Digital migration travesty reflects all the government stands for: Nyayo II

It’s amazing how much one misses when away. Never before, even when on holiday upcountry or away at conferences, has my column missed for two consecutive weeks.

This time I just decided that I was not in the mood to write.

It was not just writer’s block. I was buying the daily papers religiously, but simply could not find the energy or motivation to go through them with the usual thoroughness.

Television could have provided news updates easier to digest — and easier on the eye with our TV stations’ continuing obsession with shapely and beautiful news anchors — but the virtual blackout from the digital migration wars left us with nothing on local news worth tuning into other than stultifying government propaganda.

Of course, there is always the Internet, but everyone knows how frustrating it is trying to get halfway decent connections when out of the city. Some providers are right now touting 4G Internet, but the fact is that even the nationwide 3G reach they chest-thump about has been one big lie. 

Instead of trying to go through the mountains of newspapers on my desk, life will be so much simpler if I simply forget it, take that as a lost month, and move on.

But then there’s still this digital migration row that complicates resumption of normal transmission.

DEMOCRATIC WORLD

I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the free democratic world that a government would conspire to deny its citizens access to television news.

The Jubilee coalition government touts its digital credentials, but on media freedom, access to information, freedom of expression, freedom to receive and impart ideas, et cetera, it is stuck in the Stone Age.

This digital migration travesty is not just some incidental procurement snafus or the product of some overzealous Cabinet Secretary and regulatory mechanism, but a reflection of all that this government stands for. This is Nyayo II.

The irony, however, is that the Kenyan media might be largely to blame for its own tribulations.

In the first instance, the media largely refused to recognise that they would not get a fair shake under a regulatory regime under control of the government. Maybe that’s because some media executives were too busy sucking up to the regime instead of fighting for democratic space.

We seemed to have forgotten that we were already in court challenging the legitimacy of a Communications Authority that was a tool of the political classes, and therefore, clearly unable to be the independent and impartial regulator envisaged by the Constitution.

We started crying out after the horse had bolted, but the recourse to nationalism, the anti-Chinese card and highlighting the billions already sunk into broadcasting by local investors, probably won little sympathy.

COMMERCIAL WAR

Instead of focusing on the threats to media freedom and freedom of information, we have turned the whole thing into a commercial war, bringing out to the frontline, owners and executives rather than actual media practitioners.

Fact is, the general public doesn’t give a hoot about how much we have sunk into broadcasting and how others, whether foreign or local, are getting government support to reap where they have not sown. All the public wants is wide access to good, quality, television, free of charge without being tied down to some monthly fee.

We don’t need to dazzle and confuse the public with numbers and data. We make big mistakes in appearing as if we are fighting digital migration when everybody else wants to move forward.
We err badly when it looks like the giants are resisting the entry of rivals that the digital space provides for.

It’s time to take a fresh look at our strategies even as we wait for the government to reveal the identities of the secret local owners of the supposedly Chinese outfit getting official support to own the digital space.

The entry of Vodafone into Safaricom many years ago came with a big bribe in shares to some mystery entity called Mobitelea.

The “Chinese” Pan Africa Network Group (PANG) has bequeathed us its own shadowy local brokers. Let’s call them Digitelea.

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