You’re wrong on facts, Kenyan scribes

Many years ago, I enjoyed a day of training as a new director given by a global specialist who took us through case studies of ruined relationships and dysfunctional workplaces, to teach us some management basics.

Two of his strictures have stayed with me ever since: that we should always assume that people’s motives are good, and that it is imperative when something goes wrong to question first and only then judge. His counsel often comes back to me as I see how much damage it does when we judge first and question later, or never.

For judging without the facts is a great way to savage trust and effort, and create pointless, misplaced and damaging disputes that destroy the fabric of any organisation and even of society.

Yet, in Kenya, we do it all the time. It starts with journalism. When I was a young journalist, there was a basic we never bypassed. Whatever the story, and whoever it was about, we were required to check with the party we were reporting on. It was obligatory. We would have been fired instantly if we had submitted a story without having checked with the parties named.

So, if we had a story about how a company was about to close its second largest factory, or how the CEO was retiring early, or how it had put out a product that wasn’t safe, or whatever story we had, we had to check with the company to hear their side of events.

Yet few journalists do that in Kenya today. However, what they don’t consider is how easy it becomes to manipulate them when they bypass fact checking.

I saw a case where it was reported a supplier had damaged a company by taking its website down, whereas the demonstrable facts, proven with payment reminders, was that the company in question hadn’t paid for its website hosting, which expired.

Again and again, I see stories the same, where the smoke looks scandalous and even juicy, but the facts are situations that may still raise questions — such as, in that case, why a prestigious company wasn’t paying its web hosting bills — but are very different from the story that comes out.

Indeed, a case in point, recently, relates to all that rotting ginger.

With new rounds of headlines this week about how the public health officers are in battle with the Kenya Bureau of Standards (Kebs), it has come to my attention that no one seems to be checking the facts at all about that ginger.

As a result, there is a war, nice for headlines, but actually a complete distortion of the truth. The story looks like the public health officers caught Kebs asleep, not properly testing foods for Kenyans. The conclusion, say the public health officers (PHOs), is ‘you need us involved to test your food properly’.

But that ginger wasn’t for Kenyans. It was on its way to an Export Processing Zone (EPZ), to a producer brought into Kenya to provide jobs (policy aim: we import jobs) on the basis that their operation isn’t subject to the customs and safety controls applied at a port of entry: and all its goods then leave Kenya for another country.

Thus, the issue isn’t a Kebs sleeping on the job, but whether we want to abandon the EPZ policy, treat Kenya as a port of entry for all EPZ inputs, and test them all (at taxpayers’ expense) for the safety of consumers in other countries.

It’s still a story, a different story — are we OK with goods entering EPZs without any port of entry protocols? Yes or no? But it is a very different story indeed from Kenyan food safety.

Which is not to say we don’t have food safety challenges. But if we could stick with the real issues and stop messing about with distortions, lights and mirrors, everyone would do better.

Ask first, dispute later: even public health officers and Kebs.

Don’t waste space in our newspapers when you didn’t even check the facts with each other first.

And journalists: every story has two sides, who didn’t teach you that? Start with the facts. They define the story.