My long walk with the media started at Metro FM after I graduated from Daystar University in the early part of this century. I was the love doctor on the Metro love zone.

But despite building a reasonable following and playing great love ballads which I enjoyed tremendously, there was no hiding that the show was indeed a graveyard shift…I would work until midnight and then fight for space in the then face-me-style KBC vans that dropped all of us home!

It is then that I got an opportunity to attend an Internews in Kenya training in health feature production. It was a great opportunity. Since they had a media resource center I could access the internet for free and make phone calls. This was a bonanza for me since I have always been an infomaniac…I would spend time surfing the web and coming up with gems for my love show; the hardest I have ever worked. How it never translated into top ratings is a mystery to me and a story for another day. Read More »

The just concluded General Election in Kenya was one of the most contested elections in the country’s history.

The ‘battle’ was fought on multiple fronts: from traditional door-to-door vote hunting to flying choppers branded in different coalition colours, to the manifestos, to traditional media, and not to forget, the social media. Of all these fronts, social media stands out as the one field where, regardless of the candidate’s actual popularity or depth of purse, one could compete. Read More »

Voila!  The upper middle class in Kenya now have a convenient polling station to make their vote count - twitter. In the recent party primaries they voted in their numbers and their ballot had up to 140 characters. The expanded space enabled them to steer discussions towards their preferred candidates for various seats. But when the results were announced and their votes were not tallied, they cried foul and complained that the exercise was unfair.

All was not lost however. Some bloggers helped expose sham processes resulting in cancellation of some results. Robert Alai, a techie blogger and ‘voice of the voiceless’, as his twitter profile @RobertAlai  proclaims, was angered by attempts to favor contestants for various posts based on  nepotism and favoritism in the larger Nyanza region. A loser for the Siaya Governor seat, Oburu Odinga, who is the brother of Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga, blamed him for his predicament. Read More »