MEDIA-KENYA: Simply Having More Broadcasters is Not Enough

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Philip Ngunjiri

NAIROBI, May 22 1998 (IPS) - A new television and radio station is expected to go on the air in June but media pundits wonder how much of a difference it will make and past experience would appear to justify their scepticism.

Citizen Television and Citizen Radio, is owned by business tycoon S.K. Macharia, who is closely associated with the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU).

Macharia is the chairman of a KANU lobby group, the Central Province Development Support Group (CPDSG), which campaigned for President Daniel arap Moi during the Dec. 29 general elections, and analysts fear that he will use his TV and radio to promote the ruling party.

The advent of the new media house “may be good news to the ears of the advocates of media pluralism but skeptics doubt whether the station will be impartial in its reporting of political events,” says David Makali of the Nairobi-based Media Institute (MI).

The two channels will broadcast in English, Kiswahili and Kikuyu for viewers and listeners in the towns of Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru and Nyeri. The TV station will supplement its output with programmes relayed by Cable News Network (CNN).

Macharia says his tv and radio station will concentrate more on local issues. “We’re going to deal with cultural and educational programmes. We’re going to be more local than the KBC,” he says.

The state-run Kenya Broadcating Corporation (KBC) is the only radio or TV station that covers the whole of Kenya. However, it has been accused of being biased in favour of KANU and President Moi.

In the runup to a general election held on Dec. 29, 95 percent of air time on KBC radio and TV was devoted to Moi and KANU, while less than 3 percent was awarded to the opposition, the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) noted in a recent report.

Moreover, coverage of the opposition was always negative, according to the study, titled ‘Media Censorship in A Plural Context: A Report on Kenya Broadcasting Corporation’.

As in other African nations, broadcasting has traditionally been closely controlled in Kenya. However, the end of one-party rule here in 1992 was followed by a lifting of the state monopoly on broadcasting, although the state has dragged its feet on allowing private broadcasters to operate.

In fact, Macharia himself sued the government in 1995 for refusing to grant him a licence. The High Court ruled that the then minister of information and broadcasting, Jackson Makau, should consider his application, but Makau refused and the businessman took him to court.

That action enraged Moi who publicly said that no licence would be issued to anyone before a Press Task Force finishes its work. The task force is yet to submit its report to the government, but Macharia has managed to obtain his licence, as have a few other broadcasters.

This has caused some raised eyebrows here. “It should not be forgotten that Macharia was one of the earliest applicants to be denied a licence,” Wene Owino, a political commententor with independent ‘Star’ newspaper, observed. “Then all of a sudden when he becomes sympathetic to KANU, the state grants him the licence.

“If anything, the government’s grant of frequencies to Macharia served to confirm that they were meant for the party’s blue-eyed boys.”

Citizen TV will be the third TV station here after the KBC and the private Kenya Television Network (KTN), which is reportedly owned by people close to the president.

Citizen Radio will become the sixth radio station in Kenya. The others are: the KBC; Capital FM, owned by Mark Too — one of Moi’s close associates; Eastern FM, which serves the country’s tiny Asian minority; Metro FM, owned by the KBC, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which was granted a licence early this year. All but the BBC and KBC play music around the clock.

Comments Nairobi resident Wang’ondo Wachira: “How best can you explain these stations which play continuous pop music even when Nairobi is burning down?”

“Even when residents engage the police in running battles for days, resulting in several deaths and injuries, the music goes on uninterrupted,” adds Wachira, a sales representative with a Nairobi-based electronics firm. He reckons that the government’s encouragement of such stations is a clear demonstration of its fear of an informed citizenry.

At a recent media workshop here, Joe Kadhi, a former managing editor of Kenya’s leading newspaper, The Nation, argued that the airwaves should be freed from direct government control so that a broadcasting atmosphere that allows people’s participation in true freedom of expression can be created.

Kadhi, who is now a lecturer at the U.S. International University (USIU) here, criticised the government’s criteria for granting licences. “At the moment, the only qualification of getting a TV or radio licence is wealth and being a Kanu sympathiser,” he told the workshop.