Salim Lone

Salim Lone is a Kenyan journalist who was Prime Minister Raila Odinga's Spokesman (2007-2012, 2017-2018), and before that was a Director Communications under Kofi Annan at the United Nations, where he worked for two decades until retiring in 2003. His final UN assignment was as Spokesman in Baghdad for the head of the UN mission in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed with 21 other colleagues in a terrorist attack at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad; Salim Lone survived the bombing. Salim is now is writing a book on Kenya's political evolution in the post-Moi democratic era. Salim Lone has also been a columnist for the Daily Nation of Kenya (2005-2007), and his commentaries have also been published in The NY Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times in the UK, the Washington Post, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. He has been frequently interviewed by the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN, including on Charlie Rose, Newsnight, Inside Story and Larry King Live. Earlier, after working two years for the renowned Lester Markel, the Pulitzer prize-winning Editor of the Sunday New York Times, he returned to Kenya, where was the Editor in Chief between 1971 and 1982 of the Sunday Post and Viva magazine, the only mainstream media in the Kenyatta and Moi eras which consistently presented the political opposition's point of view. He is the only journalist in independent Kenya to have been prosecuted and convicted (along with democracy and environmental activist Wangari Maathai, later the Nobel Peace Prize winner) in court for his work (1981), and had to flee the country in 1982 to avoid arrest. His citizenship was subsequently revoked by President Moi for "disloyalty" to Kenya.