Westgate Terrorist Attack: Al Jazeera Exposes The Incompetence Of Kenya’s Traditional Media (PART 2)

This is the second installation of the story Al Jazeera has carried about the Kenyan media and the ineptitude displayed during the Westgate Terrorsit Siege.

“They wanted to control information,” said Barasa. “You know some of the information was not in their favour so they wanted to control what was coming to the public. So when they realised that, they started pushing journalists from closer to the scene.”

Despite government pressure, however, the Daily Nation newspaper broke the story of a botched police and army operation in which a police commander was wounded and a GSU police officer killed in a friendly fire incident with army forces.

A few days later Dominic Wabala, a journalist at another local newspaper The Star, published a story of Kenya Defence Force soldiers caught looting shops in the mall on CCTV footage. Expecting to see evidence of the massacre, Wabala was shocked at what he saw instead unfolding on the security video.

“It was appalling, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and what was being done,” he said. “What was of concern to me is that instead of seeing evidence of the massacre and all that … there was this apparent evident looting of some of the things within Westgate.”

The revelation sent shockwaves throughout Kenya, the country’s highly respected security forces had now been implicated in the theft of goods from the Westgate mall.

“That created bad publicity for the government, bearing in mind that during the first few hours and days of the incident that they had been trying to manage the flow of information, which in the end backfired,” he said.
Photographs of the Westgate victims [Getty Images]

‘Anti-press legislation’

Since the Westgate attack, freedom of the press has been further stifled by new media laws passed by the Kenyan parliament in December.

The amendments to the Kenya Information and Communication Act and the Media Council Act will slap fines on journalists of up to 500,000 Kenyan shillings (US$5,500) and 20 million Kenyan shillings (US$230,000) for media organisations who fall afoul of a code of conduct enforced by a government-controlled media board.

US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called the legal amendments “contentious, anti-press legislation”, saying the new laws will “effectively silence critical reporting through a new government-controlled regulator and the threat of hefty fines”.

CPJ’s Tom Rhodes said, with the new laws in place, Kenyan journalists will be more reluctant to pursue investigative reporting.

“We’re going to see massive self censorship,” he said. “The average Kenyan reporter salary is $300 a month, if you have to pay $5,000 imagine, you’ll think twice before doing any sort of story that will get you in trouble.”

With a thwarted press and a government reluctant to discuss the Westgate attack, Kenyans may never get the answers to the questions they are still asking three months on.