NAIROBI: Votes in Kenya are had for money. According to 33- year-old cartoonist Gado, that is the reality ahead of the country’s presidential elections on December 27.
In one of his cartoon’s, emaciated figures hold their hands out expectantly to a grinning official carrying a briefcase bursting at the seams with cash. Submissively the group asks him, “When will you buy back our votes for the election?”
Not long ago, Gado would have found himself behind bars for work like this.
Freedom of expression is still pretty new to this east African country. Only with the introduction of a multiparty system in 1992 have new newspapers and media outlets come into existence.
“The room to express oneself politically and freely has gotten bigger”, says Gado, who works for the Daily Nation, East Africa’s biggest and most respected newspaper. With his political cartoons, he has been focussing in on his countrymen since the changes began.
For a long time, President Daniel arap Moi was untouchable by the public. Anyone who scribbled across his likeness on a banknote risked imprisonment.
“Today it’s no big deal to draw cartoons about the president,” says Gado.
Or to imitate him on radio: Walter Mong’are, member of the comedy troop “Redykyulass” (ridiculous), plays Moi every morning on private music broadcaster Kiss 100.
In the routine, Moi is a retired head of state, running into trouble keeping his milk delivery business afloat because he can’t pay the taxes that he himself introduced.
Listeners in the thousands of listeners laugh as the old man complains at the top of his lungs about “the idiots in government” who arranged this “daylight robbery”.—dpa
