Why selective criticism in Kenyan Blogs?

The following appeared as a comment by "Concerned Rose" in response to the post below this one on the current queries about Uhuru Kenyatta's closed eyes on the 9.6 billion missing...

"Winston Churchhill once said “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”

"I am a disappointed Kenyan. Disappointed because of a scaring trend that has emerged as far as fair reporting of Kenya’s politics is concerned. Many Kenyans who frequent the many blogs discussing Kenyan politics will agree with me that most of the blogs are mouth pieces of some political parties. The owners of the blogs only publish stories demonizing one of the political party's mostly unfairly quoting faceless sources. When for example a report compiled by MP’s from both political divide finds foul play on the part of the Prime Minister and his family concerning the Maize Scandal, these blogs literally continued running unrelated stories and their owners literally deleted comments from concerned Kenyans that faulted Raila. Kumekucha led in this end. Other blogs choose to recycle old stories.

Imagine if the committee had found Kibaki guilty of the sleeze? All blogs would have published the story as ‘Breaking News’. And I bet the story would have run for days. Why the hypocrisy?

When blogs that purport to lead the war of redeeming the country are involved in cover ups when their so called ‘democrats’ are caught with their snouts in the public coffers, then how do we expect a better Kenya? Where are the honest Kenyans in the blogosphere to lead the way since the road is packed with wolves in sheep skins?

I sign off with wise words from Joseph Joubert; “Children need role models rather than critics.” Don’t shake your head I know,…. that is asking too much."

Concerned
Rose

Politics is about exploiting the poor

It's Blog Action day and this year bloggers around the world are you uniting in one common cause: making noise against poverty. Does it help throwing more cluster into cyberspace? I doubt it. The poor will still be poor at the end of today and the rich will be richer. Do we splash logos, banners and pictures of emaciated children across the screens because we sincerely believe it will help or because it makes going to sleep easier? What's special about today is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are concerned for whatever reason giving a few minutes or hours in their day to something that does not have any direct impact on their lives. But the best thing about this is that there are people out there who are united in this and not being paid to be concerned. No cushy job in an air-conditioned office with an SUV parked outside while they sit in a workshop and come up with some solution to world poverty (with no conscience about the fact that they are part of the problem - yes that includes me minus the SUV).

So let us have a minute of silence for these people - not the poor ones - the rich ones...

And let us have two minutes of silence for that other lot of people that call themselves Ministers, Members of Parliament, Prime Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Diplomats and of course Presidents. Now this lot ( at least in Kenya) are a really special breed. They have mastered the art of not just making a living from poverty but getting the very poor people they represent to pay them to get even richer. Geniuses. I salute you.

So now that we have had a few minutes of silence for Patriots Paid to Protect the Planet, I would like to make a noise about the other kinds of heroes. The silent kind who don't do any of this for a living or for the feel good factor. They have been around for too long to get a kick out of any of this.

And I needn't look very far. Today I want to make a noise about two people:


Mr and Mrs Pabari.
My mother and father.