It was no easy task running the Nyayo newspaper

Like me, you might have taken part in popularising the so-called ‘Nyayo philosophy of Love, Peace and Unity” when Daniel arap Moi introduced it soon after he took over as President upon Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s departure from us. So your sadness at President Moi’s own death may be genuine.

One of the reasons mine is real is that Mr Moi was good to me all the way till his departure. That was why, as the editor-in-chief of the ruling party newspaper, The Kenya Times, I was very often in a dilemma. How do you go about your editorial work if and when the President expects your newspaper never to carry any story that might in any way seem to criticise him or his system?

How, if your newspaper is never to carry any positive story about an opposition group’s activities? Perhaps the answer lay in that we worked for Nyayo, the plural form of the Kiswahili word wayo, which means ‘footstep’ or ‘footmark’. At one point during Mr Moi’s regime, Nyayo was, indeed, the popular name of the President’s own alleged ‘philosophy of love, peace and unity’.

In other words, the plural Kiswahili word ‘Nyayo’ translates into English as ‘footsteps’, the singular form being wayo. If you were thought to be following in the President’s footsteps, you were a Nyayo person and were very well regarded at State House. If, with that reputation, you visited State House, you were most likely to come out of that building with substantial cash.

That, however, was an extremely tricky situation, as an editor, to find yourself in. For instance, how can your newspaper compete equitably with the privately owned ones when State House did not expect yours to carry a certain category of events or to cover objectively the political activities of certain individual oppositionists?

I can now freely report that my frequent refusal to work according to that schedule was what was responsible for my parting company with President Moi. In my opinion, a justice-minded power person would have given full thought to the idea that his editor might have his or her own personal convictions about certain critical social situations.

I would have worked for President Moi for very much longer had he recognised that my own opinion about particular political crises merited any respect and consideration. But politicians never appear capable of thinking and working like that. They never seem to have heard of the adjective ‘objective’. For them, self-interest expels all other interests, including even interests that might objectively have been sent from beyond.

Much more frequently than not, however, Moi’s own opinions about certain events had been formed long before you expressed your own, so that yours, if you announced it, might earn you nothing but a powerful presidential rebuke, probably even the marching order. That was among the reasons the media found my departure from the ruling party’s print organ so worthy of extremely one-sided, thoroughly incorrect and quite maliciously unjust headlines.

It was during such a time that such a thing happened to me as a newspaper editor that I first fully understood the politicians’ own frequent complaints about certain headlines and certain stories carried by Kenya’s print and other media. It was when it happened to me that my sympathy with the cases of certain politicians took a really solid shape.

Yet newspaper editors need never wait for such a pass. In my opinion, there is no single way in which to deal with such a situation. So it is best to take every case as it comes. Yet do indulge the politician. For a politician is a person whose self-regard is beyond measure. It is only by indulging him or her that you can, to some extent, overwhelm him or her.

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