Former KTN news anchor John Allan Namu has has opened up about his bribery story while he was working at KTN with his counter part Mohammed Ali who recently joined politics in 2017.
According to John Allan he and Mohammed Ali were bribed with a whooping 1.8 Million bribe that he was offered to them.
While giving more account to it Allan Namu said the money was meant to come in two installment 10,000 dollars and 7500 dollars (which is about Kshs 1.8 Million) topped by a trip to Tanzania.
The story in question involved the ‘Track It’ (car tracking company) who would receive cash from customers but would not install the tracking devices.
While speaking at an interview he said, “There is a guy whose job was installing tracking devices in cars but he wasn’t installing them even though he used to take money from customers. So we investigated with Mohammed Ali it was our first job together and we confronted him and so he offered us 10,000 dollars to kill the story. About 1 million shillings at that time and he would add 7,500 dollars and take us on a trip to Tanzania for his other businesses. At that point we were hustlers,”
However with all that money offered to the two journalists they rejected it a situation that put their lives in danger where they got threatening messages fearing for their lives forcing the two flee to Germany.
The threat from the ‘Track It’ owner is not the only death threat Allan has received in his line of investigative journalism. He admits that what keeps him going despite the countless death threats is his passion to tell a story and not because he is braver than most journalists.
In addition he said, “I can’t say I’m braver than most people. I think it’s not really about bravery, it’s not about that. I think it’s because I have a passion to tell a story. Its really about being passionate.”
The renowned investigative journalist left Kenya Television Network (KTN) after working with them for 10years.
Namu unveiled that his move from KTN was atributed by a number of reasons, highlighting that his motivation was mainly because the mainstream media was becoming narrow for investigative journalism.
He pointed out that the editorial policies in mainstream media was not conducive for the delicate stories he was focused on telling.
He further said that, “The environment for telling stories within a mainstream environment is just becoming smaller and smaller and that has to be said! Sometimes we editorialize where we should not and that is not what investigative journalism is about. You have to have the freedom to tell your stories.”
He added that his continued stay in a restricted industry would not only harm his prospects, but also be a disservice to those who depended on him for information through the investigative pieces.