How Citizen TV journalist FAKED Wajir Hospital story and Duale angle

By Ahmed Musa.

What is now known that wasn’t known then is that citizen TV journalist Anne Mawathe did not go to Wajir County to see for herself if the allegations of expiry drugs being given to patients in Wajir County was true or false. She, nonetheless, and as is becoming usual of mainstream media journalists, met a group of Wajir County politicians, was paid her dues and ran an ‘expose’ story that has alarmed every resident of Wajir.

Mawathe did not interview any medical superintendent, any nurse and any doctor. The story, as expected, was to be used for no other reason than political posturing. Here, Majority Leader Aden Duale enters.

Duale nurses a now widely publicized ambition to be the spokesperson and final leader of the whole of the northern fronter. In the end, he hopes to use this elevated pedestal to negotiate in regimes to come, being a student of ethnic politics of Kenya. In Wajir, his poster boys are Mohammed Jillo and IGAD envoy to Somalia Mohamed Affey. Affey is a former Wajir South MP (1997-2002) who would later be nominated by Kalonzo Musyoka’s ODM-Kenya (2002-2007). Either of the two men wants to replace Governor Abdullahi Ahmed.

It is this political angle, and the clan supremacy pitting the Degodia against the Ogaden that led to a media house running a faked story on the medical situation of Wajir County. Wajir County, emerging from years of neglect, has been voted among the most prudently managed counties in Kenya. The county was among the first to increase bed capacity from 200 beds to 600 beds in the first year of devolution.

But let’s get to the expiry drugs ‘expose’ by citizen TV. In all hospitals,drugs do expire. At Habaswen hospital, the expired drugs were stocked in an empty ward before being destroyed. In the intermediate period, a malicious local informant, perhaps a hatchet man of the two governor wannabes I already mentioned above, took photos of the drugs in the room and sent them to Citizen TV’s Anne Mawathe. Already compromised; Mawathe gave a voice over to the photos and accused Wajir County of using expired drugs on patients. This is untrue.

Some people are evil but others do the very job reserved for the devil himself. Anne Mawathe did this.

To starters, Wajir County has six sub-counties and the Degodia clan is the single largest, occupying four sub-counties, this is followed by the Ogaden and the Ajuran. The Ogaden clan, throughout northern Kenya, want to be the rulers. This is a story for another day.

The writer is a freelance journalist covering Wajir and the Northern Frontier. 

 

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