Lest we forget, a commission of inquiry was set up by no less an authority than the President of Kenya to investigate the devil back in April, year of our Lord 1995.
Then the devil was all over Kenya’s news, doing all forms of mischief – from burning school dormitories to selling drugs to schoolchildren.
We at the Mediascape desk remember, not because we are the Dark One’s advocate but because of what stuck out from the medias’ reportage of both the devil’s advocates and the devil’s prosecutors, before, during and after the commission – whose report the devil must have worked overtime to ensure would not be officially released to the public.
As one critic put it: “The local media quickly homed in on the report’s allegations that Satanists are wealthy and prominent people who drive expensive cars.”
Well, it would seem the devil resurfaced after nearly 30 years of working undercover, this time using yet another of his many names- “cultism.”
Suddenly, every media house is awash with ‘devil news’ replete ‘devil experts’ on cultism and the dark arts of washing people’s brains using the devil’s detergent.
We are not about to go into details about how we have been covering the devil so far, but it is, so far, not very different from how we covered him 28 years ago: with unverified truths; half-truths, propaganda and sources whose only credibility is wearing a dog’s collar.
As Nation Public Editor Peter Mwaura pointed out, we could not even agree on whether the main character of this suspected devilish business is McMackenzie, Mackenzie, Makenzi, or even Makmende.
But perhaps we are already giving the devil too much space in our newsrooms. Take Citizen TV’s live interviews with self-confessed killers and thieves.
One describes how his friends were felled by police bullets. How they escaped because, as one of them put it, “God was with me” –connoting that God was not with his victim.
In one such interview, one of the ‘reformed’ criminals described how he and his gang knifed a pregnant woman in one of their crime sprees. “Alikuwa amebakisha a few months kuzaa (She was due in a few months’ time),” he said. He must have been a gynecologist-turned thug this one! Another described the sex lives of gang members and how they slept with beautiful girls with “red thighs.”
All this, on national TV! Ethical questions arise here. Did any of the show’s producers stop to think about self-confessed killer’s and thieves’ survivors and relatives?
Does a criminal’s confession on TV make him less guilty or are we giving killers a platform to sanitise their crimes; to clean their bloodstained hands and guilt; to lauder their crimes; to create excuses for their inglorious past, such as poverty and unemployment?
A number of the criminals interviewed described in such vivid terms how they ‘heroically’ out-witted their hunters. In a country where people become famous for their criminal exploits, from Wanugu to Wacucu; where matatus are named after ‘famous’ fugitives; what message do we communicate to our listeners out there?
That being a criminal is a shortcut to being famous? To appearing on TV?
