Let’s start with the story of Icarus and Daedalus and how the two flew out of prison.
Icarus, excited by his humongous artificial wings, flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax that held his artificial feathers together.
Icarus fell.
Daedalus flew over the spot he saw his son plunge in the ocean. All that was left were feathers tossed by the waves.
Closer home, some Icarus hid inside a airplane’s landing gear compartment hoping to sneak to London from a country that is increasingly becoming one gigantic prison for unemployed youth.
Well, the plane’s landing gear opened somewhere over London, and our Icarus fell more than a kilometer from the sky, a small crater on some London homestead.
Although it was a big story in western media, we played catch up with it. The story was deader than a dodo after that that, until Sky News came calling.
They claimed to know our very own Icarus, aka the man who fell from the sky. They even claimed to know his girlfriend, his father and his mother.
We were scandalised. How dare Sky News come all the way from London to “scoop” us?
It is one thing for a white man to come and claim he has discovered Mt Kenya and Lake Victoria. But it is another thing for a white journalist to come here and claim that the man who fell from the skies lives right next door.
Everyone laughed at us. Nay, we even laughed at ourselves. Folks that think the western media, upon which ours is modeled, is superior than ours had a field day.
We were blushing with indignation.
And this is where we lost it – instead of our indignation pushing us to renew, nay, ignite (for we did not even bother to find him after his story fizzled out) the search for the man who fell from the skies, we set out to do one thing: to prove Sky News wrong.
How dare they pretend to be better than us? We will show them!
So, our mission was not to find the man who fell from the skies, but to cut Sky News down to size.
And that was exactly what we did.
We were quick to tell our audiences that Shivoje Isaac was not the man who fell from the skies (of course he was not, or he would not have been alive to say this), and that the only place he would have fallen from was Kamiti Maximum Prison where he was under lock and key when our Icarus fell.
We proceeded to tear apart Sky 24’s story shred by shred. No, Shivoje’s father was not Isaac Manyasi as Sky 24 had reported, but Isaac Betti. No, Shivoje is not 29 like Sky News stated but 29.
They say a bleeding shark quickly becomes prey for his shark-mates: Sky News was the bleeding shark, and we had tasted blood. Then, ours was no longer the story of the man who fell from the skies but a story about the story of the man who fell from the skies.
Ours was a story that fell from Sky News.
In the end, Sky News-beat a hasty retreat with a bloodied nose, and we retreated to the victor’s corner, with a satisfied, smug look on our faces. We had redeemed our image; we had proved to all that ours (media) was as good, if not better than the West’s.
We had shown them! We had shown all those foreign “Africa correspondents” that they have no business coming to our ‘bedroom’ to make us look bad.
But wait, as we basked in the glory of the story that fell from Sky News, our audience out there was left more confused than before: Who was the man that fell from the sky? Who was our Icarus? Who is Paul Manyasi?
Are we going to wait until another foreign media house and its “Africa correspondent” (who probably is still trying to figure out whether Kenya is the capital city of Nairobi or the other way round) does all the dirty work for us, or was this a wakeup call for us to pursue stories beyond day one and day two?
Are we going to wait until another story falls from the sky?
