MEDIA-KENYA: Resistance against Press Clampdown

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katy Salmon

NAIROBI, May 17 2002 (IPS) - Rights groups in Kenya are refusing to comply with the recently passed Media Bill, widely regarded as a clampdown on the press and freedom of expression.

Pressure group, Release Political Prisoners (RPP) have vowed to continue publishing their monthly newsletter, Mtetezi (The Advocate in Kiswahili).

“If necessary we shall defy the law,” says Caleb Muchungu of RPP. “We are going to stand firm. We are not ready to be silenced. Not now, (and) not in the future.

“We shall continue to advocate for a free press and we shall continue publishing. That, I can guarantee you,” he states.

The Amendment to the Books and Newspapers Act, popularly known as the Media Bill, increases security bonds to be paid by printers and publishers of books and newspapers from Ksh10,000 (134 U.S. dollars) to Ksh1 million (13,334 U.S. dollars.

This is way beyond the budgets of small publications like Mtetezi. The newsletter has a print run of 2000 copies and is distributed free to communities. It covers “the issues of ordinary people”.

“We have always published, even when things were worse — when people were being jailed for sedition and through other draconian laws.

“We shall try to lobby with all sorts of groups so that this law is repealed but this does not mean that we are going to stop publishing,” says Muchungu.

Rights campaigners are encouraging other publishers to follow suit.

“We are urging the press to show that they are not going to comply with an unconstitutional act by refusing to execute those publishers bonds.

“After refusing, they can go to court. It can be easily shown those bonds are quite unconstitutional,” says Kangethe Mungai of People Against Torture, a non-governmental organisation.

The Kenya Union of Journalists is already planning to take their case to the constitutional court.

The government says the media law is necessary to stop the “gutter press” publishing scandalous, often untrue, stories about the private lives of prominent politicians and businesspeople.

It complains that the current libel laws do not provide adequate protection to public figures because many of the fly-by-night publications do not even have a business address that they can be traced to.

Vendors can also be jailed for selling publications, which have not paid the bond.

“We consider this an unscrupulous, even uncivilised, attack on the press, under the pretext of instilling discipline among journalists,” says Kibe Mungai of the Human Rights Network.

“How else should one describe a law that seeks to jail vendors and sellers of books for acts of omission they are not responsible for? How should decent people react to a law that seeks to regulate the media through threat of imprisonment and punitive financial sanctions?” he asks.

“At best this drastic increase in security bonds will definitely restrict access to the media and publishing industry. At worst, it will make the media industry a preserve of the rich, thereby curtailing the free market of ideas to the obvious detriment of the nascent democracy in Kenya,” he says.

Times are hard for the Kenyan media. This latest assault follows a series of libel and defamation cases in which media houses and bookshops have been forced to pay massive sums to senior government officials. Cabinet Minister Nicholas Biwott has been awarded a total of Ksh60 million (800,000 U.S. dollars) in compensation for allegations that he murdered fellow Cabinet Minister Robert Ouko.

RPP is itself facing a libel suit from a minister in the Office of the President, Shariff Nassir, over its reporting on his campaign to demolish kiosks and other illegal structures in the Indian Ocean port city of Mombasa. This rendered thousands of people homeless and destitute.

“We covered the Mombasa demolitions, which Shariff Nassir was spearheading. He has written to us, threatening to sue us on four stories that were carried on two issues.

“We have talked to our lawyers and there is nothing that we can say (constitutes) a problem (in the four stories). Our stories are very factual. We have already instructed our lawyers to reply to the threat,” Muchungu explains.

“We are making noise because we know what the courts have been doing in this country. Biwott has been awarded Ksh60 million (800,000 U.S. dollars) out of libel cases. We fear the same might happen to us because we do not feel that the judiciary is really independent.

“Considering he is threatening to sue us on four stories and the trend has been that on each count they have been awarded Ksh20 million (266,667 U.S. dollars) we fear that could be something like Ksh80 million (800,000 U.S. dollars),” he calculates.

Kibe Mungai believes the media bill could lead to an upsurge in repression and human rights violations.

“Human rights violations are likely to occur when whistleblowers and public watchdogs — the precise roles of the press — cannot perform their roles in safety,” he says.

“We recall with trepidation the darkest era of our history. The gloomy years of dictatorship in the 1980s witnessed far-reaching censorship of the press and a corresponding rise in human rights violations,” he says.

“We believe in earnest that the infamous Mwakenya trials would not have occurred if the Kenyan media were free to report about the violations that occurred in the secrecy of the torture chambers of Nyayo House (in Nairobi) and during trials at dusk,” he argues.

During the single party era, the Kenyan government took a firm stance against any form of opposition, be it academics, students, the press or other political activism. Dozens of people were given hefty jail sentences for allegedly belonging to Mwakenya, a fictitious organisation advocating greater political freedoms.

The judiciary were heavily pro-government, handing out severe punishments without adequate proof. Many of these trials took place at night in a government building, Nyayo House, which was also a torture chamber.

A priest was jailed for writing comments critical of the government in his own diary. Even though the words were not published, they were judged to be seditious.

“At that time, it was hard even to mention some names. If you were in public, you had to look over your shoulder and see if a policeman was listening to you. For publishing it was even worse,” recalls Muchungu.

The Human Rights Network is urging Kenyans to rise up and defeat the bill.

“We call upon all Kenyans to exercise extra vigilance against a resurgent dictatorship by uniting in a grand coalition of freedom to resist the evil designs of latter day fascists to trample down on our hard won freedoms.

“We stand to be counted to force the government to repeal this punitive law which is clearly a throwback to the ages of dictatorship. We are sure this is only the beginning of a long process that will see serious violations of human rights, particularly at this time when we are facing a very delicate transition process. So it is of utmost importance that Kenyans in their numbers must come out to oppose it,” says Mungai.