Uhuru’s attitude towards press masks Jubilee failures

There is a saying often attributed to French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”. It roughly translates to “let them eat cake”.

Marie Antoinette would be guillotined for it. It related to the tale of a princess who, being informed that her subjects were hungry, wondered why they were not eating cake.

A more classical version of this saying is from an ancient Chinese King who, responding to hunger pangs of his subjects who can no longer afford rice, wonders why they are not eating meat instead.

While both the Chinese King and Antoinette have been dead for centuries, the “let them eat bread, or meat” mentality remain pervasive among ruling elites in various parts of the world.

In Kenya, the dismissive attitude towards the press by the President and his Deputy better espouses this historical phenomena. When faced with accusations of runaway graft in his government, and where he has to protect those involved, President Uhuru Kenyatta often turns the heat on the press, accusing it of sponsoring wrangles in his government.

The rant line is one, “gazeti ni ya kufunga nyama”. By consistently shifting blame, the two Jubilee leaders have managed to successfully mask their regime failures. For the President, who is associated with a major newspaper, several radio stations and a TV station, the pretentious onslaught on the press is oxymoronic.

But more surprising is the President’s seeming cluelessness of the dire situation of his subjects. In Kenya today, eating meat had long become a luxury.

Families which can afford meat, or beef, are oases in vast oceans of penury. The price of basic goods have increased tenfold since the Jubilee regime took over power. Sadly, so oblivious is the ruling regime of the everyday suffering of Kenyans that they still afford to make analogies using upper class commodities like “nyama” and “gazeti”.

Did the President see that viral photo where a police officer somewhere in Baringo was sharing his ration of food canned beans with a starving woman? Those are the images that indict the Jubilee regime – a regime which has lost vast sections of the country due to elite indifference to the situation of the hoi polloi.

In the face of all these failures, why then does the President single out the media? What’s the tiff?

COMMON MAN

Well, it is because the country speaks back to the Jubilee regime through the press. Increasingly, journalists are telling the stories that are “available” stories of everyday people. Unfortunately, the common man’s story is starkly incongruent to the romanticised version the Jubilee regime is peddling. While the regime believes people can afford bread and meat, out there, journalists are finding people going hungry or eating wild fruits and rodents. No “nyama” out there.

So the conflict is as a result of the two different realities the country is facing. On one hand is a regime lost in Alice Wonderland. A regime enjoying the honey and milk overflowing from taxpayers sweat and toil. On the other, however, are citizens squeezed to the bone preyed on daily by Uhuru regime’s high priests of sleaze.

This is why the President should give newspapers a break. Persistent verbal attack on print and broadcast media in the end spirals to physical assault on journalists. This year alone, a number of reporters have been attacked by both security men and “hit men”.

A tabloid journalist was recently killed in Eldoret with no arrests made. All these sad events are indicative of the general environment of disregard to members of the Fourth Estate, fuelled in part by the escalating war on the media by the President, his Deputy and other politicians allied to the Jubilee regime.

Today, a journalist is more likely to be summoned to explain a story appearing in a newspaper or on TV than the government official in charge of the issue. That’s intimidation. It leads to psychological self-censorship by individual press men and women.

In the end, journalists attempt to be “neutral” in situations where the buck and responsibility must stop with the side with the mandate to govern, and the repressive state apparatus to effect law and order.

By persistent interference, the objective truth gets edited out. Events get romanticised. Complex issues get oversimplified, then underreported.

Junet Mohamed is Suna East MP