We won’t know about Burundi until we ignore Egypt

In Kenya the Makueni series finally came to an end. It all started with the death of the senior counsel, Mutula Kilonzo, the mystery of what caused his death was soon overtaken by who was to replace him. Enter daughter Kethi Kilonzo. As Kethi was getting ready to step into her father’s big shoes, she seemed unaware of what the likes of Charity Ngilu and Agnes Ndetei had in store for her. This ranged from fronting her step mother to the court case where she was declared ineligible to stand after her name was found missing in all the registers that the electoral body had in its possession. The last bit of the series had her brother stepping up at the last minute and even though the ballot papers originally came with his name missing, he still took the day beating his next challenger by such an outrageous margin. My following of the events in Makueni were interrupted by the shocking news of a grenade attack in Kigali that claimed two lives and left many nursing injuries. The attack happened in Nyabugogo, an area that is always teeming with people, especially in the evenings. It is a shame that cowards continue to terrorise hardworking innocent people in this city. A few weeks back, a renowned columnist, Charles Onyango Obbo, wrote a sarcastic piece on what Burundi should do to appear in the regional media. A friend of mine who aptly goes by the twitter name Mr. Burundi, Chris Nsabiyumva responded to Obbo in a blog post. I enjoyed the exchange because Obbo is someone I look up to while Chris is a good friend of mine (when he was in Kigali recently I was showing him where to find the fine meat around here). But, more importantly, I have touched this whole subject before and it looks like we may need more than just a Ssenyonga here, an Obbo there and a Chris in Burundi. For us to pay more attention to regional news, we need to start by cutting down on our consumption of news from far off places. And I am not talking about people tweeting about bombings in Boston while ignoring an incident in Kigali. It all has to do with the near blackout of any news that is across our borders whether good or bad. I spent some days following news bulletins on Rwanda TV, Citizen TV and NTV Uganda. And I noticed that all these stations have time to cover events in Egypt and even the whole royal baby madness but have almost no time for news across their own borders. Even when you spend time looking at the news ticker (the strip with news briefs at the border of the TV screen) of a Kenyan or a Ugandan TV station you are more likely to get details of the train crash in Spain than about a grenade attack in Kigali or any news in a fellow East African country. I personally miss very much, the days when NTV Uganda’s 11pm news bulletin always ended with a brief on the next day’s newspaper headlines. My OB Maurice Mugisha would do a good job of informing the viewers what the headlines were for the next day in Uganda’s Daily Monitor, Kenya’s Daily Nation, Tanzania’s Citizen as well as Rwanda’s New Times. Citizen TV’s breakfast news also does a newspaper review but it is restricted to Kenya only yet all regional papers are accessible online. And I am sure it would cost them nothing more to do these reviews covering other EAC countries. We can forget about integration if we cannot see the need for our media to invest more in covering events in other East African member states. We simply cannot integrate based on profound ignorance. We have people talking about Egypt and the royal baby with a lot of clarity yet in Uganda someone will still ask you about the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi with that annoying line “So which people were killing the other?” Still with the media, I can see that the timid Kenyan media has now picked a few lessons from the Ugandan media. Kenyan media has of late been accused of handling the new government with softness. Like the Ugandan media there is now a shift from real issues to the ‘Bukedde’ like topics of men sleeping with animals. At the end of the day you wonder how we can build our countries and community when the media seems to be pulling out each day. Email: ssenyong@gmail.comBlog: ssenyonga.wordpress.comTwitter: @ssojo81