NTV news anchor Larry Madowo has added a new dimension to the fallout between Ghafla and Ringier Africa Digital Publishing, claiming that the Swiss media company could have taken advantage of Samuel Majani, the owner of the gossip site, to rip him off.
In his FrontRow column published in Daily Nation today, Madowo appears to take sides with Majani in the saga while accusing Ringier of foul play and not doing its homework well before committing itself to partner with Ghafla. The fallout between Majani and his suitors has been messy, setting the young entrepreneur many steps back and ‘causing him a lot of pain and frustration’ according to someone close to Majani.
The buyout, which was remodeled into a partnership after issues emerged, finally failed and Majani was given his site back as Ringier opted out of the deal. Madowo touches on the alleged issue of Ghafla using bots to inflate numbers, which has raised debate in the blogosphere.
See below Larry Madowo’s take on the failed marriage the between two digital publishers as published in the Daily Nation today.
When I first met Samuel Majani just over four years ago, he was in the early stages of setting up what would become the infamous gossip blog, Ghafla! He had just received €25,000 (just over Sh2.6m) from 88mph, a fund run by my friend, Kristen Buch, a Danish technology entrepreneur-turned-investor.
Majani and his fledgling team were in the process of moving out of Nailab, the incubation hub run by another friend, Sam Gichuru. They were travelling just 15 minutes up the road to the 88mph space on Ngong Road above the trendy Brew Bistro restaurant. A replica DeLorean Back To The Future Car welcomed you to the open floor, which featured desks in clusters for the various startups Kresten saw potential in.
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An entertainment news site was not his first idea. After getting kicked out of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (a story for another day) in 2009, he started KenyanLyrics.com because he often struggled to find the right words online for his favourite local songs. That is not exactly a billion-shilling idea and it soon failed.
When he started Ghafla, he was still soft and didn’t want to offend anyone. “We call everyone we write about to confirm a story and we’re not interested in scandal,” he told me proudly.
I encouraged him to mix it up a little, throw in a dash of scandal and controversy to see what would happen. At the time, the site was boringly tame and the numbers mostly stagnated.
Then he started posting more risqué stories, embraced misleading stories or unabashed clickbait, became obsessed with socialites and the hits steadily rose. In short order, I was genuinely upset with him and his band of gleeful writers with a seemingly endless capacity to turn any innocuous social media post into a full-blown spectacle.
So popular was the blog that several mainstream and digital outlets unsuccessfully tried to buy him out. When Radio Africa failed, it poached just almost everyone who worked there and started a sleazier competitor. “A new dawn as Ghafla relaunches into a fully-fledged media news website,” proclaimed a post on October 18, 2016.
I had long given up on even reading the site and only saw it because I received a press invite to an official launch. Majani followed it up with a personal call, which amused me greatly because he had published hundreds of nasty posts about me. My boss often joked that there was a “Larry Madowo Desk” at Ghafla, whose full-time brief was to churn posts about me.
Handcuffed by secrecy clauses
Somewhere along the way, they must have discovered that adding my name to any post, however far removed I was from the actual story, guaranteed a certain amount of hits. I told him I wouldn’t attend but I was happy for him and what his success meant for the technology ecosystem.
Though Majani couldn’t disclose the terms of the deal, I gathered that the Swiss firm, Ringier Africa Digital Publishing, had acquired Ghafla for Sh60 million. The Swiss also own or have major stakes in piagiame.co.ke and rupu.co.ke in Kenya, Pulse Ghana and Nigeria as well as magazines and digital properties around the world.
The team moved into Ringier’s fancy corporate offices, hired new staff and pivoted “from disseminating just entertainment and celebrity news to covering broader topics that include politics, sports, science, technology, and lifestyle”. It was a dud. In a word, the new direction “sucked”.
On December 9, the Business Today blog had a screaming headline that quickly made the rounds: “Ringier dumps Ghafla for cooking numbers.” They changed it to something less sensational hours after but the central claim was that Majani had used bots to magnify his numbers by a factor of four.
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“Remember there are three sides to every story: this side, that side, and the truth,” Majani wrote on a blog post on whiteafrican.com last November. He refused to comment on this saga when I reached out, citing confidentiality restrictions.
“Partnership to strengthen African digital media & publishing concludes today,” his own blog said. Several people familiar with the short-lived marriage wondered how Ringier had acquired Ghafla, hired new staff and relaunched it without ever paying Majani a cent. If the numbers are inflated as that blog post claimed, how come the Swiss didn’t discover this during due diligence, if they did any at all?
There is a strong possibility that a deep-pocketed multinational could have taken advantage of a young Kenyan startup founder and basically ripped him off. This whole story stinks to high heaven and it is a shame that he might be bound by a non-disclosure agreement from speaking publicly about it. There are some major issues in this Silicon Savannah.
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