Let us talk about Damaris Wambui Kamau, the woman who defied the rule against looking a gift horse in the mouth when she rejected a presidential house because it was “substandard.”
In our initial reportage, we said that the president ordered a house built for Wambui after her son, Dennis Ngaruiya, “cracked President Uhuru Kenyatta’s ribs with a thrilling poem,” four years ago. (Oh, very romantic wording “cracking the President’s ribs” but we will return to that later).
But Wambui looked inside the horse’s mouth and did not like what she saw. She realised that this particular horse was not the champion stud that had been promised to her; that its 40 teeth (yes, a horse has a maximum of 40 teeth) were a bit too long for her liking and showed every sign that someone somewhere might have switched it for a younger stronger horse.
Now, the story had us hooked, because when a poor woman turns down a presidential gift, why, it is a classic case of woman bites dog.
Still, there were many unanswered questions in our coverage of this indefatigable woman. See, a poor woman does not wake up one morning from some mud-walled shanty to tell the press that she is turning down a modern, fully furnished self-contained house from a person no less than the president because she feels she has been short changed.
Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe once observed that a frog does not jump in the daylight unless something is after its life. Similarly, a poor woman who has never owned a horse would not go looking into his mouth unless someone told her where to look.
Our antennae should have gone up when someone quickly cleared the compound on which the house stood and repainted it as soon as the woman went to the press with her story; or when suddenly the narrative changed to the president actually did not actually promise the family a house and that the house was an afterthought by the president’s philanthropic men and women.
And right there you have a toad jumping in broad daylight. But in a shouting match between the poor and the rich and powerful, Wambui’s tale stood no chance of being believed, and we quickly painted the picture of an ungrateful wench in broad strokes, effectively confirming that the poor have little voice in our media, especially when they refuse to bend to the story template of being perpetually grateful for government handouts.
Then there was the story of Uhuru’s ‘anger’ with Cabinet Secretaries mentioned in connection with 10 per cent kickbacks for multi-billion projects. Predictably, most of our stories on high level corruption have few or no voices and mostly rely on faceless sources.
So we get to hear of “a visibly angry” president giving his Cabinet “a dressing-down” in some Cabinet meeting at State House.
Wait, how does a “visibly angry” President Kenyatta look like, especially when he is giving “dressing-down” to his Cabinet? Frothing at the mouth? Banging State House’s well-polished tables? Shouting down at terrified Cabinet Secretaries cowering under tables?
Come on, let us quit dramatised reporting and stick to the narrow path of cold facts. The basic rule on this one is simple: Do not tell, show!
As such, if our sources at State House (one hopes they are real) cannot show how the president was “visibly annoyed,” say, something like “He picked a chair and hurled it at one Cabinet Secretary…” or “he banged the table and said ‘Í am not entertaining this nonsense anymore…”; or until they invent a machine that determines whether the President is ‘angry’ or just being himself, then we must drop the “visibly angry” line altogether.
This or we might just have a really angry president breathing down our necks for purporting to know when he is angry and when he is not, or his cabinet for painting their meeting with the President as that of terrified school boys and girls being addressed by a “visibly angry” school head.
And while at it, we may as well revisit another basic rule of reportage, and weed out adjectives as much as we can.
Then Interior CS Fred Matiang’i will not be ‘a powerful’ Cabinet Secretary. Heck, even a whiff of ‘powerful CS’ in our gossip columns leaves no doubt who it is we are referring to – which is dangerous in itself, especially if a lawyer convinces a judge that it does not need a rocket scientist to know who the ‘powerful CS’ in our reportage is referring to in a defamatory story, then voila: we shall be in trouble!
So, let us leave adjectives to novellas and stick to cold facts: they might not be romantic, but they are safer.
