Kenya’s Media Owners Association (MOA) has called on President Mwai Kibaki not to assent to the Kenya Communications (Amendment) Bill passed by Parliament on Wednesday.
MOA Vice Chairman Martin Khafafa speaking at a press conference on Thursday, termed the proposed law that is awaiting President Kibaki’s final approval as draconian and not in line with any democratic principes as it curtails the freedom of information and goes against the rule of self regulation.
“We cannot allow the people who we pay to take away our voice, to take away our ability to think on our own. Freedom of expression is a basic human right enshrined in our constitution since independence. We will fight for it with our very lives,” he said.
”The media today says ‘Mr President, save our country. Please do not sign this Bill into law. Mr Prime Minister, save our country. Please do not agree for this to go any further’.”
Lawmakers collectively passed the Bill on Wednesday ignoring pleas by media stakeholders for them to delete Section 88 of the Bill, which gives the government powers to confiscate broadcasting equipment during national emergencies.
The new law hands power to the Information Minister to dictate broadcast content. It proposes that stations commit a minimum amount of time to locally produced content in lieu of which they will pay a fine to be used to “develop the Kenyan production industry”.
Khafafa said, “yesterday Parliament passed a law to ensure the media can never again tell the Kenyan people about their impunity and irresponsible looting of our taxes”.
He added, “Our politicians have now consigned all of Kenya to a permanent darkness. A darkness in which they will determine what they want Kenyans to hear and see and at what time they wish us and Kenyans to do so.”
Information and Communications Minister Samuel Poghisio supported the Bill, saying was it aims to enhancing the regulation of the broadcasting sector and provided a legal framework to encourage professionalism in the media industry.
In the past week,some MPs had indicated that they would pass the Bill “to punish the media” over the extensive coverage of their failure to pay taxes on their hefty allowances.
“We feel it is a direct revenge against our exposure against their lack of paying taxes,” said Khafafa.
The MOA further accused Poghisio and his Permanent Secretary Dr.Bitange Ndemo of reneging on promises to delete the controversial clauses.
Editors had asked Parliament and the Government to erase draconian clauses in the Bill, which they said could curtail freedom of speech and information. They had said that they would have no option but to go to court to have it repelled.
The Bill was passed by Ninth Parliament but the Head of State returned it to Parliament for amendments after the media fraternity raised issues with the oppressive clauses. It had to be re-introduced in the 10th Parliament.
Below is the Headline Story in the Jamhuri Day edition of The Daily Nation ( COURTESY OF THE NATION MEDIA GROUP)
Don’t sign this bill Mr President
The Government, working through the Postal Corporation of Kenya, can now open your letters without the authority of the courts.
If your MP steals from the Constituency Development Fund and buys a fleet of limousines, your town newspaper cannot look over his fence and photograph them.
If you insult anyone on SMS, you will most certainly go to jail.
And when there is rioting in Kibera and police use live ammunition to put down the protests, the minister for Internal Security can send officers to TV stations to destroy equipment so that reports of the shootings are not aired.
It is the minister for Information, Mr Samuel Poghisio — who, by the way, is being accused by the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission of defrauding taxpayers — who will decide what can be broadcast, when and in what form.
He will do so by giving guidelines to a Communications Commission of Kenya made up of people hand-picked by him.
The minister claims he needs the powers to control obscene and objectionable materials, but the new law is deliberately vague, so that politicians will have the leeway to do as they please.
These are just but a few of the examples of the effect of the Kenya Communications (amendment) Bill, 2008, which Parliament enthusiastically passed on Wednesday afternoon.
That fraudulent law is not really about the media; it is about civil liberties. If you believe that it is right for the Government to read your mail, your SMSs and to decide what you can watch on TV, then you can sit back and relax.
But the nature of civil liberty violations is that once the Government has tasted blood, it will not stop there. It will keep taking them until a perfect dictatorship is established.
President Kibaki took an oath to defend the Constitution and civil liberties. Those were not mere words that he uttered; he must live to their spirit by returning to Parliament for amendment this Bill, which, with the stroke of a pen, would sink Kenya into the pits of infamy.
With one signature, it would take away the freedoms of expression, thought and communications that make our cherished democracy.
Throughout his political career, Mr Kibaki, despite his diplomatic mien, has been known for a certain quiet determination.
In the 1970s, he was the only Cabinet minister with the libertarian instincts to attend the premiere of plays by dissident authors regarded as radioactive by politicians of those days.
His partner in government, Mr Raila Odinga, has suffered personal pain for demanding the freedoms that the Government is now in danger of taking away.
It is not always easy to recognise history as momentous when you are living it. MPs may not have realised how big a blunder, and what an injustice they were inflicting on the nation, when in 1982 they voted for Section 2(A), outlawing multi-partyism.
That decision precipitated a coup attempt and unleashed a dictatorship whose excesses are the cause of the poverty and hardship that Kenyans experience today.
The violations of human rights in the 1980s and the Government-driven development of ethnic hatred and politically-instigated clashes, which culminated in the massacres early this year and nearly broke the country apart, can be traced back to that single appalling vote.
In 1987, very few visionaries saw the folly of stripping holders of constitutional offices of their security of tenure.
Kenya was a democracy only in name, but even in a dictatorship, it is expedient to maintain a façade of respectability to keep the masses settled and dissidents in check.
The arrogance of power had persuaded the Kanu power-brokers that the fear of detention and torture could extinguish the candle of freedom in the human soul.
It flickered on through the darkness of the Nyayo House dungeons, the secret graves and the tribal massacres. Today, it is still burning.
Those who authored the mlolongo fiasco of 1988 thought they were being clever and “strong” by ridding politics of dissidents and enforcing conformity.
Ultimately, that decision — by forcing sections of the political elite to rebel against their own party — cost Kanu power and produced an inter-play of events, the result of which is the fragile politics of today; the weak, insecure state and near economic collapse.
The vote by Parliament to strip Kenyans of civil liberties in revenge because of the media’s coverage of the taxation of MPs’ salaries is an issue of the moment and one whose historic vibrations will be felt well into the future.
President Kibaki must not miss the moment, nor must he delude himself that this is an event without consequences for the country he swore to protect, and for his own legacy.
The law to gag the media — which otherwise seeks to regulate the ICT and broadcast industry — has been passed in gall and anger.
But it is the one act, which finally throws aside the cloak of parliamentary politics, enabling Kenyans to see in stark relief the truth about corruption, evasion of tax and the breakdown of representation in Kenyan politics.
In April 2006, the world was horrified when Kenyan MPs threatened to throw out that year’s budget if their mileage allowances were not increased.
At the time, donors had issued an appeal to feed millions who were facing starvation. What kind of leader would demand a pay raise when the people are starving?
The subversion of the legislative process to serve personal, myopic and emotional or financial needs in this brazen fashion will hopefully draw the attention of Kenyans to an awful truth: they spend a lot of money on elections and maintaining the National Assembly, they paid a high price for the election of their MPs, but these leaders are not their true representatives.
Rather, the men and women in the House work for the interests of their own feudal estate, a class that sees nothing wrong in bankrupting the impoverished mwananchi (citizen) to protect its own shallow lives of excess and extravagance.
Parliament is today a new aristocracy that has no regard for civil liberties, but is willing to go the extra appalling mile to nurse its own vanities and mask its corruption and emptiness.
Kenyans need to know that parliamentary dictatorship is as evil as any form of dictatorship and is to be fought and vanquished at all costs.
