These are not the best of times to be a political cartoonist in Kenya, Patrick Gathara, a communications consultant, writer, and award-winning political cartoonist, has told Al Jazeera English.
For starters, a political cartoonist according to Wikipedia is an artist who writes and draws graphical caricatures of public figures, expressing the artist's opinion while combining artistic skills, hyperbole and satire in order to question authority and draw attention to corruption, political violence and other social ills.
That said, Gathara through an opinion piece penned to the Qatar-based global media network few days ago, points out to three things which he says have led to the 'death of political cartoon' in Kenya as we enumerate below.
1. State repression
Gathara opines that media coverage in Kenya tends to be limited dictated by political and corporate interests where he uses the anecdote of renowned cartoonist Godfrey Mwampembwa (GADO) to drive his point home.
"The sequence of events that led to GADO's exit from the Nation Media Group, the owner of the Daily Nation, was sparked by the banning in Tanzania of The East African, a regional weekly owned by the group, following the publication of his cartoon caricaturing then Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete," Gathara writes.
2. Pursuit of profits by media houses
In the wake of plummeting newspaper advertising revenues occasioned by digital media, Gathara observes that this phenomenon has given big advertisers, 'huge influence, which often allows them to quietly control what is published and what is not'.
This he adds quoting a recent report by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ), has seen "back-door soft censorship, generally invisible to the public," which is basically a filter through which not just cartoonists' images, but also news reports, must pass before they are published.
3. Social media
Political cartoonists desire to appease what Gathara terms as 'online mobs', has led media houses to be less willing to publish images and cartoons that do not conform to popular opinion.
This, he adds, is to avoid provoking the online outrage machine which can lead to loss of subscriptions and advertisement revenues.