Obit: Mutegi Njau worked and played hard on the hunt - for fun

When he introduced himself on the phone you would easily tell whether he was making an official call or calling for light-hearted banter.

When cabinet ministers were invited to Herman Igambi’s current affairs programme Press Conference on Voice of Kenya in the 1980s, they dreaded being told he would be on the interviewing panel.

“My name is Mutegi Njau and I am calling you from The Weekly Review. Am I speaking to Mr…..?” That was a serious call, an official call and Mutegi, as The Weekly Review and Nation Newspaper newsrooms knew him, pen in hand and notebook at the ready, was on the hunt - for a news story.

“My name is Mutegi, son of Njau, I am not baptised, but I am circumcised. In my other life, I was known as Mustafa.”

Or he would vary it and go thus: “My name is Laston Mutegi son of Njau. I am not baptised, but I have other qualifications. Today is Friday, let’s have alcoholic beverages?”

Mutegi, who worked hard and played hard, was on the hunt - for fun.

Laston Mutegi son of Njau, was a journalist’s journalist, who started off as a teacher of Kiswahili, hence the nickname Mustafa. Mutegi never ceased being a teacher, because as a senior reporter at The Weekly Review, City Editor at Nation Newspapers, now Nation Media Group, and as Training Editor at Royal Media Services, he mentored many a reporter.

Igambi knew how to run TV and radio stations and how to host a talk show, especially in the days of Kanu’s political monopoly, but, even better, he knew the importance of a hard-nosed journalist on his panel. Mutegi was easily Kenya’s equivalent of the BBC’s fearless and feared questioner Jeremy Paxman.

Viewers loved pugnacious Mutegi. Ministers loathed him. Writing in his defunct Sound and Vision column about Igambi’s programme, the Daily Nation’s Joe Odindo once described Mutegi as glowering at then commissioner of police Bernard Njinu like a bull in a china shop! Mutegi relished every opportunity to hold the authorities to account.

Straight from teaching at Tambach Secondary School and after abandoning my graduate studies at the University of Nairobi, I was hired by The Weekly Review in 1986.

Mutegi enthusiastically took me under his wing and taught me the basics of writing a story (who said or did what, where, when, why and how?), the importance of the first paragraph and the centrality of facts to a story.

Three years later, I was reunited with Mutegi at Nation House. He was the City Editor and Job Githinji was the Provincial Editor. Together they ran the News Desk which Training Editor Australian John Lawrence nicknamed the mean machine. Here Mutegi was at his best.

One morning, he dispatched a young reporter to Vigilance House, the police headquarters in Nairobi, to read and file a story from what we all knew as the Police Report. The reporter came back and filed a two-page story in which he mentioned in a line that a white man had been killed in Karen.

Mutegi’s antenna shot up! Copy in hand, he walked purposely to the reporter. “Listen, my friend. White man killed in Karen? This is your story. This is our story. Go to Karen Police Station and find out who this white man is. Karen is not any other suburb in Nairobi.” Mutegi then summoned a driver and photographer and sent the reporter off to Karen.

It was a great crime story. Edward and Viola Whittaker, parents of crooning great Roger, had been attacked by armed robbers in their home at night. Viola was tied up and bundled in the bathroom. Edward died during the attack.

Mutegi congratulated his reporter on a great story, but ended with this instructive remark: “I  would have been thoroughly embarrassed had we failed to go beyond the police report to the effect that a white man had been killed in Karen. In this business, you never just scratch the surface. Dig deeper.”

We here refer to the employer, signifying Mutegi’s loyalty, dedication and commitment to upholding the Nation’s reputation as a market leader. He would have personally shouldered the embarrassment as City Editor. Nothing worried Mutegi more than to be scooped, and Lawrence loved him and Githinji for scooping the competition time and again.

Fun-loving Mutegi celebrated his scoops with his colleagues and enjoyed hearty laughs. He may have been hard on them and driven them even harder to get the exclusives or simply solid stories, but that’s what the news is about. No hard feelings, nothing personal. “In this business,”Mutegi would quip, “your work speaks for you!’’

A sensitive man, he hated injustice. Mutegi sued the defunct Kenya Times for defamation when it claimed he had been bribed by the late politician Kenneth Matiba. He won. When he felt one of his bosses had sidelined him, he quit with a flourish: “I will not be humiliated by bearded dictators!”