“This week stare down Goliath and dare him to bring it on,” goes a tweet pinned on Anne Kiguta’s twitter handle.
Everything is not going according to plan for the K24 TV Presenter where a broadcast opinion deemed to be ‘grossly’ biased against Deputy President William Ruto seems to have yielded low blows from those in the second in command’s corner.
It all started after Uasin Gishu Woman Representative Gladys Boss Shollei blasted Kiguta for what she described as baiting her to attend an interview on April 19 with the intention of using her voice to prefigure a nine-minute recital that bordered on sending a message to Ruto that there can only be one president in the country. The interview according to Shollei was facilitated by Political Scientist Mutahi Ngunyi and the recital allegedly authored by the popular Fifth Estate columnist.
“It has become clear that this was a ploy to anchor a desperate, contradictory, misinformed and ill-advised message crafted by Ngunyi at the behest of his masters with Anne Kiguta providing a voice. The manner in which my participation was exploited without my notice or consent in this unethical and lowly charade has constrained me to offer this rejoinder,” said Shollei in a video posted on various social media platforms.
For context purposes it is important to cite what Kiguta said in her Punchline.
“It remains clear that there is some kind of denial on the part of politicians allied to the Deputy President as the struggle for the party (Jubilee Party) continues. The DP’s allies continue with this narrative that theirs is a struggle for party democracy and values against party outsiders who are trying to take control of Jubilee but the truth is much simpler. As much as the Deputy President has said that his alliance with President Kenyatta was not a marriage, it was undoubtedly a political covenant meant to deliver Kumi ya Kenyatta and Kumi ya Ruto,” Kiguta said.
‘It is important to recognise that when covenants are broken, they are broken……… President Kenyatta has chosen a new political ally in Raila Odinga, perhaps politically according to him, the DP could only have gotten him so far but governing for the last term required another alliance or perhaps for some reason, the Deputy President lost the President’s confidence maybe when he publicly undermined the handshake and the pact for political cooperation with Raila or maybe the DP overplayed his hand and acted as a Co-President instead of a Deputy President,” she added.
Fireworks
But as Kiguta stared down Goliath this week, another jab was incoming, this time from loose-tongued Bahati MP Kimani Ngunjiri who hurled expletives at Kiguta to drive home his point that Kiguta has watered down her brand and fully embraced partisan politics.
” Those people have captured sections of the media. Like Kiguta, you cannot be a presenter and you are an activist. You cannot!” said Ngunjiri in a press conference from his home.
Ngunjiri seemed to suggest that Kiguta’s opinion was motivated by her links to the Kenyatta Family. Kiguta has sired two children with President Kenyatta’s nephew and personal assistant Jomo Gecaga.
The recent events have thrusted Kiguta right back into the spotlight and certainly not for the right reasons.
Business Today has previously reported that Punchline, a political news talk show has performed way below the levels Mediamax editors had projected it would when K24 prized the journalist away from Citizen TV on a huge salary that runs into hundreds of thousands.
So much for Punchline‘s poor ratings that Kiguta was one of the high earners earmarked for the axe before Mediamax sent 160 employees home last year. She and fellow presenter Betty Kyalo survived the cull in last-minute deliberations.
Mediamax is currently struggling to sustain its employees and bucking by the current trend, it is possible that Kiguta’s name might be first on the retrench list despite her links to the Kenyatta family which owns majority stake in Mediamax.
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