Land grabbing and digital saga stain Uhuru’s presidency

The brutality meted out on children protesting the grabbing of their playground by police and the punitive move against leading independent media houses this week have cast President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration in a bad light.

In an unprecedented move, even by the standards of the darkest days of Jomo Kenyatta and Moi rule, police lobbed tear gas canisters at Lang’ata Primary School children, prompting critics to quickly draw a parallel with the 1976 Soweto Massacre.

Of course the magnitude of the two events may not have merited such comparison. But the action is a blot on Mr Kenyatta’s nascent presidency whose record has so far been chequered by a tad too many missteps.

Yet even as the President and his top officials were outdoing each other trying to control the damage, the Communications Authority of Kenya was withdrawing the digital frequencies held by Nation Media Group, Royal Media Services and Standard Group in a move that handed StarTimes and GOtv a competitive advantage.

The action against the three media houses, which together control 80 per cent of local television viewership and 87 per cent of radio listenership, has raised questions about the authority’s independence and patriotism.

Critics and casual observers now point out that this punitive action, coming hot on the heels of the Security Amendment Act 2014, is the clearest indication that the Jubilee administration is hostile to scrutiny.

BETRAYS INSECURITY

While President Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto’s path to power was paved by a decisive win in the first round of the 2013 General Election — a win affirmed by the Supreme Court — the two have continued to rule in a manner that betrays insecurity.

Brazen land grabbing, crushing peaceful demonstrations and muzzling independent media, though seemingly isolated, are certainly joined in the hip together by a common thread. They all find a home in a Kenya before the repeal of section 2(A) of the Constitution more than 20 years ago.

And while government supporters are wont to explain away this worrying trend as isolated events that can’t affect the economy, the overriding thinking now in development discourse is that inclusive political institutions go hand in hand with inclusive and sustainable economic growth.

In their acclaimed book Why Nations Fail: The Origins Of Power, Prosperity And Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson tear into ‘authoritarian growth’ often based on the successful Chinese growth, showing that growth under extractive institutions is often unsustainable and will run out of steam.

“Such (authoritarian) growth has become a popular alternative to the “Washington consensus” which emphasises the importance of markets and trade liberalisation and certain forms of institutional reforms for kick-starting economic growth in many less developed parts of the world.

FREE MEDIA

“While part of authoritarian growth comes as a reaction to the Washington consensus, perhaps its greater charm — certainly to the rulers presiding over extractive institutions — is that it gives them free rein in maintaining and strengthening their hold on power and legitimises their extraction.”

Free media has, quiet understandably, been a thorn in the flesh of leaders throughout history. Even Thomas Jefferson, he of the ‘If I had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter’ fame, later ate his words. He wrote: “Nothing can now be believed which is in a newspaper.”

Yet, the role of a vibrant media in building civilisations can’t really be gainsaid. The muckrakers — a term coined by President Theodore Roosevelt from a character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to refer to prying journalists — helped the US at a critical juncture in early 1900s when the so-called Robber Barons were threatening to choke the hard-won economic freedoms with their monopolies.

In a chapter they aptly call a ‘virtuous circle’, Acemoglu and Robinson write: “Inclusive political institutions allow a free media to flourish and a free media in turn makes it more likely that the threats against inclusive economic and political institutions will be widely known and resisted.”

It is up to President Kenyatta to decide whether he wants to go down in history as the leader who reversed the advancement of his country.
More importantly, it is the patriotic duty of Kenyans to stop this from happening.

The writer is Saturday Nation’s Features Editor. [email protected]