CHARACTER ASSASSINATIONAs a weapon of politics, character assassination —broadly defined as a deliberate and sustained process aimed at destroying the credibility and reputation of a person, institution, organisation, social group or nation — is neither new nor peculiar to Kenya. Kenya is not new to the politics of character assassination. In the age of slander, intellectuals like the Kenyan-American scholar, Makau Mutua, have become super snipers in character assassination in the pages of newspapers. Since its controversial September ruling, the Supreme Court has been praised across Africa as a triumph of judicial independence. The EU interim statement reveals the acute vulnerability of international election observers to Kenya’s art of character assassination.

Source: Daily Nation September 16, 2017 18:56 UTC