Fat women. "Socialites." Gold-diggers. Blue Subaru motorists. Watu wa Eastlands. Women who wear hair weaves. Women who smoke shisha. Bloggers. The list of the classes of people that Njoki Chege has offended grows by the newspaper column inch by the week. She pens a column for the Nation Media Group in the Saturday Nation called City Girl and it is a hot topic every time she is published and says something inflammatory. She has her fans and she has her detractors. Their wars of words on Twitter are becoming legendary. The pro-free speech side declares her freedom of expression as sacrosanct. The pro-good manners side wants her column cancelled.
On January 2, an editor, Dennis Galava, at the Nation Media Group wrote a hard-hitting Op-Ed charging the President of Kenya with grave offences. He was suspended, then fired. He did not say anything that was fundamentally wrong or untrue. He was accused by his own bosses of having violated the editorial policy of the newspaper. From a political perspective, Mr Galava's Op-Ed was important, raising questions about the political direction Kenya has taken since Uhuru Kenyatta was ;elected as the Fourth President in 2013. From a socio-cultural perspective, City Girl appeals to the vain and the ill-read. It ranks up there with pornography for the value it adds to our lives. Yet Mr Galava is out of a job and City Girl purrs along.
We are a democratic republic, and it is our elected representatives who make decisions that affect our lives even to the minutest degree. Political decisions made by our elected representatives have great impacts on our lives. Mr Galava attempted to address the political decision-making in Kenya and he was fired for his trouble. City Girl does not even attempt to address what makes Kenya socio-cultural development fraught with risk. It panders to base instincts of a small section of the population and makes a hash for it. Ms Chege will continue to pen her column for as long as it fattens the bottom line of the Nation Media Group.
In the past week alone, online commentators have attempted to address the El Adde attack where Kenyan soldiers died in an al Shabaab attack and have been arrested for their online posts. These are men and women who have attempted to place the Kenyan involvement in Somalia in the proper perspective. Even the Nation Media Group has drank the Kool-Aid that "we do not question the army" when it is in the field of battle. Few seem to realise that Kenya is walking the same path that the United States walked in Vietnam.
We have been successfully trolled by the likes of City Girl. Our war in Somalia will become our Vietnam. But that is not all. The Eurobond questions refuse to die down. These are important questions about how financial and economic decisions are made by the National Treasury and the Cebntral Bank. But all the online Kenyan community can talk about is the latest outrage on the pages of the Saturday Nation by City Girl. Whether or not a massive fraud was perpetrated by the National Treasury remains unknown. Whether or not Kenya's mission in Somalia is a failure remains a mystery. Whether or not press freedom is being expanded or narrowed hangs in the balance. But the hurt feelings of bloggers, taken on by City Girl, remain the subject pf much mirth and online angst.
Think on that for a minute. We don't know how many Kenyan soldiers died in Somalia. We do not know how much money was made or lost in the Eurobond. We do not know why the Nation Media Group fired Dennis Galava. The only topic of discussion is whether City Girl is important.
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