Freelance writers struggle in Kenya
By David Karanja Posted Jan 1 2003
Geofrey Irungu, the business news editor at The People Daily, was preparing the business pullout section, getting it ready to go to press the following morning. Everything was finished except for an empty page, which he had reserved for a special report on a breaking story. A freelance correspondent was to deliver it by midday. But the correspondent did not show up by late afternoon, and he had to make frantic calls to find out what was wrong.
“When I traced her, she told me that she had quit writing for the newspaper because she had not been paid for two months,” Irungu says. “There was nothing I could do. It was too late to assign the story to someone else. I recycled an old article to fill the page.”
Incidents such as this are common in Kenya’s media. Editors live in fear of the day a freelance correspondent might abscond from duty over issues of pay. Freelance correspondents often complain that they are poorly paid and subjected to unfavorable working conditions. This is in spite of the fact that media houses rely heavily on freelancers’ input. A survey conducted this year revealed that freelancers contribute 70 percent of work in media houses while full-time journalists contribute 25 percent.
The survey, which was conducted by the African Women and Child Feature Service, painted a grim picture of freelance correspondents’ remuneration. It said 73 percent of them earn between US$52 and US$64 and 13.6 percent between US$128 and US$192 per month. They also face more challenges such as non-availability of resources for reference, lack of independence at the work place and lack of job security.
“They earn very little per article and the temporary nature of their situation may lead them into compromising quality in a bid to churn out more centimeters,” the report said.
Irungu admits that sometimes correspondents file news stories that are slightly sensationalized in a struggle to ensure publication. He points out that the most critical issue for an editor dealing with freelance correspondents is their vulnerability to engage in corrupt practices.
“Many times correspondents are bribed by newsmakers to write positive reports about them,” he says. “Sometimes an editor detects this and finds ways of verifying the story, but sometimes the pressure of publication deadlines is a constraint on strict verification.”
Correspondents deny that they deliberately sensationalize reports. Gakiha Weru, a freelancer for the East African Standard, says correspondents file stories in line with the editorial policy of the paper they write for. The Kenyan media, he feels, are currently biased towards publishing political stories. Therefore, a correspondent in a rural area might just ignore an event where farmers have formed an association to promote marketing of their produce.
“No correspondent will bother covering that kind of story because he knows an event only makes it to the hallowed pages of our newspapers when it is about police dispersing a women’s civic education seminar,” he says.
Rural-based correspondents are hit harder than their urban-based counterparts. They are faced with poor communications infrastructure such as public telephone lines that are constantly breaking down, lack of faxes and inadequate transport means. To avoid these constraints, many journalists develop close relationships with senior government officials, businessmen and politicians, all of whom often give them favors such as free rides in their cars. Because these people are the newsmakers, the correspondents cannot write any reports that might paint them negatively.
The other category of freelancers is the in-house correspondents who operate from the head offices of the media houses. They benefit from all facilities and also receive close editorial guidance by their section editors.
Media houses are not very comfortable with this arrangement. In 1999, The Daily Nation, the biggest daily, attempted to introduce new regulations for such correspondents that would, among other things, restrict their use of the newsroom to two or three days. The management argued that this was necessary to reduce waste of the company’s resources. Freelance correspondents protested the move, and four prominent writers left the paper and joined The East African Standard. The rules were later shelved.
While freelance correspondents continue to blame media houses for giving them a raw deal, poor training is a critical issue underlying their plight. Few have gone beyond twelve years of schooling. Part of the reason is that college and university graduates shun the work of freelance writing, opting to join more lucrative sectors. Newspapers have no choice but to engage as correspondents those fresh out of school, who might have little more than some interest in writing.
The Media Development Association was formed in 1997 to address this problem. Funded by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German donor agency, it has focused on training freelance correspondents to sharpen their skills.
“The correspondents we have trained have displayed a higher level of professional competence in the long run,” says Stephen Ndegwa, the association’s chairman. “Some of them have secured permanent employment in the papers they write for.”
The plight of freelance correspondents has been a major concern to the Kenya Union of Journalists.
“While the media industry in Kenya has undergone steady growth and increased profits, this growth has come with savage cuts in salaries, job security and unprecedented erosion of journalists’ rights, particularly correspondents,” says Ezekiel Mutua, the union’s secretary general.
Mutua says the environment in which journalists operate is crucial to the development of ethical journalism. He points out that it is useless to expect good ethics out of journalists working in oppressive situations.
“While we all know that the fundamental objective of every journalist is to write a fair, accurate and unbiased story on matters of public interest, it is quite clear that hungry journalists cannot be morally upright,” he says.
Freelance correspondents are, however, not well represented in the union. The AWC survey found that 92.7% of them are not members of the union. Part of the reason is that it is led by fully employed journalists who might not identify with the plight of the freelancers. In 1997, the freelancers formed the Kenya Correspondents Association, which became dormant shortly thereafter.
As the Kenyan media continue to grow, there is no doubt that freelance writers will continue to be the backbone of their survival. Improving their working conditions and remuneration remain the most critical challenge.