(CRN/IFEX) – CRN has received a report that Godfrey “Gado” Mwampembwa, a cartoonist for the Nairobi-based “The Daily Nation”, and the paper’s managing editor received a letter from Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Martha Karua. The letter demands a correction of the facts implied in a cartoon concerning her that appeared in “The Daily […]
(CRN/IFEX) – CRN has received a report that Godfrey “Gado” Mwampembwa, a cartoonist for the Nairobi-based “The Daily Nation”, and the paper’s managing editor received a letter from Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Martha Karua. The letter demands a correction of the facts implied in a cartoon concerning her that appeared in “The Daily Nation” and threatens legal retaliation.
The minister has once again taken offense at a cartoon drawn by “The Daily Nation” staff cartoonist, “Gado”. In the latest image, she is depicted as digging up an old grave. In her 18 July 2006 letter, sent directly from her government office to the managing editor of “The Daily Nation” (her prior letter, in March, sent by her lawyer), she demands that the paper immediately correct this “injurious falsehood calculated to injure her reputation, credit and standing as a Minister of Justice, a lawyer and a politician”. She threatens immediate action to redress the alleged injury.
The old grave image refers to a Moi-era coup attempt and the statements on the subject recently made public in a book by one of the coup plotters who admits to his involvement. The cartoon implied that the minister was only interested in digging up old news and unnecessarily reopening a painful episode in the country’s history for present-day political gain.
CRN and its local Kenya Affiliate, KATUNI, deplore this continued action by a government minister to harass the press and intimidate a cartoonist of high repute among the Kenyan people. These threatened uses of libel laws to intimidate the press are self-serving in the extreme, have no place in a modern democracy, and only serve to belittle the plaintiff.
