Aga Khan departure from NMG, Taarifa's entry must not limit us

Taifa Group Founder, Rostam Azizi, and Sultan Ali Allana, Director of the Aga Khan Fund sign transaction documents in Nairobi. [Courtesy]  

John Donne’s famous poem comes to mind at times such as the Kenyan mediascape has entered. No man is an island, entire of itself, the poet famously said. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”  

And so it is with the mediascape. We are each a piece of the action. Ebola in one space, is Ebola in the entire scape. When the rain begins beating in one space, it will likely beat the entire scape.

The departure of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) from Nation Media Group (NMG) invites us to do the taboo thing.  

In this business, we tend to leave our compatriots alone. They do their thing in their corner, while we do ours in our part of the firmament. We don’t talk too loudly about one another. If we must, we will only whisper. 

When the Aga Khan sells his entire interests in Kenyan media after 66 years, however, there is cause to break the unwritten rules. To comment, even to lament. For no man is an island, entire of itself. We must say with the poet, “Every man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

NMG is a part of the Kenyan story, and we are a part of its story. Without our activities, good or bad, they have little to tell that is of immediacy to us.

And if they tell strange tales of strange lands and persons, we should soon lose interest in them. They are here to inform us, editorialise on things relevant to us, and play their role in agenda setting for the better life we dream of.

For 66 years, they did just that. Of course they found the Standard Group here, under its former incarnations.

Together, however, they took on the onerous task of heralding probable and possible good days ahead.

They became our daily mirrors, giving us room to see ourselves clearly; the weekly tribunes assessed our performance and gave balanced verdicts. They became modern-day town criers, who sent urgent messages far and wide.  

There is a sense in which NMG and Kenya’s independence and turbulence in the season are inseparable. They were joined at the hip, from the very start blowing with the Harold Macmillan “Wind of Change” that heralded Uhuru. They have stoically stayed the course, knowing good times and bad times together. They have been beaten up with the rest of the media.

Kenyan youth

They have been denied licences, sometimes switched off, bullied through the courts, banned from reporting Parliament, slapped with draconian court fines to shut them up, and suffered all manner of injustice that media that attempts to be free in an unfree world must suffer.  

They have not been saints. We are not, none of us is. They have made their mistakes and taken the necessary beating.

As Kenyan youth in the 1970s we occasionally burned their papers in the streets, when we thought they had lived outside their square.

That, too, was about the rights that we must enjoy in the civic space. And NMG fought for those rights, as it should be, even when used against them. 

And now the controlling stake in NMG has been sold. More than half of the shareholding is going to Rostam Azizi of Tanzania. Sixty six years of celebrating with NMG, and joint suffering without bitterness, is gone. Just like that.

Azizi’s Taarifa Ltd is the new owner of what even this column must acknowledge as East Africa’s largest media house. Bear with me, like with Shakespeare’s Mark Antony when he says, “My heart is in the coffin there, with Caesar. And I must pause till it come(s) back to me.” 

For I cry not because of the passing of whom I have known well; I cry rather for the little I know of the new sheriff in town. He arrives from Tanzania, easily East Africa’s regional headquarters of official hostility to free media.

Does this arrival herald future growth, or does it threaten us with possible media capture?

Does it bring expanded investment and growth, or does it lift the lid on worries and self-censorship in the newsroom? We must welcome Taarifa to Kenya, as in any event they are already here. 

Taarifa, we know of your political dalliance and business connections with East Africa’s high and mighty. We, the workhorses in the Kenyan mediascape, are free spirits.

We serve today here, and tomorrow there, the next day elsewhere. Our focus is on public good, our mission service to humankind. Do not limit us.