It is understood that the decision was communicated by Nation Editor-in-chief Tom Mshindi to the Saturday Nation editors, who were instructed to ask Ndii to stop writing his column from next week. Effectively, this week’s column will be his last in the Saturday Nation, according to insiders at Nation Centre.
In the piece, Why IMF, CBK haven’t been telling Kenyans the truth about our debt, he takes on the two institutions for cooking numbers about Kenya’s economy, especially those relating to revenues, expenditure and debt.
“There is also a tautological problem,” he writes. “Our foreign currency reserves are healthy because they include the Eurobond and syndicated loan dollars. Without these, they would be precarious. Our export earnings have stagnated. The bankers are mixing up their stocks and flows. It is like taking an overdraft, putting it in a fixed deposit, and then your banker assures your creditors that they don’t have to worry about your cash flow since you have a strong liquidity position.”
An unapologetic government critic, Ndii’s exit comes a few weeks after Nation advertised positions for columnists and contributors to its various platforms and when there is the possibility of President Uhuru buying the Nation Media Group. He is also among NASA supporters whose passports have been suspended by the Government of Kenya.
It will be a major blow for the Saturday Nation since he has been one of the most read columnists not just on Saturday but in the entire Nation newspapers stable. His critical, and often controversial, take on economic and political issues won his massive following among Kenyan readers, admirers and haters alike. The Nation is likely to lose a good chunk of this market. And if Ndii is snapped up by its rival Standard, he could as well migrate with some of the readers.
