STANDARD GROUP CRASHES AS GIDEON’S FIXER RUNS NEWSROOM LIKE A SHAMBA

How Alex Chepkoit and his enforcer Jacinta are bleeding Kenya’s oldest media house dry while journalists go unpaid and audiences flee

The Standard Group now echo with a different kind of story, one the newspaper itself cannot print. It is the story of a once-mighty institution, 123 years in the making, being run into the ground by a man journalists whisper about in dimly lit corridors and half-empty canteens where even the tea is now rationed.

Alex Kiprotich Chepkoit, the Associate Editor who moves through the building like he owns it because, well, he practically does, has turned The Standard Group into his personal playground.

And the casualties? Hundreds of journalists, producers, camera operators, drivers, and support staff who have not seen a shilling this month and are now being told even their half-salaries hang in the balance like a bad plot twist no editor would allow through.

This is not how it was supposed to be. Just months ago, under Marion Gathioga-Mwangi’s steady hand, there was light at the end of the tunnel. Advertisers were trickling back. Confidence was returning.

The ship was not sinking as fast. But Marion left, and with her departure, whatever fragile stability existed evaporated faster than morning dew in Kerio Valley, Alex’s homeland, where Gideon Moi, the man who bankrolls this circus, reigns supreme.

Now Acting CEO Richard Chaacha, a man who once inspired hope, sits in his corner office saying nothing. His silence is deafening.

Employees who once looked to him for answers now avoid eye contact in elevators, afraid that even asking about their salaries might mark them for the next purge.

Alex Kiprotich Chepkoit

Because purges are what Alex does best. In one dramatic swoop, he dismantled the very structure that gave The Standard its edge. Politics desk? Gone. Sports? Merged. Crime, health, economy, agriculture?

All bulldozed into one bloated, unmanageable national desk under Augustine Oduor, a move insiders say was designed not for efficiency but to elbow out Input Editor Wellington Nyongesa, a man whose sin was being too competent.

The result?

A newspaper that reads like it was written by a committee that never met.

Headlines scream but deliver nothing. One distribution driver, loading unsold bundles back onto his truck for the third time this week, shook his head and said what everyone else was thinking: “You see a big headline, you buy the paper, then you read it and there’s nothing there. Sometimes the headline is not even the story inside. People feel conned.”

Vendors in downtown Nairobi, once loyal Standard soldiers, now push Nation harder. “Standard died,” one told us at the Tea Room stage. “These days even the horoscope is depressing.”

But Alex was not done. He turned his attention to Spice FM and Radio Maisha, the group’s once-vibrant radio stations.

Mr. Kwambai, the head of radio and a man who understood the rhythm of Kenyan airwaves, was pushed out.

With him went reporters, producers, seasoned voices who knew how to hold an audience. In their place, untrained staff stumble through shows, reading news like hostages reading ransom notes.

The 9 a.m. to midday slot, prime time for any radio station, now sometimes airs with no presenter at all, just music and the occasional ad, a haunting soundtrack to institutional collapse.

And then there is Jacinta Kiraguri, Alex’s enforcer, the woman who should be enjoying retirement somewhere in Kiambu but instead prowls the newsroom like a political commissar in a state gone rogue.

Officially, she is nobody.

Unofficially, she is everywhere, in editorial, production, and even the technical department, a feat that would impress even the most ambitious corporate climber if it were not so destructive.

Jacinta has a talent for making enemies. She sidelined Lillian Odera, the respected head of television, calling her “lazy and sick” in meetings where Lillian was not even present to defend herself.

She undermined Nyongesa at every turn, questioning his editorial judgment, his news gathering, his very existence. And in her most absurd power play yet, she ordered TV producers to create content without a budget, then threatened to fire them if they failed, a managerial philosophy best described as “let them eat airtime.”

KTN, once the crown jewel of Kenyan television, the station that broke stories and set agendas, now limps in fifth place behind even KBC, a network that for years was the punchline of every media joke.

Some prime slots are weeks away from going dark entirely because there is no money to produce content, no budget for cameras, no fuel for outside broadcast vans, nothing.

Advertisers, the lifeblood of any media house, have fled.

Why pay premium rates for a product nobody watches or reads? The Standard’s own marketing team has gone silent, unable to sell a dream when the reality is front-page visible.

Meanwhile, Gideon Moi, the ultimate puppet master, watches from Kabarak or State House or wherever it is powerful men watch empires crumble, seemingly unbothered that his media investment is circling the drain.

Perhaps he sees The Standard not as a business but as a political tool, useful when needed, expendable when not.

Perhaps Alex is not failing but succeeding at a different mandate entirely: keeping The Standard just alive enough to be useful but too weak to be independent.

For the journalists, though, there is no political strategy, just pain.

Rent is due. School fees loom. Landlords do not accept excuses, and neither do hospitals when a child falls sick.

These are people who have given years, some like Zubeida Kananu who penned that heartbreaking farewell, have given 18 years to an institution they believed in.

And their reward? Being shown the door by a man who has turned editorial excellence into editorial roulette.

“This used to be a place of purpose,” one senior reporter told us, requesting anonymity because even talking to journalists from rival houses can get you fired now.

“Now it is just survival. We come in, we do what we are told, we go home and hope tomorrow there will still be a tomorrow.”

The Standard Group, established in 1902 by A.M. Jeevanjee as a voice for the marginalized, a paper that stood up to colonial governors and post-independence autocrats, that gave Kenya some of its finest journalists, is now a cautionary tale of what happens when a media house is run not by media people but by political operatives with no stake in journalism, only power.

And so the newspapers pile up unsold.

The radio crackles with dead air.

The television station that once set the pace now chases shadows.

And in the corridors of The Standard Group , journalists who once walked with purpose now shuffle with resignation, wondering if this month’s half-salary will come, wondering if there will even be a next month.

Alex Kiprotich Chepkoit did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Richard Chaacha. Gideon Moi’s office referred us to The Standard Group’s communications desk, which has not issued a statement.

Jacinta Kiraguri could not be reached, though sources say she was busy in a meeting, reorganizing something else that did not need reorganizing.

The Standard is dying.

And the saddest part? It is dying not from market forces or technological disruption, but from the inside, killed slowly by the very people trusted to save it.