Simama, Eugene Wamalwa and the rights of free speech and association

A large public meeting has been called in Bungoma this Sunday, the 31st of January. The rally has been called by Saboti MP Eugene Wamalwa and his confederates in the Simama Kenya political action group. It is not clear that the event will go ahead, following threats, made in public by local politicians, to stop the rally taking place.

These threats are the sort of, 'come if you dare' challenges that history promises will deliver great bloodshed and destruction of property. It is a naked effort at political incitement and intimidation, an attempt at corralling sections of the country off of what are deemed ‘external influences,' an effort at the kind of ethnic balkanisation that has led to the exclusion of certain ethnicities from national political groupings and led to the exclusion and resentments that bore the pre and post-election violence in 2008.

The Standard: Outlandish Everyday!

Every time a Kenyan journalist spends a stint in police detention, the whole of Nairobi goes crazy.

Fellow newsmen and women rush to Ground Zero to show solidarity. Human rights organizations and other groups come out of the woodwork, for a chance to exhibit what they claim is their undaunted support and commitment to the cause of democracy. Politicians, some with questionable human rights records, abandon their activities and run to the police station for the photo opportunity. The more dramatic they act, the higher the likelihood of their pictures ending up on the front page. They scream at and scold police officers, who in most cases are only following orders. They kick the gates open in clear violation of the protocol they demand the government use in summoning the press. They try any and everything that would earn them notoriety in the press - anything.

Edwin Okong'o criticizes the Standard Newspapers, on what he cites as irresponsible journalism.

Free the Standard Presses

Kenyans, basking in the so genannte expansion of Press freedoms gained after the revolution of 2002 will hardly pay any attention to the increasing tightening of the screw on the Standard Group and its employees. Likely many of us already retain an animus against the East African Standard, the worn phrase being that it is a tabloid, given to an obsessive publication of untruths and hyperbole that is unbecoming for a newspaper of its influence or size. There will be a schadenfreude in many quarters as financial pressure is brought to bear on the Standard, especially among its competitors but the pain that is now the Standard's will soon be shared by all Kenya.

Amir Ibrahim, "We ignore the plight of the Standard at our peril; an unfettered Press is the very cornerstone of democratic government." Read more here.