Every media house in Kenya carries its own historical baggage. At the Nation, media scholars and veteran commentators often point to one enduring embarrassment: the reporting around the disappearance and murder of one of Kenya’s most iconic politicians, Josiah Mwangi Kariuki.
The Nyandarua MP, popularly known as JM, had gone missing, setting the political ground ablaze with rumours and speculation. In one of the most infamous editorial blunders in Kenyan media history, the Daily Nation ran a story claiming JM was not missing at all but alive and well, allegedly sighted on the streets of Lusaka, Zambia.
Days later, JM’s body was discovered by a Maasai herdsman along a cattle track in Ngong Forest. That Monday, March 3, 1975, must rank among the longest days in the history of the Nation newsroom and the country’s corridors of power.
The national uproar that followed JM’s murder may, ironically, have spared the paper sustained scrutiny. Public outrage, conspiracy theories, and outright propaganda for a moment, displaced sober reflection on media responsibility in reporting JM’s murder.
Fast forward to December 13, 2025. The body of another prominent politician is found inside the smouldering wreckage of a white Mercedes Benz just before dawn. Cyrus Shakhalaga Khwa Jirongo was dead, and once again, the media descended into a frenzy.
The script felt familiar: Jirongo’s last known movements, alleged meetings with senior politicians, whispered motives, and unnamed sources. Within hours, speculation had leapt from social media rumour mills into mainstream headlines. A few days after Jirongo’s death, the suggestion that this was “no ordinary death” was no longer a fringe narrative, it had become the dominant frame.
The death of the former Lugari MP triggered a predictable wave of rumours and conspiracy theories, exposing a deeper national problem: Kenya’s entrenched culture of suspicion around the deaths of prominent leaders and how the media efficiently lauders online rumours and gossip into news.
Feeding on deeply ethnicised politics and a long-standing distrust of state institutions, the media helps sustain the belief that no public figure ever dies of straightforward, explainable causes, a thinking that is not only dangerous, but, left unchecked, creates a fertile ground for political manipulation, misinformation, and stokes suspicion and fear in an already politically polarised society.
The situation worsens when the thin wall separating social media from mainstream journalism collapses under the pressure of clicks, speed, and competition. Even more troubling is when state institutions mandated to investigate and inform appear hesitant, opaque, or incoherent, leaving an information vacuum that rumours eagerly fill.
Suddenly, witchcraft, God, and forensic science share the same headlines. We read of ritual burial rites, invoked ancestral gods, toxicology samples being rushed to Nairobi, and deaths conveniently explained away as “God’s will.” All at once.
In Kenya, no prominent person is allowed the dignity of a natural death. Leaders die of witchcraft or murder, or both, and media narratives around such deaths are often subtly constructed long before investigations begin, framing tragedy through superstition and suspicion rather than evidence.
In a political culture steeped in the supernatural, the media becomes the broomstick on which rumours of “unnatural death” fly from one corner of the country to another, amplifying every theory offered by anyone who can reach a microphone at a political rally.
It gets worse when reporting slips into voyeurism and sexism, dragging death into the bedroom. In the aftermath of Jirongo’s passing, headlines such as “18 women were once introduced as wives” (Daily Nation) or “Cyrus Jirongo’s vices for women and liquor: Lessons for men” (Capital News) emerged.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how crude, irresponsible, and degrading media coverage of death in Kenya can become – a total abandoning of restraint that openly entertains superstition, feeds conspiracy, and turns deep, family tragedies into spectacle.
