Era of the Expansion for Nation media
By: Gerry Loughran
The years between 1990 and 2000 saw dynamic expansion in the Nation group: a new headquarters in downtown Nairobi, a new up market weekly, The EastAfrican, a $12 million (Sh750 million) press hall on the city’s outskirts with the latest in printing technology, entry to the internet and, crucially, a move into the broadcast media.
Capital expenditure soared to $12 million (Sh665 million) from $1.6 million (Sh93 million).
The group’s new home was the custom-built, multi-storey Nation Centre on Kimathi Street designed by Danish architect Henning Larsen. The new building was owned by Industrial Promotion Building Ltd., an affiliate of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, in which the Nation had a 20 per cent interest. The newspapers took four floors and their neighbours included prestige tenants such as the Nairobi Stock Exchange and Diamond Trust Bank. Staffers who had spent years in the stuffy, crammed, chaotic confines of Nation House were delighted to move to their new quarters in a light-filled, spacious, airy, noise-controlled, no-smoking and air-conditioned ambience.
A major boost to journalistic morale at the time was editor Joseph Odindo’s creation, The EastAfrican, the group’s first significant new editorial product for many years. Devised to meet growing interest in the East African region at a time when relations between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania were warmer than they had been for years, the newspaper presented as handsome and indisputably authoritative.
Little more than a year later, the International Press Institute described it as “one of the best, if not the best, of regional newspapers in sub-Saharan Africa”.
It was 1991 when the group took the first step on a long and arduous journey into the electronic media by applying for a license to broadcast. The government response was negative, presumably because of the Nation’s independent editorial line, so chief executive Wilfred Kiboro organised the purchase of a controlling interest in East Africa Television Network Ltd., (EATN), which already had television and radio licences. The government promptly cancelled EATN’s licences on grounds there was a dispute about the transfer of shares to the Nation.
There ensued a series of court hearings, postponements, statements and objections which Kiboro characterised as “a merry-go-round of delay”. Seven years after its first application, the Nation was awarded TV and radio licences, but for Nairobi only, not countrywide. Negotiations ensued about frequencies, microwave links, the siting of transmitters and the strength of signals. With most major newspaper companies reinventing themselves as multi-media providers at this time, the Nation was acutely aware that it could not be left behind.
Further, the government now owned or controlled the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and the Kenya Television Network, as well as the Kenya Times and the Standard newspapers. In the new democratic era, it was crucial that the Nation group should move into broadcast as well as print. Eventually and inevitably, resistance to the company’s ambitions melted away. As the millennium drew to a close, the company restructured, partly to reflect its entry into broadcasting, and changed its name to Nation Media Group. A subsidiary company, Africa Broadcasting Ltd., set up to handle TV and radio, was merged into a divisional structure within NMG and Nation TV (later NTV) was born.
… but dark days elsewhere
Asked to name a low point in the nation’s fortunes, the knowledgeable Kenyan might point to the early 1990s, which saw the murder of Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, the suspicious death of Bishop Alexander Muge, deadly ethnic clashes and the Goldenberg scandal. Ouko’s charred body, shot in the head, was found near hi home in Western Kenya in February 1990. A commission of inquiry and an investigation by a British detective led to the arrests of a government minister and an official of the provincial administration, but both were released for lack of evidence.
District Commissioner Jonah Anguka was tried for the murder in 1993, but found not guilty. A later investigation by a parliamentary select committee set up in 2003 was not pursued and the committee was disbanded in 2005. Its (incomplete) report was never debated in parliament.
A few months after Ouko’s death, the Anglican Bishop Muge, a persistent government critic, was killed in a road crash upon leaving Busia, shortly after a government minister warned him not to visit the town or he might not get out alive. A lorry driver involved in the crash was convicted of dangerous driving. The minister who made the threat resigned. He returned to government the following year. What started in 1991 in the form of land disputes escalated to bloody tribal purging which left more than a thousand people dead and three hundred times that number homeless (a sinister precursor of the worse violence that was to come in 2007-2008).
Starting in the Rift Valley then spreading to Western and Nyanza provinces, attacks were primarily targeted at the farms of Kikuyus, Luos and Luhyas, who broadly supported the opposition. Investigations in 1992, 1995 and 1999 blamed government officials for instigating the clashes and Human Rights Watch said the aim was to prove officials right in their assertions that multiparty politics would lead to chaos.
The greatest of Kenya’s corruption scandals was Goldenberg (1991-1993) which is estimated to have cost the country something like $600 million. Kamlesh Pattni’s firm, Goldenberg International Ltd., secured vast payments in export compensation for gold and diamonds which probably did not exist. The fraud involved pay-offs to large numbers of politicians and government officials as well as Central Bank officers. Despite numerous high-level investigations, no politician or senior official has ever been successfully pursued in connection with Goldenberg. Pattni served several limited jail terms, renounced Hinduism to become a Christian named Paul and chaired a small party, the Kenya National Democratic Alliance, in the 2007 election.
