You’re talking with this fellow. He asks you a question. You start to answer. His whole body looks like he’s listening to you. Intently. But in fact, he’s not. Instead, the fellow is thinking what he’s going to say next. You are not communicating.
This is what Point Blank, the new talk show by Tony Gachoka on KTN News, looked like last Wednesday night.
Lopsided. David Ndii was trying to explain complex problems. And each time Mr Gachoka appeared like he had no clue what Dr Ndii was talking about.
Disjointed. Not a single question from Mr Gachoka flowed from what his guest just said. Sure, an interview host can change subject and steer an interview in whatever course he wants, but a) not every question should be a change of subject; b) a transition is required to change subject.
Otherwise, the viewer gets a headache.
The one hour and nine minutes interview was like two drunkards staggering home, in the dark. The guest, Ndii, appeared frustrated at this. He would be explaining a deep point about A, and things would pop out of his host Gachoka’s mouth that tell you he wasn’t listening — or getting a thing.
How did we know? Because no sooner had Ndii finished explaining an elegant point than Gachoka jumped onto a completely new, random question that had nothing to do with anything.
They sat across from each other. But they were 100km apart.
Sample this:
Tony Gachoka: “Corruption. There’s a feeling that Kenya is almost ungovernable. Has Kenya collapsed in terms of its ability to deal with this monster [corruption]?”
Ndii starts to draw parallels with South Africa, the notion of state capture, the Gupta scandal, the collapse of Escom…
Tony Gachoka: [jumping in] “Land without compensation…”
David Ndii: “No, no, the Zuma, Gupta scandal, all that maneno. We’re talking about the erosion of social structure.”
And Gachoka looks like somebody just poured cold water on his face. But he recovers quickly…
Tony Gachoka: It is like a political coup d’état. Are we in a state where corruption has pulled a coup d’état?
Ndii: No, don’t call it a thing. It’s a leadership failure. You have a rudderless leadership. It’s a state whose leadership has been going down.
Tony Gachoka: Intellectually, David, there were problems when the ICC came into the country. Do you feel that, that compromise with the ICC was too expensive?
Ndii starts to logically educate Gachoka on recent history, how Kenya got here.
Ndii: “Let’s go back to the beginning, 2003. Narc, the abrogation of the MoU [between Kibaki and Raila]. Narc was a new political dispensation. But then the old guard, the status quo, they coalesced around Kibaki, subverted the agenda of political dispensation, brought back the agenda of development, business and all sorts of things. That led to the 2005 referendum, a very toxic political environment. And that led us to the 2007 election fiasco, the post-election violence, the national accord and the new constitution. The ICC is an outcome of that toxicity of the 2007 election. But after the new constitution in 2010, our misfortune was that we put the new constitution to bed and allowed the old forces to regroup behind the ICC toxicity. And so we end up in 2013. The first thing, we throw Chapter 6 of the new constitution out of the window, the integrity chapter.”
And Gachoka gives into a long monologue about civil society. Ndii looks completely lost.
Ndii: I don’t think that is how things happened. What we tried to do, particularly with the new constitution, was to transform Kenya from an administrative state to a political state. When you talk about a political state, subsidiarity is very important. That decisions should be made closest to the people. We were quite clear that a big problem of our state is over-centralization. So, if you’re going to decentralize, to what unit are you going to devolve power?
Gachoka: David, these intra-Jubilee wars we’re seeing, the headlines, that there comes in Jubilee [sic] targeting the Deputy President and his people. Humm, and the argument that there is new tanga tanga wars and all these things. Are you saying that these are manufactured wars? Or is this Uhuru shooting himself in the head, as opposed to Uhuru being shot at?
What! These guys could as well be on different planets. Could you read tanga-tanga or Jubilee wars from Ndii’s preceding discussion? Can you connect the two?
An interview host should own his show. When the guest continuously tries to educate his host, it’s a train wreck.
