We won!
CNN international correspondent Larry Madowo posted on his social media accounts that, “People in Kisumu keep telling me that they’ve run out of toilet paper. The agonizing wait for the presidential election results seems to have caused mass diarrhoea”.
That was on August 14, five days after this year’s election. International media was getting bored to death. Nothing to report. Kenya was peaceful from Todonyang in the extreme north to Vanga in the deep south; from Busia in the west to Liboi in the east.
Moments after IEBC Chief Ref Wafula Wanyonyi Chebukati announced William Ruto as President-elect in the evening of August 15, Al Jazeera correspondent Haru Mutasa recorded a handful of protesters in Kisumu expressing anger that their candidate, Raila Odinga, had lost for the fifth time. Police fired teargas canisters to disperse them. That was all.
In an era gone by, Larry would not have had the luxury of scrolling down his phone to read messages of no toilet paper in Kisumu. He would most likely have been counting the dead while dodging police bullets against the background of burning buildings and terrified residents running helter-skelter for dear life.
That era has gone, hopefully forever.
We won on August 9, not against anyone but against our own bloody record of deadly violence every election cycle. Each Kenyan should be genuinely proud of himself or herself.
BUT the media let the country down. The diarrhoea Larry reported in Kisumu, the handful of protesters or the national tension arising from Raila’s rejection of the IEBC result would have been entirely avoided if the media had done its job.
Chief Ref granted the media – and everyone – the opportunity to tally the election results for themselves. Only they could not announce the winner. Kenyans expected that, with such open access, the media would play its critical role in free and fair elections by seizing the opportunity to do fast and independent tallying.
But what did the Fourth Estate do?
Well, they started tallying shortly after the election but then stopped, without telling the public why. Chebukati poked fun at the media for slowness and showing conflicting results.
“You should be at 97 per cent. Maybe you were not prepared,” the Chief Ref said on August 10, The Star reported. The din of public frustration with the media was deafening.
“For KE Media: you can bury your heads in the sand in 2 ways on Form 34A election results: 1. Not to want to conclude the tally. Where has your curiosity gone? 2. Not to want to inform the country. Where has your courage gone? Either way, it’s a bad show,” senior counsel Charles Wanjama tweeted.
“We gave media robust protections for freedom of expression & of media in articles 33 & 34, Katiba. But we didn’t foresee self-sabotage and loss of nerve.”
Constitutional lawyer Waikwa Wanyoike said: “The ultimate purpose of Article 34 – which guarantees the freedom of media – is to safeguard the greater public interest and to enhance socio-economic and democratic ideals. It is not meant to be a self-serving and arbitrary freedom for the media to use as it sees fit.”
Nic Cheeseman, Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham and a former Nation columnist, wrote: “Sad to see Kenyan media – having been so slow for so long – stop counting to avoid telling the Kenyan people who won the 2022 elections. Are you for free + fair elections or not? If you were not going to finish, why start?”
These concerns caught the attention of the Media Council of Kenya. CEO David Omwoyo issued a statement. “The council confirms that the results being projected are all from the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) though the sequencing by different media houses is from different voting areas,” he said.
“The Media Council of Kenya is in consultation with media owners and editors to find an urgent solution to this to ensure Kenyans receive synchronised results.”
But local media did not resume and complete their tallying. International counterparts like Reuters and BBC posted their final tallies.
On Sunday, August 14, five days after the election, Radio Africa Group became the first and only local media house to complete its tallying and publish the result.
“A Radio Africa tally of all Form 34Bs (provisional and yet to be fully verified by the IEBC) shows that Ruto received 50.36 per cent of the vote compared to 48.88 percent for Raila,” Lion Place reported.
Those figures were close to at least 10 independent tallies The Media Observer monitored.
Why did the media behave this way? Why this blatant dereliction of national duty? How will Kenyans ever again trust their media as the foremost independent and fearless pursuer of the truth, the watchdog and defender of the public interest?
Kenyans won. The media lost in the 2022 election.
See you next week!
