Is Kenya losing its luster as the star of a rising Africa? The short answer is, no. But from afar it certainly looks that way.
Consider a modest sampling of recent events:
•A member of Parliament is assassinated in the heart of downtown Nairobi. A few weeks later, a prominent businessman is shot 15 times in a gangland execution.
•Students at an aviation school here stage a raucous rally after media reports reveal that many won their certificates by allegedly bribing administrators. Think about that: Aspiring aviation technicians who will one day be working on complicated machines that fly through the air carrying large numbers of people are graduating in some cases without attending classes.
•Police officers fire tear gas at elementary and middle school students and teachers protesting wealthy land-grabbers conspiring to steal the kids’ playing fields. Images of children running from the riot police amid clouds of tear gas flash around the world.
In early April, the country was hit with its latest terrorist drama: the killing of 148 people at Garissa University near the Somali border by militant Islamists. Why did it take Kenya’s elite special police force seven hours to get to the scene, Kenyans asked. They got a sickening answer. A senior official ordered the unit’s plane to ferry his daughter-in-law and two children back to Nairobi from the coastal resort town of Mombasa, even as the crisis unfolded.
More recently, the international Committee to Protect Journalists reported on two Kenyan journalists beaten by paramilitary police officers using clubs and iron bars. According to the CPJ, this was but the latest in a series of attacks on journalists reporting allegations of police corruption.
At times, Kenya seems its own worst enemy. When it comes to issues that the rest of the world pays most attention to, the country has an unerring knack for shooting itself in the foot.
In 2013, the government proposed new security legislation imposing onerous penalties on news organizations deemed by a government-controlled panel to be unreliable in their reporting. Another law proposed to ban NGOs from receiving more than 15 percent of their funding from foreign sources; in December, the government deregistered more than 500, allegedly for failing to file financial returns. International news agencies and global human rights organizations had a field day. Democracy under threat! they trumpeted. Crackdown on the media!
This year brought a similar flap. In an effort to accelerate Kenya’s transition to digital broadcasting, the government interfered with the operations of three television networks, allegedly for moving too slowly. After police officials forcibly closed their transmission station, the networks shut down their own digital signals in protest and plunged the country into a three-week news and entertainment blackout. Adding insult to injury, the regulators had awarded licenses to a pair of competitors, one owned by the government and the other a Chinese company, along with rights to rebroadcast local and international content regardless of copyright.
Kenya’s political opposition shifted into high gear. Rival political leaders accused the government of seeking to crush free speech and tame the country’s robustly independent media. Absurdly, one went so far as to charge President Uhuru Kenyatta with leading the nation into “dictatorship.” Not surprisingly, the world’s media lasered in on the controversy. On these global litmus tests for democracy and civil society, Kenya was seen to be failing.
The real story, of course, is more complicated. For all the sturm und drang, the controversies that drew so much critical international scrutiny have largely fallen away. The proposed laws restricting the media are under review by the Supreme Court and likely to be quietly renegotiated. The most onerous NGO restrictions were dropped when the bill became law, and few have had to curtail their activities.
In the fight over digital migration, a deal has been made. The country’s three major networks are back on the air, licenses restored. And to be fair, the government was not wholly in the wrong. For years, Kenya’s major broadcasters had been resisting a move that other nations made long ago, missing deadline after deadline. The licenses granted to those companies had earlier been offered to the major media houses and turned down. To those in the know, their very successful effort to cast themselves as victims of rapacious regulators smacked of self-serving spin.
Meanwhile, there has been bona fide good news. Economic growth for 2015 has been projected at 6.9 percent by the International Monetary Fund and 6 percent by the World Bank, higher than past forecasts. Foreign investment continues to pour into the country. Apart from insecurity, according to the I.M.F. and World Bank, the chief impediment to a brighter future is corruption, poor governance and debt.
Coincidentally or not, the Kenyan government appears to be listening. In recent months, it has launched a sweeping anticorruption drive. A dozen former and current cabinet ministers and regional governors are under investigation for graft; formal indictments and more prosecutions are said to be on the way. Kenya’s media outlets are launching investigations of their own and devoting major coverage to the crackdown — oddly, however, without giving much credit to the government for initiating the campaign.
Enter the spin-meisters. Mindful of the importance of global perceptions, Kenya’s government is undertaking a public relations blitz to refurbish its image. In February, it hired the Podesta Group, whose chairman, Tony Podesta, is a lobbyist with extensive ties with Democratic leaders. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has been brought in to attract foreign backing for a series of high-profile infrastructure and technology projects. A prominent global public relations firm most recently joined the effort to resuscitate Kenya’s tourist industry.
Whether these big names will do more than collect big fees is an open question. More to the point is whether Mr. Kenyatta can deliver on his anticorruption drive and stop his ministers from egregiously thieving from the public till. When it comes to Kenya’s image in the world, he must find a way to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot, particularly on issues that attract so much international attention.
If he succeeds, Kenya will prosper, regardless of its terrorists.
Michael Meyer is dean of the graduate school of media and communications at Aga Khan University in Nairobi.