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Kenya: Policy watch - key documents

06/11/2007 --

Media Bill (2007)

The Media Bill elicited a heated debate between media and government officials when it was published in May 2007. As a result, the Parliamentary Select Committee invited media stakeholders to Mombasa to discuss the Bill. One of the contentious issues was the powers given to the minister to appoint the chairman of the media council, and that part was removed. In this respect, the government will not have the power to regulate the media. Rather, the powers were left to the media council. This means that the media can self-regulate. The organisation to nominate members of the council has been reduced from 14 to 9. After deliberations, the name of the Bill was also changed from Media Bill to the Media Council of Kenya Bill.The Bill is now waiting to go through parliament for further deliberations.

Kenya Communications (Amendment) Bill (2007)

This Bill has its controversies too. Stakeholders feel that most of their input was not taken on board. For example, Clause 5 fails to take into account the lessons learned from other policy formulation process es and locks out all other stakeholders in policy formulation. The Bill stipulates that the Minister can appoint an unlimited number of the board members to the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) board. All the board appointments are heavily tilted to the supply side, and only one appointee will represent the consumer side. KICTANeT is interested in your views so read and let us know what you feel about the Bill.

Send your thoughts to: Rebecca Wanjiku (rebeccawanjiku(at)yahoo.com) or Alice Wanjira (alice(at)apc.org).

The link to this document contains proposals made by KICTANeT to the Kenya Information and Communications Bill 2006.

Date: 06/11/2007
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