Comment
Don’t shoot that foreign correspondent, he’s dying
Posted Monday, August 23 2010 at 00:00
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.
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That the point, these foreighn media are also becoming more amd more poorer and their countries folk are getting that poverty as well. See France, Italy, Germany, Britain are all try to expel Romanians (Roma)and trying to show as nothing is happening! Lol! Europeans fighting their own. The economic crisis is a learning point to africa to produce its own products and services.
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I like your take on the foreign press in Africa. The Economist said the same thing last week, that west press is becoming irrelevant in the developing world. And I think this has a lot to do with our own journalists like you, COO! Keep up the good work.
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