Moi cared about his optics and faulted how we used his images

President Daniel arap Moi knew the value of optics, whether it was the rungu (club) he carried or the pictures of him in the media.

He particularly cared about how we used his images in the Nation in the early 1980s when I was Editor-in-Chief.

He cared, too, about how we used the pictures of others in juxtaposition to his, or sometimes even when there was no juxtaposition.

President Moi was the number one complainant of the Nation and he gave me no quarter.

I had numerous encounters with him regarding how we used his pictures and some of the stories we published or did not publish.

He once telephoned to say he wanted to strangle me for using a picture of his that he thought was ugly, but more about that later.

I was appointed Editor-in-Chief in July 1981 and reported for work on the first day at 9am. At exactly noon, he called. “This is the President calling,” my secretary announced as she transferred the call to me.

CRITICISM OF NJONJO

He was calling to complain about a story the Nation had printed about Charles Njonjo (who had steered him to power following the death of Jomo Kenyatta).

He said the story was unfair to Mr Njonjo. I was completely unprepared for such an encounter. It was baptism by fire.

Three months later, he called me again to complain about another story about Mr Njonjo. The story was about the uneasy relations between Attorney-General Joseph Kamere, who was seen by many as a Njonjo appointee, and the Law Society of Kenya.

We had used a picture of Njonjo and Kamere, in that order, in the story published on October 22, 1981. The headline was “Law Society rift with A-G widens”.

The article mentioned Mr Njonjo’s criticism of the quality of African lawyers and how he often defended the role of expatriate judges in the Judiciary.

But the story was more about Mr Kamere and the LSK than about Mr Njonjo. Nonetheless, President Moi said the article was a criticism of Njonjo.

WRONG PHOTO

He told me, disarmingly, that any schoolboy reading it would know it was a veiled attack on Mr Njonjo. But Mr Njonjo had not complained to me; maybe to the President.

President Moi was particularly sensitive about how we used his pictures. The then-head of the Presidential Press Unit, Cornelius Nyamboki, told us that the President complained to him about the way we were using his pictures “below those of nyang’au (lowly people)”.

He complained to me directly — and justifiably — about a picture of himself which we used “reversed” (flipped).

This had the effect of showing that the was wearing his floral decoration (carnation or rose) on the wrong coat lapel of his designer suits. But the picture had come to us from KNA, the official news agency, already reversed.

In 1982, President Moi, who was then the chairman of the Organisation of African Unity (now African Union), called a “mini-summit” in Nairobi to review the OAU peacekeeping forces in Chad.

MOI SANDWICHED

Although the leaders of Nigeria, Zaire (now DR Congo), Senegal, Benin, Guinea and Togo were expected, only one other president, Goukouni Weddeye, of Chad, attended the summit.

In a story on February 14, 1982, the Nation published a picture of President Moi sandwiched between President Weddeye and OAU Secretary-General Edem Kodjo. He was unhappy we used his picture “sandwiched”.

He was not happy either when we used a group picture of Kenya’s top military brass on the front page.

Nation Newspaper chairman Albert Ekirapa told me in not so many words that Mr Moi was not amused by the picture because soldiers must stay in the barracks.

It was a time when military coups in Africa were common and the thinking was that we should not be seen as encouraging them to come out.

PICTURE REMOVED

But for me the most striking complaint came when the Sunday Nation of February 4, 1982 published a picture that President Moi thought made him look ugly.

I was on a US benchmarking visit at The St. Petersburg Times in Florida but he called me pronto upon my return.

He told me in very dramatic terms that if I had been around when the picture was published, he would have “strangled” me.

It sounded like a joke but President Moi had, obviously, been sorely upset by the publication of the picture.

We removed the offending picture from the Nation archives to avoid its reuse and waited for the next complaint, whenever it would come, on how we portrayed him on our pages.

May God rest his soul.

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