On 4 February, the Kenyan government lifted the month-long ban on live broadcasting ahead of court hearings officially because of an "improvement in the situation." However, Information Minister Samuel Poghisio warned the media against "inflammatory content" and confirmed the setting up of a media task force.
On 29 January 2008, the Media Institute and the Kenya Editors Guild had filed a lawsuit against the interim government to overturn the broadcasting ban that had been in effect since 30 December 2007, following the highly disputed presidential elections. Since then the country has been in turmoil with approximately 1,500 dead from violent riots and ethnically-motivated killings.
On 14, January WAN co-signed a letter of protest with 22 other IFEX members addressed to President Kibaki urging him to rescind the ban which sought to "black out the expression of genuine grievances and muzzle the freedom of the press.”
In this context, media organisations gave the government an ultimatum to revoke the ban by 24 January, which the government ignored. The Media Institute and the Kenya Editors Guild subsequently filed the lawsuit in the nation’s High Court. The organisations say that the ban hinders journalists’ ability to cover the current political crisis which is “worse than the government wants the public and the world to believe.”
The same day that the case was filed, Kenya’s Information and Communication Minister Samuel Poghisio announced the creation of a task force to observe the media’s conduct both during and after elections. According to the Media Institute “the government is essentially turning the heat on the media to shift blame for inflaming tension.”
On 29 January, photojournalists Hezron Njoroge of the Daily Nation and Robert Gicheru of The Standard were shot while covering riots in Nairobi. The same day, identical messages containing death threats were sent to several major media houses, journalists and editors. The message, which said it was from the pro-government “Mungiki” militia, went out to Joe Odindo, Managing Editor of the Nation Media Group, Kipkoech Tanui, Managing Editor of The Standard newspaper, Linus Kaikai, Managing Editor of the Kenya Television Network, Robert Nagila, reporter for Nation TV, and Paul Ilado, editor of The Nairobi Star. The authors of the e-mail accused the media of inciting violence in the nation.
Reporters without Borders called on Kenyan authorities to take these threats seriously given the recent murder of opposition parliamentarian Melitus Mugabe Were who was shot in front of his home. A second lawmaker, David Too, was killed just days later.
As the African Union Heads of State Summit was taking place in Addis Ababa, the African Editors’ Forum (TAEF) called for both President Kibaki and AU leadership to end the violence and the ban on media broadcasts or else create a new interim structure “that would calm the situation and bring Kenya back from the abyss it is in.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) stated that “AU member states must uphold their commitments and allow the media in their countries to operate freely, without fear of reprisal.” Furthermore it appealed to the AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konaré to address the fact that Ethiopia, the Gambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo were “among the places worldwide where press freedom has deteriorated the most over the last five years.”
At the summit Konaré said that “Kenya is a country that was a hope for the continent. Today, if you look at Kenya you see violence on the streets. We are even talking about ethnic cleansing; we are even talking about genocide. We cannot sit with our hands folded.”