On Citizen TV’s Power Breakfast Show on Monday, April 11, 2001, one of the saddest episodes in Kenyan journalism occurred and the tragedy is that it involved two good acquaintances of mine. The Newspaper Review and Know Your Rights anchor, Laston Mutegi Njau, was in the studio with publisher Barrack Muluka, CEO and lead investor in Mvule Publishers and a former longtime MD of East African Educational Publishers as well as a prominent newspaper columnist.Njau and Muluka, jumped the gun and in the process grossly insulted no less a personage than Mama Ngina Muhoho Kenyatta, Kenya’s founding First Lady, widow of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and mother of, among others, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta.
The two were going through the lumbering paces of what passes for a newspaper review segment on Power Breakfast, a dull-as-dishwater interregnum. It was the morning of the return from The Hague of the Ocampo Six. After generally bad-mouthing Uhuru and Eldoret North MP William Ruto, and repeatedly calling for the cancellation of the homecoming rally in their honour scheduled for Uhuru Park later that morning, the two turned their fire on Mama Ngina, all barrels blazing.
Prefacing almost every reference to Njau with the word “Senior”, which made the broadcaster simper horribly each time, Muluka raised the Ngina issue by noting that she had declared she wished to write a book on the horrors of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Mutegi harrumphed and shifted belligerently in his chair while Muluka launched into the most vulgar insults directed at a woman who is old enough to be his mother, who is moreover still alive, alert and prominent.
Squealing at their own wickedness,Njau and Muluka pointed out that Mama Ngina is the daughter of a one-time colonial Senior Chief, the sneering implication being that this disqualified her from writing a critique of colonialism and after. Muluka, grinning and basking in Njau’s mutual-admiration-society enthusiasm, then suggested that the real reason Kenyatta married Ngina was as an “investment” in the loyalist, colonialism-compliant Home Guard African elite of the day. Mutegi reeled off a number of names of colonial collaborators’ children educated in the 1940s and ’50s, among them today’s Environment Minister John Michuki, adding the rider that many of them were not particularly bright but had nonetheless been taken to the finest schools set aside for Africans under the Colour Bar system.
Njau and Muluka rounded off their obscene assault on Mama Ngina’s name, person, character, integrity and her union with the late Kenyatta by observing that it is little wonder the founding President gave so many top jobs to the progeny of Home Guard collaborationists.
In a long life in the limelight during both the worst and the best of times in Kenya since the mid-last century, the gracious, reserved, eminently non-controversial and magnanimous Mama Ngina has never been exposed to more undeserving public ridicule than this by two senior journalists who ought to know much better but apparently don’t.
The Media Council of Kenya’s Code of Conduct for the Practice of Journalism in Kenya, Second Schedule of the Media Act 2007, is clearly a document which Messrs Njau and Muluka have scant regard for. In one fell swoop and in less than five minutes, in mistreating Mama Ngina the way they did, they were in breach of the Code’s Clause 1, “Accuracy and Fairness”; Clause 3, “Integrity”; Clause 4c, “Accountability” (urging all journalists to “recognize that they are duty-bound to conduct themselves ethically”); Clause 9, “Obscenity, Taste and Tone in Reporting”; Clause 13, “Privacy”; Clause 15, “Sex Discrimination”; Clause 23, “Editors’ Responsibilities”; and Clause 15, “Hate Speech”.
The truly astonishing thing is that, between them, Njau and Muluka have 65 years of combined experience in the media and publishing. But all this experience counted for absolutely nothing when they appeared to descend into selective amnesia and pilloried a prominent public personality who has taken the most assiduous care to avoid controversy in a long life in the limelight. They conducted themselves worse than the greenest of greenhorns and clearly operated without a script and direction, adding insult to injury and enjoying themselves thoroughly.
I almost wept for these two. Mutegi was once my teacher and Barrack my classmate and friend on a postgraduate course. If Mama Ngina takes umbrage and sues these two, she will almost certainly be awarded some of the most comprehensive exemplary and deterrent damages in the history of journalism in Kenya.
Easily the biggest tragedy of this sordid little show was the golden opportunity that it missed by a million miles of encouraging one of the most preeminent of Kenyans of the pre-Independence generation to tell her story. The opportunity of debriefing Mama Ngina for her story, either as autobiography or authorized biography, and doing so intelligently, sensitively, intuitively, professionally and with maximum integrity, is something that many a journalist or specialist writer — and most publishers — in this country would give the proverbial arm and leg for. Told and presented in the right way, Mama Ngina’s memoirs could be the most sensational publishing event since the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s Not Yet Uhuru in 1967 and her own husband’s Suffering without Bitterness in 1968.
The point Mama Ngina was making when she expressed a wish to write at her farewell event for Uhuru and Ruto on the eve of their departure for The Hague is that she has lived long enough to see her husband (in 1952) and now their son (59 years later) whisked away to both colonial and neocolonial “justice”. This is her perspective, held passionately, in good faith and within both her lights and her rights. Njau and Muluka forgot themselves completely when they set out to insult Mama Ngina at yet another stressful juncture in her life. This was not only ungallant but also a very unkind cut at one of the most trying moments for a mother!
Being opposed to DPM Uhuru’s political style and content does not give one a license to insult his mother no matter how strongly they feel about his held political agenda.
The author is the Media and Communications Advisor to the Vice President. The views expressed here-in are his own.
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