Chief Justice David Maraga has been in the news “for all the wrong reasons” – a favourite phrase in Kenyan journalism. The President of the Supreme Court has protested budget cuts he says have frustrated operations of the Judiciary.
Maraga has accused President Uhuru Kenyatta of failure to appoint 41 judges recommended by the Judicial Service Commission he chairs. The result is a growing backlog of cases.
And then last week on June 30, Mary Kwamboka happened. Wailing and yelling at Milimani Law Courts in Nairobi, the woman said she had a baby fathered by Maraga who has refused to take responsibility.
The video of the incident went viral on social media. But a lot of people struggled “to come to terms” – another journalistic gem – with the image of Maraga as a deadbeat dad or that Kwamboka was his ‘mpango wa kando’.
In newsrooms across town, editors scratched their heads on what to do with Kwamboka’s salacious claims against the self-confessed staunch Adventist and respected elder of that church.
Maraga through his lawyers denied being Kwamboka’s baby daddy. “It emerged” that she had not even filed a court case as she claimed, the lawyers said. The birth certificate she circulated was a forgery, and so on.
The matter received “mixed reactions.”
At Citizen TV the editors appeared reluctant to dignify what bore the hallmarks of a scurrilous assault on the dignity of Kenya’s Chief Judge.
In their prime time news, Citizen showed Kwamboka’s protest but muted her voice. The station exposed her as a fraud.
“A search at the office of the Registrar of Persons by Citizen TV revealed that there was no record of the purported birth certificate produced by Kwamboka. We have since learnt that there is no registrar for Kamkunji as stated on the document since there is only one registrar for Nairobi,” the station reported.
Isn’t this excellent journalism? Or should media houses merely reproduce as news whatever claims anyone makes?
NTV allowed Kwamboka to wail and rant against Maraga, attempting to give the story “balance” by airing rebuttals by the CJ’s lawyers.
But Maraga was “not out of the woods” yet. On July 1, he launched e-filing for Nairobi law courts. All the newspapers – except one – reported that the CJ said he was going nowhere despite intense pressure on him to resign.
The Star: “Maraga ‘not going anywhere’ after launching online portal”
Daily Nation: “I am not going anywhere, CJ tells Kenyans”
People Daily: “I won’t leave out of pressure, declares Maraga”
The Standard headline stuck out like a sore thumb: “I’ll be out of here soon, embattled Maraga declares.” Yet the blurb right below contradicted the headline.
“Maraga says he will stay put to the end of his tenure unlike his predecessor who left a year before his retirement.”
One wonders what The Standard headline meant to achieve.
Is it so difficult for the Fourth Estate to see it has a duty to protect the Judiciary and all other pillars of democracy?
