On December 4, 2025, a peace accord between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda was signed in Washington, DC —a ceremony framed by the American press as another of President Donald Trump’s “made-for-television diplomatic victories.”
For Kenya, however, the story quickly morphed into something else entirely. As media outlets scrambled to localise Trump’s made-for-television diplomacy staged thousands of miles away, they ended up with muddled narratives that recalled the ancient Indian fable of the blind men and the elephant: many hands feeling the same creature, yet each insisting on a completely different truth.
In the fable, six blind men are led to an elephant. One touches its massive side and concludes it is a wall. Another grabs the trunk and declares it a snake. A third, feeling the tusk, insists it must be a spear. Each man touches only one part, each insists he has found the truth, and together they argue until they drown themselves in noise.
That story—first told more than 2,500 years ago—played out again this week across Kenya’s media landscape. As President William Ruto travelled to Washington to witness the signing, the elephant in the room—East Africa’s most complex conflict—was already difficult enough to explain.
Yet by the time the story passed through Kenyan newsrooms, it seemed to gain multiple new definitions, none of which aligned, and few of which helped the public understand what had actually happened. Three major news outlets—The Star, The Standard, and the Nation—offered three very different interpretations.
Rather than focusing on the peace deal itself, The Star zoomed in on former President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has served as Kenya’s special envoy on the Great Lakes conflict. Their story, “Uhuru: Washington peace agreement marks new dawn for Rwanda, DRC,” attempted to re-centre the narrative around Uhuru’s diplomatic role. The result, however, was a weakly edited, awkwardly stitched-together article that smirked of lazy journalism and outright mediocrity. Trump was at one point referred to as “Former US President.”
The People carried a similar story but took a simpler route—reporting the event directly from a social media post. Their story, “Uhuru joins leaders at historic Rwanda-DRC peace accord in Washington,” openly acknowledged that it was sourced from an X (formerly Twitter) post. In avoiding the pitfalls of over-analysis, they also avoided depth. Their coverage merely repeated what was already public elsewhere, without adding any Kenyan context or interrogating Uhuru’s actual influence on the deal.
The Nation’s initial story on the peace deal, (before splashing it on Saturday-two days after the signing) relied heavily on Reuters. Their wire story, “Kagame, Tshisekedi sign Trump-brokered peace deal in Washington,” while factually correct, failed to explain Kenya’s stake in the matter or the significance of Ruto’s presence.
In fact, by Thursday morning, the Nation seemed unsure of how loudly to play the story; one of its email alerts earlier that day had simply listed it alongside local political drama, as though a decades-long conflict ending—or appearing to—was just another bullet point in the news cycle.
The Standard found its voice, surprisingly, not in the peace deal but in the unrelated side announcement: a sweeping US–Kenya health funding overhaul with a sexy angle that highlighted concerns about data protection. The Standard ran to town with headlines questioning whether President Ruto had entered a “shoddy” agreement with Washington. In doing so, it shifted public attention further away from the Congo–Rwanda accord itself.
Meanwhile, almost entirely missing from Kenyan coverage was the constituency most deeply invested in the story: the estimated 40,000 Congolese nationals living in Kenya. For them, Washington’s peace ceremony was not a diplomatic showpiece but a moment of hope. They wanted to know: Would the guns in North and South Kivu finally fall silent? Would this agreement allow them to plan for a return home?
Yet Kenya’s media landscape offered them little more than noise—headlines competing for clicks, narratives imported from foreign wires, and local political commentary drowning out the human stakes of the story.
The confusion illustrates a larger problem: Kenya’s media often struggles to meaningfully interpret international diplomacy for local audiences. Stories are either copy-pasted from Western sources or reframed through domestic political rivalries. The result is journalism that is reactive rather than explanatory.
The Washington peace deal was an important moment in African diplomacy. Whether it succeeds or fails, it deserved serious, contextualised reporting. Instead, Kenyans received a cacophony of interpretations—much like the blind men shouting “wall,” “snake,” “spear,” each convinced of their own truth, none grasping the whole.
And so, one simple question remains unanswered in all the noise: Can the many Congolese who fled their homes finally begin to imagine going back? Until Kenyan media returns to deeper reporting and contextual storytelling, that question—like the elephant—will remain frustratingly undefined.
