CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PROMOTING OUR HERITAGE, CULTURE, MEDIA & SPORTS

The Challenges:

In a 24 hours / 7days a week television and Internet age, our heritage and cultures are under threat. We need to preserve the best for posterity. The Kibaki Government boasts about liberalising the broadcasting sector by listing the number of FM stations and private television channels it has licensed. However, the glaring omission is the reform of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) as a public broadcaster which remains under total government control and is a biased mouthpiece tha covers 80% of the country.

There has been a lot of political interference, bad management and corruption in many of the sporting organizations responsible for all the various disciplines. Quite a lot of sporting infrastructure has been poorly maintained.

Our Commitments:

We will strengthen the unity of our nation by maintaining our cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity as we believe that encouraging cultural diversity is more in keeping with democracy than forced uniformity.

We will develop and reinforce the national ethos of honesty, hard-work, self-reliance, discipline and patriotism.

We will ensure complete independence of the media from government control.

We will ensure that Kenya Broadcasting Corporation is fully independent of political bias, and its role as primary broadcaster will be to serve the public interest.

We believe in the universal principles of journalism, which require media houses to be responsible, fair, accurate and unbiased on matters of public interest.

We will reclaim all recreational areas that have been grabbed.

We will ensure that sporting facilities are well maintained and managed.

We will encourage greater participation of children in sports and drama through their schools curricula.

We will bring a competitive spirit back in Kenyan teams participating in various regional and international events. Participation in team sports plays a critical role in political and social integration as different ethnic members come together to make a team.

We will nurture and sustain a thriving national music, literature, art, drama and the film industry.

We will reward and recognize the great talents of Kenyans in the fields of sports, media, culture, arts, music, theatre and film.

We will promote moral and religious education in all educational institutions.

Your ODM Government will:

In Heritage and Culture

• Establish more museums and cultural centres in various regions.
• Pursue policies that instill a greater sense of nationhood, while at the same time promoting greater awareness of cultural and linguistic diversity through programmes on radio and television.
• Support upkeep of our monuments and historical places of interests.
• Launch a national campaign to elicit the best idea to mark our 50th anniversary of our independence.

In Media

• Ensure that broadcasters will be expected, encouraged and enabled to defend national pride and identity through the production of high-quality local content that reflects the cultural, social and economic realities and aspirations of society.
• Ensure that the broadcasting industry present news and programmes with integrity and decency, respecting dignity and intelligence of the audience, as well as the subject of the news.
• Encourage the media to promote peaceful co-existence among citizens and strive to effect positive change in society and within government.

In Sports

• Establish a Sports Policy and Legislation Unit that will have the responsibility of developing policies and guidelines in areas of women and sports, junior sports, disabilities sports, code of conduct, anti-doping regime and sports infrastructure.
• Increase funding for all sports and cultural activities by, among other ways, setting up a national sports lottery to assist in building world-class sporting facilities.
• Establish a Kenya Sports Commission, Kenya Institute of Sports and National Sports Academies for various sporting disciplines, such as soccer, volleyball and athletics.
• Encourage private sector participation in the development of sports with a particular focus on sports marketing, branding, promotion of athletes, commercial sponsorship, sports export promotion and sports tourism.
• Build new stadiums in every region of the devolved government.