It is not funny! Female reporter speaks on viral State House interaction with CS Alfred Mutua
Last week, President William Samoei Ruto and his South African counterpart, President Cyril Ramaphosa, held a joint press conference at the State House in Nairobi.
Among the invited press was Liz Jackson, a journalist with Stage Presence Media, widely known as SPM Buzz.
During the conference’s question and answer segment, Liz, 9 months old in the media industry, asked a question that caught the attention of the Presidents and the invited VIPs.
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She asked how the two national leaders planned on easing the interaction of South Africa’s and Kenya’s culture, arts, and entertainment and ensuring that Swahili was spoken in South Africa as part of an exchange program with Kenya.
During her questioning time, Foreign and Diaspora Affairs Cabinet Secretary Dr Alfred Mutua turned in his seat to look back and watch her. He was the only one among the invited VIPs that did so.
Later, when the presser ended, Liz and Dr. Mutua were captured on video as the CS gave the journalist his phone number. Her moment in the limelight and Dr. Mutua’s actions during and after the presser was captured on video and went viral.
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Liz would later upload the video of her work at State House to her Tik Tok account, but what was different this time was that at the tail end, the video was edited to include a snippet of Suna East Member of Parliament Junet Mohammed repeatedly shouting, ‘hii imeenda (this one has already gone)’ to a crowd during a past campaign rally.
“CS Mutua turning in his seat to look at me as I asked my questions really boosted my confidence because when I started asking my questions, there’s somebody who laughed so I thought my question was stupid. So when he turned, he was actually acknowledging my questions and this really increased my confidence,” said Liz in an exclusive interview with Nairobi News on November 15, 2022.
She further revealed that among the invited journalists, she was the only one who asked the CS for his phone number because she intended to carry out an exclusive interview with him for SPM Buzz.
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However, a section of Kenyans claimed that she had made herself a target for the CS to seduce and that she knew he was not married, so she knew what she was doing asking for his phone number. Others claimed Liz was fair game for Dr. Mutua, considering his infamous love life and attached scandals.
“I have not spoken to him since because people have bullied me left, right and center. I saw the video that has that Junet part added, and I saw the comments.
At first, it was funny, but now people are bullying me, making me feel bad. I even saw Andrew Kibe did something concerning this!
This entire speculation makes me feel bad, obviously, but what people don’t know is that I’m also the head of the digital at SPM Buzz, so anything that goes online or any number that we can get, I should pick it.”
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“People think I should not have taken the number, but as the head of digital, any time we need an interview, I am the one to ask.
I cannot ask my bosses to look for these people to arrange an interview for me. I am the one to do it. So I did not do anything wrong in my capacity. I always do that. If he had given me his personal assistant’s or security’s number, I would still have taken it,” explained Liz.
She lamented that if a man had been given the number, he wouldn’t have been bullied and insulted as she had been, and matters blown out of proportion.
From her experience, her advice for young female journalists interacting with male VIPs was to keep chasing their goals because people will always talk, and no one will love them 100%.
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