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Kenya: Are We at the Beginning of a Media Renaissance?
5 min read.In recent days, the Kenyan media appears to have rediscovered journalism with more critical investigative stories and fact checks.

From colonial times to the present, the Kenyan media has experienced massive growth and change. From its establishment at the dawn of colonial occupation to the present, it has alternately thrived and weathered serious challenges, with its form and role in society morphing, and its performance not always matching the expectations of Kenyans. Thirteen years ago, one study asserted that “Kenyan audiences trust media. In fact, they almost perceive media reports as ‘gospel truth’” citing a survey from 2007 that showed 80 percent of respondents professed faith in the media’s reporting on the government. Today, however, the situation is markedly different. According to a report from the Media Council of Kenya, between 2019 and 2022, the proportion of Kenyans who said they has “a lot of trust” in the media dropped by nearly half, from 48 per cent to 21 per cent, although the total proportion of those who said they had at least a measure of trust, small or a lot, stayed the same at around 70 percent.
The declining fortunes of Kenya’s media partly reflect the declining fortunes of media around the world. A study carried out last year in 46 countries by the Reuters Institute found “interest in news and overall news consumption has declined considerably in many countries while trust has fallen back almost everywhere”. With a brief interruption during the covid years when people were perhaps reminded of the value of reliable news sources, this loss of trust and relevance has been pretty much a feature of 21st century journalism, though not necessarily felt in exactly the same way in every nation.
In Kenya, the media has always had to evolve and has almost always been defined by its relationship to the state. In the beginning, served the interests of the privileged groups like white settler colonists, administrators and missionaries that played a role in the creation of the Kenyan state. It was then coopted by other groups, including South East Asian immigrant workers and local activists and nationalists like Harry Thuku and later, Jomo Kenyatta. With the exception of The East African Standard, most of the publications established in the colonial era were short-lived affairs and did not survive due to a mixture of commercial pressures and suppression by the colonial state.
In the immediate post-independence period, the watchdog role of the press was overshadowed by its role in promoting nation-building, practicing what came to be referred to as ‘development journalism’. In this way, the media was more a mouthpiece for increasingly authoritarian Kanu dictatorship and while it was allowed a limited degree of freedom, that was strictly circumscribed. In the eighties and nineties, however, the media played an important role in the push for multiparty democracy and reform of the Kanu state.
Since the election of Mwai Kibaki in 2002, the media have been in what noted columnist Charles Onyango-Obbo, in 2013 described as “Establishment Mode” where they “cease to aggressively challenge the political system, become vested in “stability”, and begin to worry about what will happen if the system breaks down”. With that comes a larger focus on sustainability of media houses as a business and reduced emphasis on its “fourth estate” functions. Thus the media has been implicated in the state’s subversion of laws and suppression of rights during elections, such as in 2013 when despite clear evidence of widespread failure and fraud, it would not challenge the state’s assertion if a free and fair vote. In the next election cycle, it went even further and not only corruptly accepted government payments for running clearly illegal advertisements during the campaign period, but media owners and senior management were also complicit in the state’s attempts to ban live coverage of Raila Odinga’s mock swearing in as the People’s President.
This latter period has also coincided with the rise of the internet which has hugely impacted revenues at media outlets. With Google and Facebook gobbling up advertising, without a historical subscription model to fall back on, and unable to build sustainable revenue models around their electronic and digital offerings, the largest media houses are struggling, with most of them forced to live off declining revenues from their nearly anachronistic print divisions – for example the Nation Media Group’s 63-year-old flagship newspaper still accounted for nearly three-quarters of revenue in 2021, although its circulation has declined precipitously.
This reality is leading to a reappraisal of the role the media will play going forward. As evidence by the staff layoffs and salary payment delays, establishment mode is clearly not working. The question is what comes next. And perhaps the increasingly critical coverage of the William Ruto regime, as well as the growth of small independent upstarts like The Elephant, Africa Uncensored and Debunk Media, points to some answers. In recent days, the Kenyan media appears to have rediscovered journalism with more critical investigative stories and fact checks. The desperation generated by falling revenue may be leading to a reappraisal of business models – rather than selling audiences to advertisers, media may be going back to the future and prioritising selling news content to audiences.
If this is the case, and it may still be too early to tell whether it is, Kenyan media may be on the verge of a new and exciting and hazardous phase. For while putting the needs of its audiences front and centre may seem to be the obvious thing to do, it is far from clear how that can be done profitably. Even in its hey-day, when the cost of a newspaper was significantly subsidized by advertising, probably less than two million Kenyans, largely in Nairobi and other towns, got to read a newspaper. Everyone else listened to the radio, which they did not have to pay for. Now people are flocking to social media and free public broadcast TV for the same. And the challenge of how to get the news to pay for itself is further complicated by the cost of living crisis.
However, the same digital technologies that have doomed traditional media houses may also be riding to their rescue. “Going forward bulk of the revenues will come through going digital. The legacy media like print will still remain for a few years but distribution will be mainly digital,” NMG chairman Wilfred Kiboro said last year. With digital distribution especially via mobile phone, one can innovate around the sorts of news products one is selling. For example, people could only pay for the stories they want to read rather than subscribe to the entire newspaper which would force journalists to concentrate on quality rather than on quantity.
However, even this would require a revamping of how news is collected and paid for. At the moment, about 70 per cent of the stories in a Kenyan newspaper are not written by staff journalists, but rather produced by freelance correspondents who are paid by how many stories are accepted and how many column-inches they take up. The incentive is thus for these correspondents to produce as many stories as possible and not to spend too much time on any one – a well-researched 200 word piece will be paid the same as a poorly-researched one. Within newsrooms, this conveyor belt mentality and tight deadlines means sub-editors and editors only edit for language and space, and rarely for content. A world where digital content is truly king has no publication deadlines and newspapers can essentially partner with reporters to produce engaging, well-researched stories, each of which could be offered to millions of readers at a few cents, or a few shillings, per download, and the revenue shared between the media house and the reporter.
In such a world, the media would be transformed into a true online public square. Rather than determining agendas, its role could be to work with journalists in much the same way book publishers work with writers. The aggregation of views/downloads of a story would replace the front page or story order as the measure of a story’s importance. The low cost of individual stories which could be achieved would make public entry into the square meaningful, and by their choice of what to buy, the public, not editors, would dictate which issues mattered to them and thus what would be profitable for journalists to pursue.
If this were to happen, and again, it is not automatic (or perhaps even likely) that it will, it might mean that Kenyan media may finally live up to the expectations that Kenyans have had for it for generations.
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Op-Eds
The Sudan Crisis Has Been a Long Time Simmering
The weakness of central state institutions has enabled the paramilitary Janjaweed to carve out its own power base. An attempt to muscle in on this power by the army has led to the current crisis and leaves hopes of a transition to civilian rule in tatters.

Sudan has been plagued by military rule for most of its existence since it became an independent state in 1956. Every intermission of civilian rule has been interrupted by military coups. Since independence, there have been six successful and five unsuccessful coups in Sudan. The civilian rulers lacked a national vision, and the political parties were weak and unable to unite the country, making them easy targets for the military.
The only party that appeared to have any national political agenda was the Sudanese Communist Party but in a predominantly Islamic society, it always seemed out of place and vulnerable. The country’s first political party, the Umma Party was dominated by the Al-Mahdi family and although they were prominent in Sudan, the party lacked a national platform. Sudan has had a collection of other parties that have tried but failed to leave a legacy.
Out of this rose General al-Bashir, a former military officer who ruled Sudan with an iron fist for thirty years. Al-Bashir collaborated with Hassan al-Turabi to overthrow the democratically elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi in 1989. The partnership of al-Turabi and al-Bashir transformed Sudan, entrenching hard-line Islamist ideals and Shariah law. The morality police in Sudan acted with impunity and have been known to publicly flog women for minor “infractions” like wearing trousers.
Regional violence
The “Southern question” has proved chronically destabilising. A racist Khartoum elite who saw themselves as Arab were ill-equipped to deal with South Sudanese who do not share that identity and had been administered separately by the British during colonial rule.
Pre-independence violence in the region may have cost the lives of three million people before South Sudan seceded in 2011, and a territorial dispute with Sudan around the oil-rich Abyei area meant more fighting and eventually the sending of a UN peacekeeping contingent.
Al-Bashir collaborated with Hassan al-Turabi to overthrow the democratically elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi in 1989.
The Darfur area in Western Sudan was equally marginalised and became the country’s epicentre of violence at the beginning of the century, bringing Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti) to political and military prominence. What differentiates Hemedti is that he is not an insider or part of the Khartoum elite that has dominated politics since independence. Hemedti presided over the paramilitary force known as Janjaweed that led the fighting in Darfur. His ruthlessness won him al-Bashir’s trust and propelled him to the limelight.
Al-Bashir became the first sitting president to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for the Darfur genocide. He escaped arrest when he ventured to South Africa in 2015 because he was allowed to slip out of the country against the recommendations of the South African High Court.
Al-Burhan and Hemedti: An unholy partnership
In 2019, Sudan was shaken by protests triggered by inflation and the rising cost of bread. As demands for political change grew, al-Burhan and Hemedti—al-Bashir’s operatives in Darfur—together with former spy chief Salah Gosh, betrayed al-Bashir and seized power.
A career military man and part of the Khartoum elite, General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman al-Burhan is now the head of the army and the chair of the Sovereignty Council that runs Sudan. Hemedti began as a camel trader before rising through the ranks to lead the paramilitary Janjaweed (re-named the Rapid Support Forces) and partnered in the coup against al-Bashir. He served as the deputy chairman of the military council.
Following the coup in 2019, a transitional coalition of civilians and military was formed with the stated intention of eventually holding elections and returning the country to civilian rule. A civilian technocrat Abdalla Hamdok, was appointed as prime minister, but he never wielded much power.
Hamdok served for two years in the so-called transitional arrangement that saw the three in a troubled triangular game. Hamdok was put under house arrest in October 2021 and reinstated in November 2021. He eventually “resigned” in January 2022, one month before the transition to civilian rule was originally due to take place.
Despite Hamdok’s troubled short tenure, Sudan was removed from the list of “international sponsors of terrorism”, sanctions were lifted, and some money from international financial institutions became available. Yet, his efforts were interrupted by Sudan’s ambitious general and the promise of civilian rule looks to have evaporated.
Al-Burhan vs Hemedti
After the coup that brought them both to power, al-Burhan wanted the Janjaweed to be integrated into the army within two years. Hemedti wanted a more gradual integration over the course of a decade and he viewed al-Burhan’s move as a consolidation of power that threatened the patronage he had built. This created an impasse that triggered the current crisis.
A transitional coalition of civilians and military was formed with the stated intention of eventually holding elections and returning the country to civilian rule.
Now Hemedti and al-Burhan are head-to-head against each other, with both sides well equipped and prepared for a long drawn-out fight that is putting civilians in harm’s way and bringing violence to the capital, Khartoum.
Sudan is bordered by seven countries: Egypt and Eritrea to the northeast, Libya to the northwest, Chad to the west, the Central African Republic to the southwest, South Sudan to the south, and Ethiopia to the southeast. Most of these countries are plagued by their own instabilities, have porous borders and share overlapping ethnic groups with Sudan. The threat of violence spreading must be taken seriously.
The nation-state model appears to be crumbling in the Horn of Africa and Sudan is providing another example of dysfunction and disintegration.
Op-Eds
Freedom Of Religion: A Call To Order
Freedom of religion is one of the most fundamental in the Constitution of Kenya, 2010, brooking a twin understanding; persons are free to practice their religions (Article 32), the so-called free exercise clause and government should not establish any religion (Article 8), the non-establishment clause.

To our credit as a country, freedom of religion is one area that has enjoyed relatively few hardships, with persons being allowed to practice their faith unhindered. There have been no major penalties and disabilities hampering the freedom of religion. As a result, we have had exponential growth, particularly in evangelical churches, owing to a relatively free operating environment.
The result of the spreading number of churches has been the mushrooming of unregulated churches, sprouting in virtually every corner of the country. With these many churches, we have had persons of questionable morals and ethics appear and claim the mantle of pastoral authority.
The protection of the exercise of free religion is undoubtedly an essential aim of the Constitution’s religion clauses. The fervor that religious belief excites is powerful and indeed, a significant number of people care profoundly about their religious beliefs and practices. The passion for religion and faith is such that a good number would feel that their religious obligations supersede duties to the state in the event of a conflict between the two. Hence the need for the state to tread cautiously in matters of faith by avoiding interference in so far as reasonable circumstances demand.
However, the recent discovery of bodies in a mass grave at Shakahola forest, the dead believed to be adherents of a church headed by a controversial Pastor Paul Mackenzie, raises the dire prospect of heightened regulation of churches. The lax regulatory structure governing churches has been blamed for unfortunate incidents such as the Malindi mass grave surrounding Pastor Mackenzie. The approach has been termed by Professor H. Kwasi Prempeh as ‘socially disastrous and no longer desirable’.
The realities of life today call for the regulation of churches and indeed all faith institutions in some form. It can no longer be business as usual considering the unfortunate happenings. We have experienced several bad apples who have taken advantage of the liberalized to not only enrich themselves but to take advantage of vulnerable citizens. The Constitution certainly expects state intervention in its protective capacity whenever the life and limb of persons are at risk. The state must take decisive action and engage church leadership in finding a solution. It can no longer be business as usual.
The state must also resist the temptation of overacting and overreaching when dealing with unfortunate cases such as what happened in Shakahola. The state, in dealing with these serious concerns, must always stay on the path of constitutionalism and the rule of law. Arbitrariness and knee-jerk reactions will not assist Kenya resolve the myriad of problems we face as a country.
Church leaders must join hands with the state in tackling the challenges that are presented by the rogue elements within their ranks. The onus on the church leaders is to ensure that the image and the moral force that faith should hold are not jeopardized by bad apples within their ranks. The leadership of the church and indeed all religious leaders in Kenya, those that serve in truth and are genuine in their calling, must see the Shakahola incident as a wake-up call for urgent reforms and regulation. The traditional resistance to accountability and regulation is no longer tenable. The time for regulation and reform has drawn nigh. Our condolences to the families of the bereaved persons. We hope that there shall never be a repeat of the Shakahola incident.
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This article was first published by The Platform.
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Fighting the Good Fight: Court Proportionality of Remand a Win for Kenyans
When an accused individual comes before a judicial authority, what is at stake is the most basic of all rights—that of personal liberty. In applying the doctrine of proportionality, Hon. M.A. Opondo has demonstrated how courts can truly protect the rights of individuals.

The constitution says that an arrested person must be produced before a judicial authority within a stipulated time period (say, 24 hours). The police adhere to this timeline, and before the 24 hours are up, they bring the arrested person before the judge and seek permission for continued custody. They cite various reasons: that the investigation is continuing, that the individual’s custody is required so that he may be “confronted” with other witnesses, that the individual might interfere with the evidence or intimidate witnesses if he is left free, and so on. Hanging above all this is the unarticulated premise that a judge should not interfere with the work of the police. If the price to be paid is the temporary deprivation of liberty (for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months), then that’s just how it is. The judge, therefore, should apply a light touch in remand proceedings, essentially acting as a slightly sentient rubber stamp, or a stenographer who sometimes asks a few clarificatory questions. Judicial scrutiny should be like breath on glass, as transient and as ineffectual.
That is a familiar story, one that has become so normalised that the grant of remand when the individual is first brought before a judicial authority by the police is taken as a matter of course. But sometimes we are reminded that it is not the only way that constitutionalism and criminal justice can work.
In Directorate of Criminal Investigations vs Calvince Okoth Otieno, three individuals were arrested on the 24th and 25th of March, 2023. On 27th March, the police applied to the court for ten-day custody, so that it could complete investigations with respect to offences of unlawful assembly, damage to property, robbery with violence, and so on. The police claimed that the arrested individuals belonged to an “informal group” called “Bunge la Mwananchi”, which was funded to cause damage to property and the breach of peace in Nairobi, with a view to destabilising the country (one may even say, a “larger conspiracy”, with due apologies to certain police forces!). The police further claimed that they had received credible information that the Bunge was planning further disorderly conduct, that there was a forensic report on the way, that not all witness statements had been recorded thus far, and that the arrested individuals might interfere with the investigation and intimidate witnesses if they were set at liberty.
Hon. M.A. Opondo—the Senior Principle Magistrate—refused the police’s request. She relied upon the judgment of the High Court of Kenya in Sudi Oscar Kipchumba vs Republic. In that case, Justice Joel Ngugi had held, in effect, that, at the first instance, the doctrine of proportionality must be applied to decide a police request for custody. Recall that the third prong of proportionality requires the state to demonstrate that a rights-infringing measure is the least restrictive alternative that is open to the state. Justice Ngugi had therefore laid down the following double test:
First, the State must persuade the Court that it is acting in absolute good faith and that the continued detention of the individual without a charge being preferred whether provisional or otherwise is inevitable due to existing exceptional circumstances;
Second, the State must demonstrate that the continued detention of the individual without charge is the least restrictive action it can take in balancing the quadruple interests present in a potential criminal trial: the rights of the arrested individual; the public interest, order and security; the needs to preserve the integrity of the administration of justice; and the interests of victims of crime where appropriate. By virtue of Articles 21(1) and 259 of the Constitution, the Court must act to aggrandize not diminish the personal liberties of arrested individuals in line with the other three interests. Differently put, the State must demonstrate that there are compelling reasons to deny pre-charge bail while balancing all factors within the complex permutation presented by these quadruple interests and without reifying or essentializing any.
In essence, therefore, three things follow from the double test. First, that the granting of custody is meant to be the exceptional case, and not the norm. Secondly, that the state bears the burden of showing that custody is the least restrictive option that is open to it; and thirdly, in the analysis, all other things being equal, the judiciary’s task is to expand liberty and not to diminish it.
Indeed, in the application of the standards to the case before him (which was a criminal revision application), Justice Ngugi went on to note that “the acontextual and simplistic pitting of “public order, peace and security” against the personal liberty interests and autonomy of the Applicant … is a dangerous anti-liberty ethos which was rejected by the Constitution of Kenya”. It was dangerous because, at the stage of remand, where nothing yet had been proven against an individual, this logic essentially exempted the state from its duty of maintaining law and order, and instead, placed it upon the shoulders of the accused individuals (by keeping them in further custody) (for a detailed analysis of the judgment, see this article by Joshua Malidzo Nyawa).
Of course, it is one thing for constitutional courts to lay down doctrine, and quite another for courts of the first instance to apply them to concrete cases. It is for this reason that the Hon. M.A. Opondo’s order becomes significant. Applying Justice Ngugi’s doctrine to the letter, she observed that the state had only asserted but provided no evidence to substantiate its claim that the Bunge was being funded to spread disorder through Nairobi. Who were these funders? What were the Bunge’s activities? In other words, the moment that the state was asked for specifics—and not generalised, bare assertions—it failed to provide any. Hon. Opondo further observed that the state had claimed that it had “credible information” about the Bunge’s future activities, but had failed to provide the source of the same. While the Evidence Act immunised a police officer from revealing whence information came, it provided no such immunity when it came to the source. As far as the arguments on the forensic report and witness examination went, Hon. Opondo observed that the state had failed to show why it had not already completed this within the 48 hours that it had so far held the individuals in custody. And as far as intimidation of witnesses went, Hon. Opondo observed that, once again, the state had failed to provide specific claims to justify its fears or apprehensions, adding that it was doubtful whether, under the constitution, it was the police that had the power to judge an assembly unlawful.
It is one thing for constitutional courts to lay down doctrine, and quite another for courts of the first instance to apply them to concrete cases.
For these reasons, Hon. M.A. Opondo held that the state was essentially trying to turn the criminal process “on its head”, and that there was no warrant for the “extreme measure” of a further ten-day detention (to those of us in jurisdictions where ten-day remands are granted for the asking, this probably sounds like manna from heaven!).
When applied rigorously, the doctrine of proportionality achieves two things. First, it ensures that if less restrictive measures are available, the state is bound to use them first; and secondly, the form of analysis is such that it requires the state to justify its stand in specific terms. Through this remand judgment, we can see the power of the doctrine in the context of core personal liberty: not only was the state unable to demonstrate that continued detention was the “least restrictive alternative”, the moment it was asked to substantiate its justifications for custody with a degree of specificity, the claims fell apart.
The doctrine of Justice Ngugi and the approach of Hon. M.A. Opondo—when one thinks about it—should be the norm. The production of an accused individual before a judicial authority is the first occasion that a court has to adjudicate the claims of the state and the citizen; and what is at stake is the most basic of all rights—that of personal liberty. In such a situation, it makes eminent sense for the court to apply the doctrine of proportionality, and require the state to justify the need for continued custody; it is, after all, only such an approach that gives any meaning to the phrase, “One day of the deprivation of personal liberty is one day too many.” No doubt, the text of Article 49 of the Kenyan Constitution—which requires release on bail unless there are “compelling reasons” otherwise—makes such an approach easier to ground within the constitutional text. But ultimately, this is not so much about constitutional text as it is about judicial philosophy, and the approach of judges towards confronting state power and truly protecting the rights of individuals. The order of the Senior Principal Magistrate is an example par excellence of how courts can do just that.
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