The Nation Media Group has silently withdrawn its weekly investigative series ‘Broken System’ after President William Ruto held separate meetings with His Highness the Aga Khan’s eldest children last month.
The meetings were held in Dubai and State House Nairobi but only one was made public. Princess Zahra Aga Khan, who is the first born child of Nation Media Group’s founder His Highness the Aga Khan met Ruto at State House on February 16.
The Princess was on a a six-day visit to Kenya to attend the global convocation ceremony of the Aga Khan University (AKU), and to visit a number of AKDN projects
“Kenya appreciates the significant contribution of the Aga Khan Development Network in the fields of health, education, financial services and energy,” said Ruto of his meeting with Princess Zahra.
“We look forward to more collaboration in other sectors as we enhance public-private partnerships in our development agenda,” he said.
A State House source has told us that it is the Aga Khan’s foundation that requested the meeting between Ruto and Princess Zahra. This request was delivered on February 12 in Dubai by Princess Zahra’s younger brother Prince Rahim Aga Khan.
Ruto was on the way from Japan to Kenya when he met Rahim during a stop over in Dubai. During the meeting, the two discussed ways of deepening the cooperation between the public and private institutions..
They also deliberated on ways of enhancing the contribution of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) in Kenya and East Africa, as the talks largely centred around the long development partnership spanning over six decades.
They also discussed the long relationship between Kenya and The Aga Khan who owns significant investments in health, education, energy, hospitality, insurance, banking and the media in East Africa.
Highly placed sources have told us that the issue of Nation’s coverage on the government was discussed in both meetings in Dubai and in Nairobi. It is not known whether the ‘broken system’ investigative series was discussed but it was quietly shelved without explanation.
‘Broken System’ was launched on January 30 both on the Daily Nation and on NTV. The plan was to run it on every Monday night on NTV and on the Tuesday edition of the Daily Nation.
As promised, the ‘broken system’ did deliver some incredibly good investigative stories on public interest issues like the suffering of pensioners pursuing the processing of their retirement dues, delays in the issuance of passports and inefficiencies at the biggest public health referral facility in this country, Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH).
So good was the series in exposing government inefficiencies that the Nation came under a barrage of well-coordinated, vicious, malicious and unsubstantiated attacks on social media.
“This sustained barrage of baseless attacks against NMG as an institution as well as its individual journalists is as baffling as it is unacceptable,” said the company.
“For six-and-a-half decades now, NMG has pursued public interest journalism with the clear intention of impacting our society positively. We assure all audiences that we remain steadfast on this mission,” said the company.
However, despite promising to continue the investigative series, Nation Media stopped it after publishing this editorial on February 9. Several stories that had been filed by journalists for the series months in advance are yet to be published and it is likely they may never see the light of day.
