December 2024 was full of drama. For starters, it will go down in history as the month when a whole Deputy President of the Republic of Kenya disappeared like the Malaysian plane.
One moment, Abraham (short form ‘Abe’) Kithure Kindiki was sweating under a barrage of questions in a first-of-its-kind media interview since he was sworn in. The next moment, the media houses that lit a fire under the DPs chair in the interview reported he had disappeared, vanished, melted away, evaporated, evanesced…
“And this, after only two pay slips!” The Standard yelled.
Well, we know some fellows who vanish immediately after the first pay slip, but the tale about Abraham’s disappearance was exactly that – a tale spurn from armchair journalism whose main raw materials are rumours, petty gossip, propaganda and half-truths.
Indeed, the only evidence of Abraham’s ‘disappearance’ was that he had become invisible. Nobody seemed to have sighted the man from the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya for days.
And so ‘people of the media’ spurn theory after theory of Abraham’s ‘disappearance,’ key among them that the DP had walked out on his boss, Bill, in what could have been the shortest honeymoon in Kenya’s political history.
To back up these theories, we, the people of the media, drew parallels with another disappearance – one that was followed by an impeachment sometime last year: “Kindiki’s absence has fueled rumours of potential tensions within the presidency, particularly following Ruto’s controversial ouster of his former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, who has since become a vocal critic of the administration.”
News editors debriefing hordes of journalists dispatched to every presidential function across the country asked only one question: Was Abraham Kithure Kindiki at the function? And when the answer was ‘no,’ computer keyboards would suffer ‘domestic violence’ as yet another theory on the DP ‘disappearance’ was ‘banged’ for the next day’s headlines.
“The President later held a political meeting at his Kilgoris residence attended by top government officials and the Opposition with the exclusion (italics ours) of Kindiki.”
Very well, but the headlines turned many heads like a wind vane in the middle of a whirlwind. Did Abraham simply ‘disappear’ or was he made to disappear from the public scene? Was he ‘excluded’ from his boss’ house? We looked up the meaning of ‘exclude’ in the dictionary and got two dozen, including ban, keep out, prohibit, reject, expel, suspend and throw out.
We must admit that dictionaries, with their 600,000 English words, can make one’s head spin. But our super-bright editors, hired for knowing more englis than the king of England, ought to have realised that a simple word like ‘exclusion’ in the context of Abraham’s ‘disappearance’ was unsuitable, even by the longest stretch of meaning.
For, indeed, we had no record, nay, no source – not even our notorious ‘sources that did not want to be identified’ – that Bill had ‘banned,’ ‘expelled,’ ‘rejected,’ ‘suspended’ or ‘thrown out’ Abraham from ‘his Kilgoris residence.’ In fact, long before the spin masters at the house on the hill emerged to counter the ‘disappearance’ tale, our favourite sounding board, the fellow called anonymous, had refused to corroborate our tale, denying a falling out between Bill and Abe.
But gossiping is a very addictive habit, and the following day, we were at it again: ‘Missing’ Kindiki resurfaces with New Year posts.
“The mystery of Deputy President Kithure Kindiki’s whereabouts has deepened following a flurry of New Year messages unleashed hours after the world ushered in 2025,” The Standard reported.
Mystery? Missing? Wait a minute, had someone abducted Kenya’s Deputy President? Given that we were dealing with interesting times when Kenyans were ‘disappearing’ left and right, picked up by fellows that still wore face masks five years after the Covid 19 pandemic, had someone decided to push the abduction craze a notch higher?
Be that as it may, Abe resurfaced somewhere in Kiambu after Christmas – dark goggles and all – and called out media tales about his ‘disappearance’ for what they were-petty gossip. In Mount Kenya region, they call it mucene. Here at the Media Observer, we call it irresponsible, armchair journalism.
Because Abraham Kithure Kindiki did not go missing at any one point. Had he ‘disappeared’ as we reported, his family would have reported him missing at Irunduni police post in Tharaka Nithi County.
His whereabouts were certainly not a mystery. Well, it could have been for lazy journalists who do not bother to check but prefer to trawl through X posts and other online rumour mills to ‘cook’ headlines. Why, for example, didn’t anyone reach out to contacts within Kindiki’s communications team, some of whom were former colleagues in the newsroom?
We must remind scribes that, one, by the virtue of being Kenya’s number two, Abraham is a national asset: any alarmist rumour or gossip concerning him is likely to trigger national anxiety. Two, Abraham has family and friends, as such it is insensitive, nay, unprofessional, to report him as ‘missing’ and his absence as a ‘mystery’ and to deliberately try to spin conspiracy theories packed with half-truths totally devoid of facts.
And three, that there is no room for rumours and speculation in professional media. In this trade, facts are sacred.
