Media houses should strive to unify country

Whom, among President Uhuru Kenyatta and his political rivals, do you support? Whomever it is, please stick by her or him as long as you are convinced that her or his ideas and activities are the best for your country. The only reason I ask you is that, through a newspaper headline story on Thursday, we learned that Mr Musalia Mudavadi, one of Kenya’s perennial presidential candidates, had “faulted” Mr Kalonzo Musyoka and Mr Raila Odinga because of their support for what the Nation on Thursday called “the Uhuru agenda”.

PROPER ETIQUETTE

For readers who do not know, Uhuru is the first name of Mr Kenyatta, Kenya’s young and youthful Head of both State and Government. Even by itself, that is a point worth commenting on because, for many people all over the world, it may not be proper etiquette and good manners for a news medium to refer to its country’s or any other country’s head of state by his or her first name.

That is probably why Western European and North American media never refer to such famous leaders recently simply as “Thatcher” and “Reagan” (except in headlines). That is among the reasons that, in my writing, I would think twice before I refer to our President simply as “Uhuru”, namely, by his first name, in any newspaper article. For another reason, in this particular case in a Nairobi daily the other day, one made it look as if it were a deadly political crime to support “the Uhuru agenda” – as the Nation put it in a headline on Thursday – whatever that agenda may be.

BIGOTS AND PINHEADS

Two of the recent socio-political “agendas” from which I would readily, publicly and powerfully distance myself are Adolf Hitler’s in Europe a few decades ago and, in our own region, Idi Amin’s in neighbouring Uganda more recently. In Kenya, I would also powerfully and publicly distance myself from all gender, all racial, all religious and all ethno-tribal bigots and pinheads. Through a recent Nairobi newspaper headline, it appeared as if to support Mr Kenyatta is to commit a crime against the whole nation. The relevant heading might thus have intimidated very many Kenyans into making a thoughtless or ill-advised political choice if an election had immediately followed that event.

POLITICAL PROFIT

In other words, the best way in which our media can serve the whole people is to enable the people to make the best political choice. No, not by preaching the “virtues” or dwelling at length on the “vices” of this or the other candidate. To be quite sure, a news medium – newspaper, radio or television – has the right to preach a social system, a sociology – even an ideology and even a theology. But no medium has any right to try to sell an idea to the public by vilifying any of the organisations that rival it. No medium has any right to seek to make any political profit by continually libelling, insulting or otherwise scandalising those whose candidates the newspaper or any other medium does not agree with or approve of. To be quite sure, to like or to dislike is a human right. Put another way, you have a right to approve or to disapprove.

RIGHT TO INSULT

In law, however, you have absolutely no right to insult, to libel and to scandalise your political and other rivals and, for that matter, anybody else, Kenyan or foreigner. In the entire human career, political competition was a good invention. But, being what it is, humanity soon introduced into it a kind of language characterised by rudeness, impoliteness, friendlilessness and absence of culture.

That, I strongly suggest, is among the most important tasks that face those whose part in the national and international division of labour is to educate humanity, namely, to bring human beings mentally up to par with politically the most developed societies the whole world over.

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