Why have we decided to blow off the lid

This campaign was launched with a strong desire to cleanse the Editorial Dept and ensure we practice the same values we preach in our newspapers and on the radio and the TV daily. The biggest beneficiary of our campaign will be our female colleagues who have for so long suffered in silence while they are being abused and used as sex objects by managers who don’t respect themselves and their families. We have taken this bold step to liberate our female colleagues and alert men who have wives in Nation Centre that all is not well. Your wives might be suffering in silence and you don’t know.

We hope Fida and other organizations that champion the rights of women are listening. What goes on behind the walls of Nation Centre, the imposing and elegant building in the heart of Nairobi, is not just publishing newspapers. There are dark secrets that the walls have concealed for years. Female employees have suffered in silence as bosses use them as sex toys to quench their sexual greed.

Nation has for years been so critical of the Government and pretends to be the champion of the truth and the injustices in the society. It’s ironical that the same company can work so hard to suppress the truth internally and internal democracy. Any member of staff who dares raise a finger is shown the door. Linus sent Koskei to the offices of the weekly Citizen newspaper in the second week of February to buy papers that were rolling off the press on the unfolding story of the sex scandal rocking Nation. The paper had carried the first story when we first exposed the scandal in public in January and demanded the resignation of the sex predators. To stop further publication, Koskei used millions of funds from Nation – the money for shareholders and the Aga Khan – to buy the paper’s silence. He succeeded since the paper has since given the scandal a blackout.

In addition to bribing the gutter press, Linus and Co. have instructed the IT Dept to block the internet to ensure we don't circulate the mails on the sex scandal to the entire world. That is a simplistic way of reasoning. What are cyber cafes for? Are you going to block internet worldwide from today henceforth? The real Tsunami is coming. You would better move to higher grounds.

Since we started exposing the scandal through letters and emails, the argument by Linus has been that he can’t respond to anonymous writers. We would be so foolish to append our names to the letters for that would earn us instant tickets back to our villages.

If the argument by Linus is valid and has any substance, then Nation would never have published anything since most of the stories we publish are from anonymous sources. Two examples stands out – the Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing scandals, which rocked the regimes of retired President Moi and his successor, Mwa Kibaki, respectively. Nation was the first newspaper to serialize the two scandals. In the Goldenberg scandal, Nation relied on an anonymous dossier leaked by Central Bank of Kenya employees and in the Anglo Leasing one, Wangethi and Odindo solely relied on the dossier of Githongo. Only when Standard and other media houses started serializing the dossier did Nation reveal that it was from Githongo.

If Nation could trust and go ahead to publish sensitive dossiers leaked to it by outsiders – which threatened to bring down the regimes of Moi and Kibaki – isn’t it strange then that the same Nation can’t trust the same journalists whom it relies on to write the stories their newspapers publish? Why should readers continue believing in what we write if Linus and his leadership can’t trust an anonymous dossier we have sent to him? Everything we have penned in the letters we have been sending to Linus is the basic and solid truth that everyone in Nation Centre knows too well about.

Just the same way we treat secret dossiers sent to us by anonymous sources, Linus should treat our letters in the same way. Names of the authors are not important. What is important is the message. Is what he is being told by the journalists the truth? It would be ridiculous if the police or Rinegera’s boys get a tip off about a serious crime that is about to take place or which has already taken place and they refused to respond or act because the caller is anonymous!

The behaviour by Linus and his leadership tells Kenyans a lot about Nation and its lies about standing for the truth. It is now evident that the truth is only sweet when Nation is exposing the Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing, the rot in the Government, parastatals and in other corporate organizations. But the truth becomes so bitter when told about NMG editors and managers. They would prefer the truth to remain buried.

From today, we begin a systematic and a long journey of removing the veil and mask that has for years concealed dark and harrowing secrets in Nation Centre. Anyone messing around with journalists should know that its like messing around with a scorned woman. From today, we will tell you the inside story about the sex scandals that have left many female employees terrified and leading shattered and traumatized lives.

In this respect, we call upon the following organizations to take a firm stand against the Nation Media Group and demand the immediate resignation of all the kings who have turned female employees into sex pests:

Kenya Union of Journalists (KUJ)
The International Federation of Journalists
The Federation of Women Lawyers – Kenya (FIDA)
Hon Newton Kulundu, Minister for Labour
Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE)
Central Organisation of Trade Union (COTU)
The Law Society of Kenya

Apart from resigning and retreating to the comforting arms of their wives, some of whom appear to have accepted to live with their men despite having been accused of being involved in sex scandals with their junior female for over a decade, the Aga Khan should order a major investigations and he will be shocked that the managers whom he has trusted to run his affairs are monsters who keep the female folks terrified. They have turned the respected Nation Centre into a brothel.

Most of these managers are good material for Kamiti and it’s surprising that they have evaded jail for so long. Wangethi is a classic example. He has been taken to court twice over allegations of attempted rape and sexual harassment. But since he belongs to the inner circle of the ruling Kikuyu elite in Nation Centre, he is untouchable. His famous court case with court reporter Njeri Mwangi over attempted rape in his vehicle will feature in our next issue.

Wangethi Mwangi’s famous love affair with a junior employee Linda Gacheru, whose bridegroom-to-be had to call off a planned church wedding because of the secret affair, is another classic example. We will tell you what the jilted lover told Kiboro in letters that were serialized by the now defunct Finance Magazine. We will also tell you how Wangethi almost ruined Linda’s second planned marriage with a different man on the morning of the wedding, when the bridegroom bitterly questioned the presence of a NMG driver and whose Mercedez Benz the driver had been assigned to carry the bridegroom. We will reveal more in the next issue. Wangethi has been fighting one sex scandal after another but his wife seems to have accepted to live with the problem.

To make you have a better understanding that the issues of sex scandals ran deep in all the media houses, not just NMG, take a look at a story run on February 24 Saturday Nation on page 21. It was a story about how a KTN news anchor who had filed complaints of rape against a well known state counsel and part-time KTN news anchor, Mr Nathan Browne Birundu, lost a good case on technicality. Birundu had been convicted of rape and sent to jail for four years for luring the girl, who was then working for KBC, into a lodging in Nairobi on pretext of getting her a better job in KTN. He then raped her. But the man appealed and the case was thrown out.

When the matter of the KTN rape saga became public almost five years ago, NMG editors panicked and instructed court reporters to give the story a blackout. They feared that the case would open a flood gate of similar cases against other editors who engaged in such dehaviour. The harrowing experience that the KTN anchor went through is what most interns and job applicants go through in the hands of influential NMG editors. It’s called sex-for-hire in the newsroom circles. For a long time, the joke in the newsroom was that there were two sets of interviews.

One of them was the office one and the other was most crucial – in hotels and lodgings. The joke was that those who performed well in sex got an instant job and the office interview was a matter of formality. This was so rampant when Tom Mshindi was the Managing Editor of the Daily Nation. Then, Frank Whalley, the Briton who was brought in by the Aga Khan to be the Training Editor, took over the mantle from Tom and he left Nation with an sex-for-hire record all other editors envy. We wont’t embarrass the more than 15 innocent girls who had to be subjected to Frank’s sex orgy by naming them. Some of them are still in Nation and they are well known. Two of them were last year sent on a training programme to France by Frank and they have never written any readable story since they were put on NMG’s payroll almost three years ago. We have interviewed some of the girls and preserved their testimony.

- - Nation Centre - -