A curious piece, was John Kamau’s story about Hilary Ng’weno in one of the newspapers Sunday last week. Kamau seemed at pains to paint Ng’weno, the most lauded, outstanding and principled journalist Kenya has ever produced, as a latter-day villain and a sellout to some cause Kamau evidently espouses. Kamau laid out the colour of his stall early, in his opening remarks, calling Ng’weno a “[President Daniel arap] Moi apologist” and describing The Weekly Review (WR) in its final days as “just like any other rag in the media market”. Kamau showed his fundamental misunderstanding of Hilary Ng’weno and WR when he wrote that “In 1981 … the government decided to place all its tender adverts in The Weekly Review, and this also came with a price. Ng’weno took out crippling loans that he invested in multiple publications, a commercial printing plant, a film studio and, in the early 1990s, an attempt to build a company HQ on an arid plot just off the Mombasa road.

Source: The Star July 19, 2021 01:52 UTC