Hilary Ng'weno: The man who shaped journalism, turned Moi apologist

Hilary Ng’weno was a pan-Africanist – at least when he entered into journalism, aged 25 and straight from the prestigious Harvard University. He was also a latter-day Moi apologist; thus riling up many of his ardent followers and readers of his once-prestigious Weekly Review.

By the time it closed shop on May 14, 1999 – everybody, including those who had made a name there, accepted its fate: it had lost its shine and was just like any other rag in the media market.

Journalists watched this painful fall that had started about 1990. “From a gadfly,” as my good friend David Makali observed in 1996 in the opinion pages of the Nairobi Law Monthly, Ng’weno’s Weekly Review has metamorphosed to “just a fly.”

Students of journalism, and those who want to study Ng’weno’s journalism, will be amazed by this later-day transformation and ask why.

What we know is that, as Kenyans were pushing for multi-party reforms, Ng’weno joined a small Kanu think-tank that was working behind the scenes to organise for Moi’s re-election. As the dalliance with President Moi entered a crucial phase, he sacrificed the Weekly Review and was appointed the chairman of Kenya Wildlife Service. He later served in the came capacity at the Kenya Revenue Authority – positions which were only reserved to insiders in the Kanu regime.

By the time it died, most of its writers, readers, and advertisers had left.

To his credit, Weekly Review, once a must-read, produced some of the finest journalists in the country and they owe their career to Hilary Ng’weno – “the gadfly”. Its analysis of Kenyan politics in the 1970s until late 80s remained in a class of its own – and is still unmatched.

By then, Ng’weno was a household name – a brand.

In the late 60s, while still at Harvard, Ng’weno analysed the global politics and navigated the cold war mischief and the push to liberate African Portuguese colonies and struggle against apartheid South Africa with ease – and through his Sunday Nation column, Letter from America. His only local equivalent as a columnist was James Ngugi, the young journalist – now known as Ngugi wa Thiong’o – who had published his first novel, The River Between.

By the time he arrived back from the US, with a degree in nuclear physics, Ng’weno, who died this week, had already made up his mind: he wanted to be a journalist.

At the Old Nation House, the two-storey building overlooking Khoja roundabout in Nairobi, Ng’weno was received by Michael Curtis, the Editor-in-Chief. “Curtis had a high opinion of Ng’weno, the Aga Khan even higher – they had been contemporaries at Harvard,” wrote Gerald Loughran in the book Birth of a Nation.

But barely a year after he was appointed as the first African editor of the Nation, Ng’weno resigned.

“He said that he was depressed by the restrictions implicit in the government attitude to newspapers and particularly (Minister for Information) Achieng’ Oneko,” said Curtis.

But Ng’weno, in perhaps the only published comment on his resignation, told the German Newspaper Siddeutsche Zeitung that his tenure at Nation House was the “worst of my life. Most of the editors were British and they thought that this token Kenyan would ruin the paper. Many gave notices the same day I arrived. I had many enemies. The problem was that I could not keep my mouth shut.”

But behind the scenes, and apart from Oneko, were intelligence officers led by James Kanyotu who kept watch on the journalists and opened files on their writings. Another irritant was the Kiambaa-born Peter Gachathi, the PS in the Ministry of Information, who would ask his press officer Tony Hughes to check the writings of the likes of Foreign Editor John Dumoga, who was described as ‘anti-Nkrumah’ and kept sending protest letters to Ng’weno, who was caught up in the cold war intrigues and ideology politics in post-independent Kenya.

Again, both Dumoga and Ng’weno had no time for Organisation of African Unity and Ghana’s Kwameh Nkrumah.

Hard-hitting commentary

For instance, February 14, 1964, Hughes wrote a letter to Ng’weno telling him that the Nation newspaper’s tone was “completely inappropriate to the conditions in Kenya today. The permanent secretary has asked me to write to you to say that in his opinion, too many errors are still occurring in the publication of East African newspapers…”

Hilary had no time for such drama and he quit his position as Nation’s editor to become a freelance journalist. It is still unheard of. As a freelance, he made a name by writing the popular column, With a light touch and then became an entrepreneur.

Ng’weno’s rise as an independent journalist was fast. He founded the Weekly Review in 1975, published his first thriller, Men from Pretoria in 1976 and in October 1977, he launched the Nairobi Times, a Sunday newspaper. Another publication on his stable was Joe magazine (illustrated by Terry Hirst) and was also producing a popular television programme, the Kenya Breweries–sponsored half-hour series Sports Magazine and Business World, sponsored by Kenya Commercial Bank, for the Voice of Kenya (VOK) starting July 1974. He also published the children magazine, Rainbow.

Initially, Ng’weno wanted to change the way Africa was reported and disliked how the continent was portrayed by the western press and would dismiss the likes of Ian Smith of Rhodesia as a “gang of racist wolves” and was always saddened by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) which he dismissed, as early as 1969, as “inefficient, understaffed, underfunded, directionless and completely impotent as far as major decisions are concerned.”

Actually, Ng’weno called for an armed uprising against Rhodesia and South Africa and asked African leaders to get help from communists to topple fight Ian Smith and topple the apartheid regime: “It will take arms to fight the South African and Rhodesian regimes, just as it is taking arms to fight the Portuguese regime in Africa. These arms will have to come on a scale as large as that possessed by the racist regime in Pretoria and Salisbury. And it should now be obvious that these arms will not come from the United States, Britain, France or any of the Western countries. If African countries are as interested in liberating the rest of the continent, as they claim they are, they have no alternative now but to turn to the Eastern countries for assistance in the struggle.”

He disliked the likes of Nkrumah who he dismissed as a “tyrant.” He once wrote: “Nkrumah meddled in the affairs of many African countries, tried to impose his vision of a united African upon other leaders on the continent (his) lust for power was the undoing of tribal loyalties in Ghanaian political circles.”

Locally, after Tom Mboya’s assassination in 1969, Ng’weno wrote a hard-hitting commentary and asked the country to address the question of tribalism. “Kenyans will have to find a solution to tribalism through determination, trial and error and a great deal of good luck..,harmony and understanding among tribes is not going to be achieved through pretending that tribalism does not exist; or through persistence in the very policies and practices which generate tribal animosity.”

In the pages of Weekly Review, Ng’weno analysed local politics through these tribalism lenses and never shied to identify the tribal groupings that were emerging. At times, he got it right. At times, he was awkwardly wrong – especially on the quest for political pluralism. Perhaps, his personal flirtation with the Nyayo regime had blinded his view.

In 1981, when Moi started to crackdown on his critics, the government decided to place all its tender adverts in the Weekly Review and this also came with a price. The paper started to tone down its attack on the Nyayo regime. A few years back, I had written this in a column and Ng’weno denied the fact until I fished the Moi directive. “I am sorry, I must have forgotten,” he wrote to me. 

Makers of a Nation

With majority of its advertising revenue coming from the government, Moi had finally compromised one of Kenya's vibrant second opinion publication. His only real problem remained at the University of Nairobi where ‘radical lecturers’ had continued to criticise his government.

It is on record that it was the Weekly Review that "named" the lecturers "behind" the university strikes. Those he had named were: Dr George Katama Mkangi, Mr Mukaru Ng’ang’a, Dr E. Atieno-Odhiambo, Prof Kihumbu Thairu, Dr Willy Mutunga, Shadrack Gutto and Dr Oki Ooko Ombaka. The Weekly Review, and Kanu politicians alike, criticised them as the ones fuelling boycotts to commemorate the assassination of Nyandarua North MP, JM Kariuki. Later, Ng’ang’a, Mkangi, and Mutunga were detained without trial while the rest fled to exile.

They initially filed a case at the High Court seeking to stop Ng’weno from associating them with university riots and from commenting on their case. But the High Court ruled that "…an order restraining the defendant from publishing…would not only unnecessarily and unjustifiably restrict the freedom of the press and would not be in public interest but would also be too indefinite for practical enforcement".

It was due to lack of adverts that Ng’weno sold his Nairobi Times in April 1984 to Kanu and it was transformed to Kenya Times, the party’s newspaper. Shortly, Ng’weno would launch Kenya’s first state-of-the art video recording studio. He had always dreamt of venturing into film production since his university days. The equipment, first assembled and tested in London, was supplied by Amprex, one of the largest and reputable makers of film and television equipment.

Also in 1987, he launched the Financial Review but he later sold it to his business editor, Peter Kareithi in a deal that soon saw the matter end up in court. In 1988, Ng’weno took Kareithi to court demanding that the publication should not write politics – and thus confine itself to publishing stories and articles on business and finance. Ng’weno got the injunction he wanted from Justice Lady Effie Owuor. The Financial Review, which was exposing corruption within the government, was later banned and that was the end of its short reign.

It was also claimed that he in 1988 prepared the ground for Mwai Kibaki’s demotion as vice -president. In his analysis, he had singled out Kibaki as the man forming political camps ahead of the elections. The rest is history.

When the government was unwilling to license private TV stations, Ng’weno had a licence to operate Stellagraphics TV (STV), which was running foreign productions with no local news. The only other licence was given to Kenya Television Network (KTN), which was operating an ultra-high frequency Channel 62. It is not clear why Moi trusted him with a licence – though it is said that Amos Wako, the Attorney-General, played a key part. In 1996, he had been appointed by Mr Wako as the chairman of a committee to review media rules. But after a short period, he tendered his resignation.

Ng’weno was brilliant, no doubt. He had grown up in Muthurwa estate, Nairobi, and attended St Peters Clavers – here he was nicknamed Majengo – before joining Mangu High School in 1952. He was the school goal-keeper, the pianist and the most talented student. While he had been admitted to study medicine in Makerere, a Harvard scholarship to study physics made him detour. But his heart was in journalism.

Ng’weno’s interest in film and documentary came when he did the Makers of a Nation series for the Nation Media Group. He also sold his Weekly Review rights.

While none of his media enterprise has survived, he will be remembered as a man who trained journalists on news analysis – the later day Moi apologist. Fare the well.

[email protected] @johnkamau1