Nairobi, Kenya -- World Press Freedom Day? Not if you ask the Kenyan president's wife, who stormed into the newsroom of the nation's largest newspaper early Tuesday and demanded the arrest of journalists for what she considers biased coverage. One cameraman said she slapped him.
Lucy Kibaki, wife of President Mwai Kibaki, arrived with her bodyguards and ordered her security men, who are police officers, to prevent anyone from leaving the newsroom and to confiscate the reporters' mobile telephones, according to an account in Tuesday's late edition of the Nation.
The midnight to 5 a.m. confrontation in The Daily Nation's newsroom "sends shivers down your spine," said Wangethi Mwangi, the newspaper's editorial director.
Government spokesman Alfred Mutua refused to comment. The police spokesman didn't answer his mobile phone.
An impromptu news conference the first lady gave in the newsroom was broadcast on television. She was shown berating the Nation staff while the Nairobi police chief, King'ori Mwangi, stood by her side, looking sheepish.
She was protesting weekend reports carried in the Nation and other Kenyan daily papers that said she tried to pull the plug on a party Friday for the departing World Bank country director, whose residence is next door to the president's private home.
The first lady said the music was too loud and that she was doing her duty as a "senior resident" of the posh neighborhood by trying to stop the party.
Kenya's newspapers previously have reported on her allegedly heavy-handed dealings with her husband's staff and the power she is believed to wield within the government.
Before briefing reporters Tuesday, she tried to stop television journalist Clifford Derrick of KTN from filming her, he said.
"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 as the police officers watched," said Derrick, who won last year's CNN African Journalist of the Year award.
The police chief tried to persuade her to leave, but no action was taken against her, the Nation reported.
The president's wife called for the arrest of a Nation journalist and an editor in connection with the story published over the weekend. There were no arrests, but editor Mwangi said he worried about the future of press freedom in Kenya.
"We are treading on very thin ice. Even as we applaud the success we have achieved over the past few years, we still have a way to go," he said.
