KENYANS SUSPEND SCEPTICISM

ON Tuesday afternoon, terrorists stormed Dusitd2, an upscale hotel and office complex in the heart of Nairobi. Within an hour, security forces had cordoned off the area, evacuated nearby buildings and launched an operation to confront the attackers and rescue people.

Given the security forces’ performance during previous attacks, this was a huge improvement.

Five years ago, during a terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall, it was a different story. As described in a reconstruction by freelance journalist Tristan Mcconnell, by the time security agencies organised a response, “most of those who would escape had already escaped; most of those who would be wounded had already been struck; and most of those who would die were already dead”.

Sadly, the government’s communications efforts this time did not match its security response. While there was no repeat of the initial contradiction, chaos and confusion during Westgate, there was a familiar effort to speak while saying nothing. In all, the government held just four news briefings during the 17-hour siege and gave no casualty figures or information about the attackers. The media was pushed away from the scene early on, so hours after the start of the rescue, we were still in the dark about what was going on.

At around midnight, Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i falsely declared that “all buildings have been secured”. The media dutifully repeated this even as gunfire and explosions continued throughout the night and into the early morning. It was as though we were back at Westgate, where journalists were wont to simply regurgitate what the government was telling them.

In 2013, it was ordinary Kenyans on social media who called out the government on the inconsistencies in its communications.

Yet this time, Kenyans on

Twitter, or @KOT, were for the most part reluctant to challenge the government’s narrative. For most, the priority was supporting the security forces as they battled to rescue those trapped inside.

While understandable, this attitude conflated the misleading statements of bureaucrats with the heroic actions of the security agents risking their lives in the hotel, suggesting that to criticise the former was to undermine the latter.

Toeing the government line wasn’t the only thing @KOT got wrong.

When the New York Times published a photograph showing the bodies of two people killed in the attack, then tried to justify it by claiming that it wanted to give its readers “a real sense of the situation”, @KOT blew up. Many pointed out the hypocrisy and double standards. Where, they rightly asked, were the pictures of bodies from the many mass shootings in the US? However, @ KOT’S fury soon focused on one person, Kimiko de Freytas-tamura, the incoming East Africa bureau chief for the Times, whose article contained the offending photograph.

The hashtag #deportkimiko was soon trending despite her assertion that she was not responsible for decisions on what photographs to use.

But the mob was not interested in logic and reasons. They wanted blood. However, as a Twitter thread by author and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola pointed out, the environment it generated could have dangerous implications for the practice of critical journalism in Kenya.

Clearly, there is a need for caution during a crisis. But Kenyans can do better than blindly trust in a government that routinely lies and takes out their frustrations on a journalist just doing her job.

| The Washington Post