Kenya: Vernacular Stations in the Spotlight

Alphonce Shiundu    5 May 2010

Nairobi — Vernacular radio stations are set to be monitored more closely in the push for national unity in the referendum campaigns. This becomes apparent after a report urging the broadcast regulator and the media's self-regulating agency to tighten the monitoring of the radio stations was endorsed by the government.

The proposal to the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) and the Media Council comes as the country awaits the publication of the proposed constitution, which will set the date for the referendum. Attorney-General Amos Wako was on Tuesday given the greenlight to publish the draft constitution on Thursday. This was after scrutiny by a parliamentary committee confirmed that no major changes had been made to the document endorsed by all MPs.

The Ministry of Information and Communication endorsed the proposal contained in a report released at Nairobi's Hilton Hotel last Wednesday. The report was compiled by PeaceNet-Kenya, a lobby group pushing for national healing. The key focus of the report -- Nurturing Nationhood Through Peace Media -- is on the content of vernacular radio stations, especially at this time that a referendum is around the corner.

The fear is that, like in 2005, politicians were likely to use the vernacular FM stations to ram tapered ethnic prejudices down the throats of all listeners. Kalenjin radio station Kass FM was closed in November 2005 for 40 hours over alleged ethnic incitement as the referendum beckoned. This time, the government is more vigilant to ensure it does not suffer a backlash similar to the one that followed the 2005 referendum.

"Most vernacular radio stations are privately owned (such that) any information that is aired in most instances is skewed towards the owners' interests," reads the report. Drawing hugely from the post-election experience, the study says that since talk-shows and phone-ins were the pillars of these stations, there was a risk of the content degenerating into "appalling hate speech".

Music played in these stations is also under scrutiny because "it is quite dangerous for our societies if the lyrics contain ethnic and anti-cohesion slogans".

Ethical threshold

"Any expressions of hate in public can never be tolerated," the study notes. The grouse of the study is that the quality of broadcasts does not always meet the ethical threshold of accuracy, balance and independence of news. The gatekeepers in this role, the report noted, are "compromised" to the extent that they feed listeners on "misinformation."

As a result, the vernacular stations take the heat for focusing on sensational content and using journalists whose professionalism is "suspect" to generate "cheap content". "Commentary, chat, speculation, opinion, argument, controversy and punditry cost less than the rigorous process of gathering and or verifying information ... the principle of keeping fact separate from opinion and analysis is no longer honoured," the report noted.

Similarly, the study takes the view that "there's a general feeling" that the media have colluded with "economic and political interests at the expense of the common citizenry". Between January 29 and February 19, the period under study, the major topics that stole the show in the vernacular radio stations were the debate on boundary review, the Mau evictions, the Prime Minister's "suspension" of ministers William Ruto and Sam Ongeri, and the controversy surrounding the choice of Mr Bethuel Kiplagat at the helm of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission.

The methodology of the study went for politically "hot" topics -- the ones that easily stir up tribal passions. The sampling of 10 radio stations was "purposive", which in essence means the researchers were judgmental. This is an aspect that the researchers explain as one based on the target audience of each station.

Nonetheless, this weakness in the choice of sample was mitigated when two people, not known to each other were asked to listen to the same programme and then assess it based on a given criteria. The focus was in identifying words that explicitly evoked fear, sensationalism, outrage or sympathy.

When the verdict came out, the vernacular stations were vindicated to some extent: The content was accurate and balanced three quarters of the time. The 10 sampled were West FM (Luhya), Lake Victoria (Luo), Pamoja (Sheng'), Ghetto (Sheng'), Kass (Kalenjin), Muga (Meru), Musyi (Kamba), Egesa (Kisii), Inooro (Kikuyu) and Baraka (Kiswahili).

The study showed that these radio stations dwelt on peace-related topics between late morning and early afternoon. The bed-time topics, the study noted, did little in the push for unity. The reporters in these stations scored poorly as agents of peace, as did the callers. However, the panellists, many of them drawn from lobby groups, got significant approval.

The characteristic back-patting evident in many NGO researches also surfaced, with more than half the respondents supporting NGOs and their spokesmen as agents of peace. But politicians did not escape blame as over a third of their sentiments broadcast through vernacular stations portrayed them as "perpetrators of violence."

The thumbs-up for politicians as peace-builders was in a paltry 24 per cent of the content. Interestingly, the same report praises the vernacular stations as the ones that are likely to propel the healing message to the grassroots, where it is needed most. In fact, the study notes: "Kenya has reached a time that national and official languages need to be extended to include all the major and regional languages native to the Kenyan nation."

The rationale for this is that English and Kiswahili radio stations have for decades been a preserve of the elite and town residents, thereby locking out the bulk of the population in rural areas.

Report concludes

With over half the content being of national interest, the report concludes that vernacular radio stations are "not a curse, (but) a trend in the right direction". The remedies from the report are that the journalists in these stations ought to be trained; politicians ought to be barred from inciting "their people" in vernacular; that the public monitors and reports any traces of inciting broadcast; and that the government pumps money for national unity drives through these stations.

How this will work out given the shrinking budgets of media owners, the reluctance of government to embrace these stations and their profit-geared content, is still unclear. Throw in the hunger for higher ratings and the clout of politicians in marshalling local audiences and you begin to see the mountain to be scaled in the pursuit for national cohesion.

Source: http://bit.ly/a4EPyN

(Yimber Gaviria, Colombia)