This is why Kenyans steal newspapers

 In Kenya, a newspaper, once bought, is not your own. Like a child raised by a village, it becomes everybody’s Photo: Courtesy

Newspapers are glorious things, and in his home country, the expatriate was wont to wax lyrical about their ‘independence, freedom and integrity.’ This, even when he comes from Britain, a country served by rags such as the right-wing ‘Daily Mail’ or the surreal ‘Star.’

In Kenya, of course, newspapers are about as independent as termites in a colony. The naïve expatriate is likely to moan about this almost every day when, in traffic jams, he buys his dailies through a tiny gap in the rolled-down window of his Land Rover. ‘This one,’ he will say to his driver, ‘is clearly Jubilee, and this one is obviously Cord.’ The driver will nod politely, pretending not to have any political leanings whatsoever.

But, forget the content-bias of our newspapers (of course, this present newspaper, The Nairobian, has no bias at all, and leans only towards top-quality investigative journalism and genuine public-interest stories); for, what the expatriate will soon notice more than newspapers’ content, is how damned quickly the things get stolen as common property by co-workers, people in bars, indeed anybody.

In Kenya, a newspaper, once bought, is not your own. Like a child raised by a village, it becomes everybody’s. You can even observe it in supermarkets. No-one in a supermarket, for instance, walks past the apples, takes a few bites from them, then leaves them behind, smothered in tooth marks and Colgate-shy saliva. Do so, and you’d get arrested. Possibly, you’d get a tyre around your neck. However, approach the newspaper stand in a supermarket, and everyone’s fingering the things, having a surreptitious read and then wandering on. This, I assume, is why newspapers in supermarkets always have their pages stapled together. This, or else the editors know how rubbish the things they produce are that they try to perform a public service by preventing us from reading them.

The expatriate is strongly advised, having purchased a newspaper, to keep it secure under his trouser belt, always. For, if he leaves it on his office desk and pops out for a coffee, it’ll be stolen; if he nips to the toilet for the shortest call in the history of short calls, he’ll return to find it gone; if he turns aside on his office chair to wave at someone through the window, he’ll swivel back to find an empty desk.

Simply, Kenyans are talented newspaper thieves.

Most annoying for the expatriate is this fact that he soon comes to realise: the stolen newspaper is not actually read anyway. That is, except for the obituary pages. Let’s face it, Kenyans only steal newspapers in order to read the obituaries, and bit like a leopard might catch an antelope and then eat only its liver.

My advice to the expatriate is simple: read the front and back pages of the newspaper you buy in the morning. When you’ve done this, wrap this cover around a discarded piece of cardboard and staple it. In a few days, people will learn, and the theft will stop.

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