Abducting journalists won't stop the government's date with comeuppance

September had an ominous beginning for Standard Group Associate Editor Alex Kiprotich. Armed men in a government vehicle abducted him along the Gilgil–Nakuru road and later dumped him near Masinga Dam in Machakos County. It was Kiprotich’s second brush with armed men this year.

The media is increasingly under siege, and every government that has ever tried to cage the press has told itself the same lie: that this time, the bird will stay quiet. History, however, keeps proving otherwise.

The canary in the coal mine does not sing to please the miners. It sings, or falls silent, to warn them. The miner who shoots the canary for singing has not solved his toxic gas risk. Rather, he has only ensured nobody will warn him of the next one.

This is not a new fight. Richard Nixon tried to bury the Washington Post over the Watergate scandal. Two reporters and a healthy contempt for cover-ups outlasted a presidency. Ferdinand Marcos shut down Philippine newsrooms under martial law, but the press that survived in exile and underground mimeograph helped write his obituary in 1986.

Augusto Pinochet's Chile jailed and disappeared journalists for 17 years. The country's return to democracy vindicated all of them, though posthumously in many cases. Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte harassed Maria Ressa's Rappler with tax charges and cyber-libel.

Ressa answered by winning a Nobel Peace Prize. Even Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has jailed more journalists than perhaps any government on earth, has not managed to make Turkey's problems disappear; he only made them harder to report on, which is not the same thing as making them go away.

Donald Trump built a political career partly on branding the press ‘the enemy of the people’, and the press outlasted his first term, called out his second, and is still standing. Try naming any government that survived by silencing its critics rather than answering them, and you find there is none. There is only a longer or shorter delay before the reckoning.

Kenya has been here before. In 2006, masked police officers stormed The Standard's newsroom and KTN's studios, torched newspapers, and switched off a television station, all because a story about secret meetings between State House and the Opposition had rattled someone. The then Internal Security minister John Michuki offered the country an unusually honest confession: Rattle a snake and expect to be bitten. The snake, of course, was the truth. It bit anyway.

It is not the work of the media to applaud a government for doing the job it was elected to do. That is what campaign posters are for. It is very much the media's work to point out where an administration is failing the very taxpayers who fund it, because no leader was elected to fail them quietly. A press that has stopped lighting fires under the soft backsides of the executive has stopped doing its job and started doing public relations.

The Standard has lately made a point of lighting those fires, to the visible discomfort of an administration that treats Wanjiku as a doormat for wiping muddy boots. Government-aligned bloggers tried mockery first: ‘Githeri media’ and its cousins, but the mockery failed, because ridicule cannot survive contact with evidence.

So, a bright spark reached for something older and uglier: abduction. That the Inspector General of Police deigned to order ‘investigations’ on the abduction fools nobody old enough to remember how many such orders have gone to die in a drawer.

A police service cannot credibly investigate itself when its own vehicles have reportedly been traced to the scenes of both incidents. Kenyans do not need another perfunctory statement; they need independent investigators with no stake in the outcome.

President Ruto's silence, at this point, is not neutral. Through omission or commission, he stands accused, and in a republic that still believes in its Constitution, an accused president does not get to skip the trial by press conference. The canary is still singing. The only question is whether anyone in the State House is still listening or has simply decided to shoot the bird.