It's what it is, but it is not all doom and gloom

Kenya needs a clear plan and a clear vision of what it has to be. [iStockphoto]

The negativity in my country Kenya can cripple the spirit. We live on a rich daily diet of toxic vibrations.

We feed ourselves on intended hostility towards those who don't agree with us, paralysing cynicism, and a sense of rank hopelessness. The heart wants to sink.

We watched, this week, a quartet of our religious top brass across faiths, ventilating sarcasm and scepticism on national television.

Elsewhere, those entrusted to lead an ongoing national conversation went for each other with slander, in front of cameras. For their part, the religious leaders had not a single good word for their country, not one message of hope.

For theirs, the politicians were indifferent to mutual respect with the public. Our sneering pessimism is endemic. Those whom we should look up to for hope are immersed in perpetual perorating, whining, insulting and exuding a motley of poisonous energy.

Once long ago, in 1980, the respected team of Sean MacBride, Marshall McLuhan, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with other Third World luminaries, called for a New International Information and Communications order.

Today they must wonder, even from their graves, what the fuss on covering Third World countries in the news was all about.

You see, Ahmed Mokhtar M'Bow of Senegal, today aged 102, was then UNESCO's director general. He commissioned a report in 1978, on the global flow of information.

The team, led by MacBride, issued a damning report against Western media multinationals, for unceasing negative reportage on Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Such global entities as Reuters, United Press International (UPI), Agence France-Presse (AFP), and Associated Press (AP), were accused of casting the three continents in the pictures and language of hell.

We were never in the news, unless there was a bloodbath somewhere, a military coup or putsch, a natural disaster, an epidemic, a massacre, or some other terrible happening.

The poor world cried out for a new international information and communication order. We were especially sick and tired of coverage that cast Africa as a foil to civilisation, and the global headquarters of bad happenings.

Apart from the MacBride Report, M'Bow also presided over the writing of the respected UNESCO Africa History Series, today the most comprehensive and authentic narrative on Africa over millennia.

The MacBride Report was titled "Many Voices, One World." It recommended a new order in international flow of information.

The Third world should not just be a subject of information, it said. We should also be an active original source of objective information on ourselves, the team recommended.

The US and Britain protested against the MacBride Report. They pulled out of UNESCO.

Britain would return in 1997 and the US only in 2003. Both starved UNESCO of funds. But, perhaps, they should never have bothered to sulk and go away in protest?

M'Bow must today look at us in utter disbelief? News coverage on Africa for Africa, is largely in the hands of African journalists - with the exception of Francophone Africa.

The damage Western multinationals did to us in the early decades of independence, we now do ourselves. It would seem from the wall-to-wall coverage of the continent by our own journalists that nothing good happens in Africa.

Put together with a melange of angry professional voices and social media royalty, the new doomsday party for Africa is jet set.

Certainly we are not Sugar Candy Mountain. We are defective. We have so many challenges on the continent.

Famine, return of military generals, internal strife, unemployment, cost of living, bad politics.

But, surely, doesn't anything good ever happen here? We must find something cheerful to say about us, sometimes.

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications advisor

www.barrackmuluka.co.ke