READERS HAVE THEIR SAY - Daily Nation

I was on the verge of writing to you to castigate Editorial Director Mutuma Mathiu and company for giving us a one-sided view of the “Demon of Tambach” but then I read “Moi: The X-Files” (Daily Nation, February 14, 2020) and the Public Editor’s Notebook on the subject and forgave you all.

Now I can get on with my life because there is closure on the matter. Happy Valentine’s Day. By the way, who was this guy Valentine?

Please convey to the news editor (Head of Content) my sincere appreciation for the coverage of the death of former President Daniel arap Moi. Kudos to the Kenya Defence Forces and the media.

— Philip Wangalwa, Busia

The story “Matiba, a friend that Moi brought down”, by John Kamau (Daily Nation, February 14, 2020), falsely claims that Kenneth Matiba was the first Cabinet minister to resign.

As Vice-President, Oginga Odinga was a member of the Cabinet, from which he resigned in 1966. Achieng Oneko also resigned from the Cabinet soon after Odinga.

Then Joe Murumbi left a year after them. Why is Nation keen to revise history?

In his “Nation Media Group’s message of condolence on the passing of retired President Mzee Daniel Toroitich arap Moi” (Daily Nation, February 14, 2020), the chairman, Dr Wilfred Kiboro, said Moi “rose from a Cabinet minister to Vice-President in 1969, a position he held conscientiously for nine years until 1978….” But Moi became Vice-President in 1967 and held that office for 11 years!

Public Editor: Journalists do make mistakes, like everybody else. The important thing is to ensure the mistakes are corrected. The question of revising history does not arise.

Revising history (historical revisionism) is trying to change the way people think about events in the past. It’s not about making mistakes about the dates when the events occurred.

Moi, revisionism and misattributed quotes

In the Nation review of the Moi years, there was no mention of an intellectual war that started long before he became president.

In the 1960s and 70s, eminent historians were rewriting the history of the Mau Mau to minimise its perceived role in the fight for independence.

In the early Moi years, the revisionists worked together with the State to intimidate their dissident juniors in the faculties. Some were detained or went into exile.

One critic of the revisionists was Joseph G. Donders, of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Nairobi.

A record of the brutal repression of the Mau Mau uprising had to wait until 2005, when Caroline Elkins published Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, and David Anderson published Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire.

A historian of Prof Maina wa Kinyatti’s stature could have been a useful contact for more information on the revisionist project.

A convenient starting point on the historical revisionism is Thought and Practice: Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya, Volume 1, Number 1, 1974.

Still on the coverage of the Moi era, Joyce Nyairo uses the term ‘fiscal policy’, rather than ‘monetary policy’, in reference to 1992 printing of money.

In her opinion piece “Remembering and re-membering Moi, and the way he made us feel” (Daily Nation, February 5, 2020), Dr Nyairo writes in paragraph 11: “Then — in total disregard of fiscal policy — Moi printed money to fund his 1992 re-election campaign.” Please edit the online edition.

We also have the problem of the paternity (authorship) of quotes. There is a tendency for writers to anchor or summarise their pieces by quotes from great thinkers of yore.

The inherent risks are misattributed quotes or the lesser sin where credit goes to someone who restated the idea of another person without attribution.

Between October 2005 and October 2017, the Nation credited physicist Albert Einstein 13 times for the saying “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, even though he never said it.

Though the Nation does not appear to have ever attributed the quote “the ends justify the means” to Niccolo Machiavelli, it is the Roman poet Ovid (43BC-18AD) who observed that “the outcome justifies the means”.

Apart from the paternity of quotes, journalists face a burden in identification and verification of historical facts and events.

Despite the billions spent on IT infrastructure, individuals, companies, universities, research institutes and government institutions rarely host useful information on their websites.

Government websites only put information of current relevance (including speeches by the incumbent Cabinet secretary or governor); rarely content of any historical value.

The Nation Leadership Forums could be used to provoke discussions on promoting digitisation of historical and current records as a sure way to a knowledge-based society.