealt with as quacks', apparently unaware that the diagnosis fit him better than it fit the newsroom he was insulting.
Sophocles wrote, in Antigone, "that none love the messenger who brings bad news". Omar has updated that wisdom for the age of by-elections; none love the messenger who brings a lost seat, so shoot him, or better still, accuse him of taking instructions from elsewhere. When pressed further, Omar all but conceded the conspiracy existed only in his imagination, admitting in the same breath that his own camp had "whitewashed Gideon several times".
Then came the threat, casually delivered by a man who has never been made to answer for his words. If a journalist hides behind the veil of media freedom, Omar warned, his side would respond politically. These words always precede fresh assault on the Fourth Estate. This is the language of an SG nursing a bruised ego, a man who believes power entitles him to redraw the boundaries of what journalism may ask him.
Omar seems to have forgotten he was once an aggrieved party. In 2017, while on national television, he bristled at being mocked over his physique, insisting no politician deserved dehumanising for holding a different opinion. He was right then, and still is, but has seemingly forgotten his own lesson now that the microphone points the other way. A man who once demanded dignity for himself cannot, a few years later, deny a working journalist the same courtesy.
And what, pray, gives Omar airs? His is the trajectory of a political loser. He emerged third in the 2017 Mombasa governor race and got trounced again in 2022. A month ago, he was forced to give a public apology for opening his mouth before engaging the brain after his remarks raised hackles in Central Kenya. His own party colleagues said his conduct fell way below standards expected of the office he holds.
Journalism does not exist to flatter women and men who cannot win their own elections. It exists to ask the questions Omar could not answer. UDA deserves better than an SG who treats the newsrooms as enemies whenever the truth is unflattering to him. The quack, in the end, was never the journalist. It was the man holding the stethoscope to someone else's chest while refusing to check his own.
