A rare entry into this year’s list of Presidential Awards marked a departure in the way media is officially viewed in this country.

At last week’s Jamhuri Day celebrations, President Mwai Kibaki presented the coveted Order of the Grand Warrior of Kenya award, OGW, to two journalists. The President further bestowed the civilian Head of State Commendation award, HSC, on a media consultant. The three, Philip Ochieng, Dorothy Kweyu and Amboka Andere, were honored for their “service to the nation,” according to Saturday Nation last week.

No such thing has happened to a journalist since independence. We are simply not used to government rewarding journalists.

On the contrary, our media has been viewed largely as a serious meddler. At every corner, its practitioners have been treated like gadflies. The police, at the behest of powerful politicians, habitually paid visit to the media with batons and anti-riot gear. Our not-so-brilliant past has even seen pressmen maimed in the line of duty, as they strived to tell citizens what they’ve the right to know. This newspaper’s managing editor, for example, nearly got there when in the 1990s a politician had him kidnapped by hired thugs and beaten senseless in Karura forest for questioning on record the politician’s devious ways.

Some 200 cases still litter our courts today, each citing various crimes allegedly committed by the media. Moreover, as we have leant from the Press lately, some old timers in the corridors of power still itch to throw a hammer, anything, at media people. And no national leader has been heard to encourage high school graduates to pursue a journalism career at the university.
With the recent presidential recognition, however, this looks set to change. Or does it not?
Journalism is traditionally an uncelebrated business, even if it’s permanently in our face. We remember the media only when individual rights to privacy have been questionably laid bare, and when reportage is inaccurate. I was personally reminded of this, painfully, this week. “Your students have behaved exactly like journalists,” a faculty colleague came complaining at my office, the voice creaking with sarcasm. “They’ve misreported [in the University Gazette] on what I did.” The same is perennially replicated in public life.

There are a lot of rotten things in our country. And, yes, you may blame the media for bringing it all to light. The roads are a nightmare. Our politics long went below boredom. The cost of essential goods is increasingly becoming unbearable. The struggling middle class is bottlenecked at every corner. This week, for example, the country leant of a bitter betrayal dealt to this class. The unsecured loans that our banks scampered to give away all year are now coming to haunt those who rushed to take them. They’ll have to pay more after all, we are told. The poor, on the other hand, look long resigned to fate. Deep inside the North Eastern province, communities there know no face of government. Old men and women are withering in hunger. There are high-school teenagers who have never seen a tarmac road. The nearest health center, for some, is 30km away by foot. And in Nyanza Province on the western boarders, school-age kids now run whole families after AIDS ravaged entire villages.

But there are also a lot of things Kenyans today walk tall about. And the knowledge of these we also have journalism to thank for. For example, there may be little need to blindly emulate the phantom blondes from the West anymore. Our village girls now have a homegrown role model. Wangari Maathai, Africa’s first woman to win the coveted Nobel Peace Prize, is a village-bred woman who speaks about green grass and tadpoles, a language our children can relate to.

Besides, our country has become the region’s peacemaker. We’re even hosting a foreign government, Somalia, whose home country is still too dangerous to govern. We recently hosted a special session of the United Nations Security Council, which always sits in New York, to discuss the peace of our northern neighbors, Sudan. On sports, we still wiped unchecked tears in front of our TV screens when our athletes did a clean 1-2-3 sweep of the Steeplechase at the Athens Olympics. And our tropical beaches and grassland still team with tourists, who flock in a hundredfold, despite American negative travel advisories.
It is largely the media that got us all onto the world stage. Civic and government officials from donor countries know this. They now turn to our media personalities to brief them on the true state of the nation. And they return the word, as they did two years ago, that ours are the most optimistic people in the world.

The truth is that when we celebrate such national achievements, we rarely pause to acknowledge the men and women who risk personal safety, among other things, to bring it all to our attention. In that triple gesture the President made last week, the country made that significant pause. It acknowledged journalists. This, it must be said, is a turning point.

Kodi Barth teaches journalism at United States International University-Nairobi.
If you have seen questionable content in the press, write to kodi@kodibarth.com
Website: www.kodibarth.com/