Sad when scribes start looking over the shoulder

By Ken-Arthur Wekesa

In the recent sands of times, broadcast and print journalists from Standard Group, have been compelled to live in fear of their lives following threats from shadowy operatives.

The latest to have the ‘barrel of the gun’ placed on his head is Robert Wanyonyi over the coffee row expose that has brutally claimed half dozen lives in Bungoma county.

This comes hot on the heels of yet another expose by KTN’s Mohammed Ali and Denis Onsarigo that exhumed the remains of a whopping Sh6.4 billion cocaine syndicate that had manifestly been buried since 2004.

Another expose a couple of years back by Alex Kiprotich on the mysterious death of a pupil at a private school in Nakuru saw the scribe suffer chils as forces of darkness strived tooth and nail to ensure the sad ordeal does not see the light.

There was Patrick Mathangani who spent sleepless nights after splashing the acts of brutality committed by organised criminal hit squads like mungiki, as were sungusungu that had backing from some wheelers and dealers of power.

Mr Juma Kwayera, Athman Amran and others too many to mention here, have also received threats on their lives because of their bold and incisive exposes that have left a sour flavour in the taste buds of a few in the echelons of power.

Such are the archaic and uncouth defeatist tendencies aimed at gagging members of the Fourth Estate from independently articulating the discourse of public interest that must be resisted at all costs.

The primary role of the media is to inform, educate and entertain the public.

But it is the public watchdog’s role of calling to order an inefficient, moribund and sometimes dysfunctional regime, that tolerant to wicked acts of corruption, impunity, lawlessness, extra judicial executions among other nauseating filth that the populace should jealously guard against.

Seismic scale

Any intimidation malevolently seeking to coerce, instil fear and manipulate members of the Fourth Estate is detrimental to both the media and the citizenry and that is why they too, should be up in arms with anyone who labours disastrously to suppress journalists who ably articulate the voice of the voiceless.

Citizens must cross swords with such rotten eggs that have infiltrated sections of the Executive, Legislature, Judiciary and core institutions thereon that appear hell bent to sacrificing the role of the media at the altar of myopic and narrow-minded interests.

It is criminal, unconstitutional and an insult of seismic scale to scatter the elementary gains our sovereign democracy has made since Independence.

The Constitution guarantees fundamental freedoms of expression, media and access to information. Article 33 articulates in black and white, that every person has the right to freedom of expression.

Article 34 also guarantees the freedom and independence of both print and electronic media. Article 35 consequently affirms that it is the fundamental right of every citizen to access information.

Such are the milestones counted in the long walk across the terrain to increased democratic space that led to rivers of blood and incomparable sacrifices. Right thinking members of the public must not cede in the interest of few evil and rogue forces that bestride our potent arms of government. It sickens one to the marrow that the mortals in the sanctums of power do not uphold the spirit and letter of the new law.

The quest for a new constitutional dispensation, which was overwhelmingly endorsed by the populace at the referendum, was a reaction to myriad acts of injustice committed by the past successive establishments that included muzzling the media by influencing its content to the public.

In the quest to quench their thirst for raw power, they have gone to extremes that surpass the precincts of morality, to sip from the chalice of all vices and expect the media to ‘see no evil, hear no evil and say no evil’ about them.

Rattle the cage

Not even allegations of extra judicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture, summary executions and extortion by forces of darkness, committed openly and with impunity are allowed to see the light of day.

It is a evil when a regime throws its weight behind mercenaries who storm a news rooms under the cover of darkness to vandalise equipment, destroy acres of newsprint, and roughs up journalists for rattling unnamed cages.

The Standard Group journalists will not relent in exposing to the public domain, the evil acts of such leaders no matter the price.

The writer is a reporter with KTN.

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