Kenya’s First Lady, Lucy Kibaki, entered the offices of the country’s biggest-circulation newspaper on Tuesday, where she allegedly slapped a television cameraman and seized reporters’ notebooks and tape recorders to protest at stories about her eccentric behaviour.
Kibaki, one of President Mwai Kibaki’s two wives, arrived at the offices of The Daily Nation just before midnight on Monday, accompanied by a six-man security detail, and stayed until 5am on Tuesday.
She accused the paper of printing lies about her behaviour on Friday night, when she disrupted a party for the outgoing country director of the World Bank, who lives next door to the president’s private home.
Touring the newsroom and sitting down at different editors’ desks, she reportedly said: ”We cannot entertain lies, it is illegal and it is a crime.”
According to reports in Tuesday’s late edition, Kibaki demanded the arrest of a reporter who wrote a story about her visiting a police station to complain about noise levels at the party. She also wanted that reporter’s editor arrested.
When she saw a cameraman, Clifford Derrick, filming her, she allegedly assaulted him.
”After she stormed the newsroom, I rushed to take pictures and she furiously asked: ‘What are you doing? Are you taking pictures? Stop,’ then she slapped me, grabbed me, and we started to struggle as she wanted to take my camera,”Derrick said.
The protest took place on World Press Freedom Day. It was reported in detail in The Daily Nation and audio recordings were broadcast on radio stations to a Kenyan public already unhappy about Kibaki’s behaviour.
On Friday, she went to a garden where the World Bank’s Kenya director, Makhtar Diop, was holding a party, complaining that the music was too loud.
Diop, who was playing bass guitar on stage with a Kenyan singer, agreed to halt the performance, but witnesses said Kibaki had tried to unplug the amplifiers herself. ”She was spoiling for a fight. She wanted to make trouble,” a guest told The Guardian.
The World Bank official is renting the Kibakis’ former home, which became vacant when the couple moved to the president’s official residence. The Kibakis retain a private residence on a portion of the plot.
As she left, she told Diop: ”You must have had a very bad mother, if you do something like this.”
The guest said: ”He became very angry and friends had to restrain him from shouting something back.”
Under the former president Daniel arap Moi, such an altercation might have been hushed up. But the Kenyan press no longer grants leaders automatic deference.
The presidential household has been divided by a feud between Kibaki, the president’s first wife, and his second wife, Mary Wambui. Kibaki’s outburst may have been linked to a public appearance by Wambui. Last week the woman dubbed the ”second lady” donated equipment worth £68 000 to a hospital in the president’s home town, Nyeri.
”This must have caused some domestic squabbles, with the first lady wondering where she got the money,” said Owuor Olungah, a research fellow at the University of Nairobi’s Institute of African Studies.
”We Kenyans are speculating that whenever the second lady is in the public domain, the first lady goes ballistic.”
Kibaki is considered highly influential. She announced last month that her husband would be seeking a second term at the next elections, in 2007.
In a country where macho attitudes still hold sway, Kibaki’s credibility has been damaged by his failure to rein in his wife.
Voters question whether the mild-mannered president, an LSE-trained economist who has reportedly had a stroke, is capable of controlling Kenya.
An MP, Reuben Ndolo, was questioned by police after he was accused of composing a satirical song suggesting that the president was lazy or incapable, and that the first lady was the real power behind the throne. – Guardian Unlimited Â