Don’t shoot that foreign correspondent, he’s dying

If there is one group of people quite a few Kenyans would like to shoot right now if they could, it is foreign journalists.

It all has to do with their coverage of the August 4 constitution referendum vote.

It was an African referendum, and in Kenya where, after the December 2007 election dispute, the country plunged into murderous violence.

The charge is that the foreign press waited for the machetes to come out, and when they didn’t, they didn’t treat the “historic” vote with the respect it deserved.

It is true that the majority of international observers and foreign journalists who were in Kenya congregated in the Rift Valley, where some could have expected, as one European newspaper put it in 2008, “Kalenjin natives of the area [to] murder the local Kikuyu tribesmen.”

In the event, the real story was happening in Nairobi at the tallying centre of the Interim Independent Electoral Commission.

Kenya’s IIEC easily pulled off one of the most efficient voting operations in the world.

Thanks to smart deployment of new technologies, the first result, according to a good source, was received in Nairobi exactly minutes after polling closed at 5pm.

By 8pm, exactly three hours after polls closed, the IIEC had received a record 87 per cent of the results.

Then it faced a pleasantly strange problem; it had been too efficient, and now it had more data than it could process!

We stayed up through to 7am, and I had dozens of “international” news sites open on my computer. It was amazing.

Even a British outlet with a strong African presence went nearly 10 hours after the polls closed before it did an update — it was waiting for the bloodletting that never came.

I am a big fan of the foreign press. In the bad days, they were the only source of information on the nasty things happening in Africa.

They reported the carnage of wars, ravages of famines, and the brutalities of military and one-party African regimes when there were hardly any independent newspapers and broadcasters to tell these stories.

However the spread of democracy, free markets, the Internet, mobile phones and other vehicles of globalisation have changed the game.

Those who want “negative” images of Africa – the alleged cannibalism, African porn, witchcraft, corruption, mob lynchings, squalor, and tribal rage gone amok — no longer have to look for it in the Western media.

The African media do it better than anyone else. If you want the good stuff, there’s is no shortage of African sources for that too.

Every nation needs an external eye to draw its attention to flaws that it cannot see.

Africa can collectively use a lot of that right now, because the continent is changing and throwing up a lot of complexities.

This requires financial resources and the type of clever correspondents most struggling Western media can no longer afford.

However, part of it doesn’t require money.

Just a shrewd editor to wake up, smell the coffee, and realise that while most votes in Africa are stolen, occasionally some get away clean.

However, even with more sophisticated coverage, my sense is that traditional-style Western foreign correspondent is mostly irrelevant today, and will soon be dead altogether.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke