“If I get the person who issued my land to someone else, I will not hesitate to behead him. I will not,” he said. The quote is a response to a question posed by a journalist to a disgruntled land owner who is yet to get justice. The story was carried on page 11 of the Standard newspaper on September 3. It was titled “Confusion reigns in city titling plan” by Graham Kajilwa.
The quote taken the way it is might escalate the situation and provoke other affected individuals into action. The intention of the journalist could have been to give facts of the situation but caution must be exercised on language use.
Words are very powerful and especially if used by a journalist because they can be used to transform or harm. The power of pen is always demonstrated by one’s choice of words.
The question one needs to ask themselves is, how might those words affect those who will read the story? Will they evoke negative or positive energy?
Ross Howard in his conflict sensitive journalism handbook notes that it is important to avoid emotional and imprecise words like assassination, massacre and genocide due to their inferred meaning. Such words do not minimise suffering and can escalate a situation.
Persons who want to murder others – no matter how justified their anger – should not be given a media platform to ventilate their intentions. This should be common sense. What would life be like if, every time you switched on your TV, tuned to your favourite radio station for the evening news or opened your newspaper in the morning, all you got were blokes raving mad with threats to finish off their enemies?
Such media reports would not only be irritating; worse, they would normalise violence as a way of life and provide justification for other people to plot to eliminate their adversaries. The media would be promoting anarchy.
Hundreds of land buyers have been camping for weeks at government offices in Ruai, Nairobi, to verify ownership for processing of title deeds. The situation is volatile. In recent years, there has been a mad rush for land in Ruai and other areas neighbouring the capital.
In Kenya, land is routinely described by the media and other talkers as an “emotive issue”. Why the resource is emotive, or who made it so, is yet to be clarified.
Land buyer John Wainaina had spent several days at the offices of the deputy county commissioner trying to figure who allocated his plot to someone else and whether the land could be reverted to his name.
“It is just these company officials. I am not surprised people have been killing each other over land. Imagine spending Sh1 million to purchase land and finding out you do not own it,” Wainaina fumed.
When that happens, you go find the person who facilitated the robbery, sharpen your panga, slash off his head and move on with your life, Wainana seems to be saying. And the Standard agrees with him, or why did they offer him scarce newspaper space to issue the threat?
One day, the Observer will write in detail about this “emotive issue”. But for now, let us just say that the landmass of any country does not increase over time (territorial conquests are now rare). But the population grows.
In a capitalist society where land changes ownership on a willing-buyer-willing-seller basis (never mind that the “willing seller” is, in fact, a poor peasant who is forced to sell his portion to a rich “willing buyer” to pay medical bills or take a child to school), soon enough land becomes the most expensive resource because of speculation.
The rich buy or grab as much as they can, do nothing on the land and wait for prices to go up. Then they become “willing sellers” and rake in millions from “willing buyers”.
Well, in the end, most land is in the hands of few people while millions are actually landless.
That is the source of the land hunger – and anger, like Wainaina’s – in Kenya.
Media is full of stories of land conflicts. But like all other conflicts, issues involving land should be reported with sensitivity. The concept of conflict sensitive reporting is now well established in media practice.
“The media shall avoid presenting acts of violence, armed robberies, banditry and terrorist activities in a manner that glorifies such anti-social conduct,” Section 22 of the Code of Conduct for the Practice of Journalism in Kenya states.
Publicising Wainaina’s raw anger in the Standard amounts to poor editorial judgement.
