Transformation Team assembled by the board of directors of the Standard Group (SG) made recommendations to send home hundreds of workers.
The newsroom was hit hard and besides the average reporters, influential editors earning a handsome pay have also been shown the door.
Recent top editors fired were Kipkoech Tanui and Kizito Namulanda.
Tanui was the Head of News while Namulanda was Intake editor.
The two were part of nine editors running the company’s Super Desk. The team is headed by the Group Editor-in-Chief Ochieng’ Rapuro.
Word is Rapuro is also nearing the exit and the board has identified his replacement.
Bigstar News can reveal that veteran journalist Chacha Mwita is making a comeback to the Mombasa Road-based company as the editorial boss.
“Rapuro is also going home. We hear Chacha Mwita is replacing him to turn around the company’s editorial department” a source hinted.
In July Mwita resigned from the SG board where he was a Non-Executive Director.
He had stayed in the board for only one year. It is rumoured his exit was to prepare him to take the Editor-in-Chief role.
Mwita had earlier worked as SG Editorial Director but was sacked in 2014 over a story that enraged then President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Interestingly in the board Mwita was the Chairperson of the Editorial Committee and a member of the Finance & Audit Committee and the Transformation Committee.
The two committees are behind the shocking dismissals at SG.
Rapuro joined the Standard in July 2019 from the Nation Media Group (NMG).
The last role at NMG he was Managing Editor of The East African for six months.
He worked for NMG first as the founding News Editor of the Business Daily and later its Managing Editor for 10 years.
Read Also: Top editors fired from Standard media as restructuring starts
Before joining NMG in 2006, Rapuro had worked for Standard newspaper as Business Editor from 2004.
Mwita, the man set to replace him has worked in leadership roles at NMG, SG, the Aga Khan Foundation, the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC), and Thomson Foundation (London, UK).
He has also served on the Boards of the Inter-Region Economic Network (IREN-Kenya) and Ewaso Nyiro South Development Authority (ENSDA) and Co-Secretary of the Africa Means Business Advisory Panel.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Education (Arts) degree from the University of Nairobi in 1996.
He also holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Mass Communication from the University of Nairobi’s School of Journalism and an MBA from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, with Executive Development stints at the Haas School of Business (the University of California at Berkeley, USA), and the University of Luxembourg.
A published author, Mwita is a former Fanning Fellow for Journalism at the Kettering Foundation, Dayton, Ohio, USA.
