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CITY GIRL: An open letter to viled blogger Cyprian Nyakundi

March 25th, 2017 3 min read

Dear Cyprian,

I hope one of your friends will show you this newspaper because this letter is meant for you. A court recently sentenced you to four months in prison or a fine of Sh300,000.

As I write this, you are probably not languishing in a smelly little police cell with a seething bucket of human waste simmering next to you. But you could easily have been. But what if matters had turned out differently?

You most certainly are not used to that kind of hard life, and you would have been wondering when you would finally get home to your warm bed, your clean bathroom and finally tweet again.

Has it occurred to you that you could have been behind bars for failing to raise a very small fraction of the monthly salary of the man whom you trolled, bullied and whose wife you publicly embarrassed? The oxymorons of life!

I empathise with you. I feel utterly sorry for you because Nyakundi, I think it is time for you to stop, take a breather and rethink.

MALICIOUS BLOGGER

Your heart is in the right place, Nyakundi, and I mean that in all honesty. You really do try. I can tell an aggressive person when I see one, and if I am being honest, I think you sometimes try to do an okay job. Your blog’s numbers may not be off the charts but you are doing far much better than most ageing pioneer bloggers.

But you see, the problem is, dear Nyakundi, is that you are not doing this the right way. You are not an activist with foreign connections that would hire you a good lawyer and raise bail money for you. Neither are you an urban legend, beloved by the media and making headlines. You are not a Boniface Mwangi or an Okiya Omtatah. Neither are you a Rev. Timothy Njoya or a Raila Odinga in the making.

You have come across as a vile, hateful and malicious blogger who has been very uneconomical with the truth and has most times fallen off the mark in your stories and predictions. That is the truth, Nyakundi. I have been your ‘victim’ once, so there isn’t a better placed source to poke holes into your credibility.

That said, Nyakundi, you are living at the right time. At a time when the Internet and digital media presents a litany of opportunities to young, bright and tech-savvy people like you. If you played your cards right and hacked this digital media space, Nyakundi, you’d become quite the success story.

But even as your heart is in the right place, I am afraid your mind is not. You have allowed people to use you for meagre pennies that would make Judas Iscariot very proud. You have an unsavoury reputation for being quite ‘affordable’ and one would not need more than a few coins to have their rivals trashed on your blog.

HAVE A PLAN

You have allowed the social media euphoria to get into your head, thinking that your hundreds of thousands of followers are your friends. They are not. If they were, and if they cared about you or your tweets, they would have advised you long ago to desist from this vile behaviour.

So here is my advice. Get your life together. You are still a spring chicken, you haven’t seen much of the world – yet. Take the bus home… is it to Kisii? I don’t know. Go home, stay there a few weeks and think about your life. Begin to ask yourself those difficult questions like “Who am I?”

Identify a purpose in life and stick to it. Have a plan. Have a strategy. Be a man with a vision. Be issue-driven. Learn a thing or two from the likes of Boniface Mwangi, Rev. Njoya and Okiya Omtatah. Is that the path you want to take? I don’t know.

Nyakundi, go back to school. Get a degree from one of the few remaining universities whose names you have not maligned. Study real hard, be an expert in something.

Do not allow yourself to be used like tissue paper by people to fight their battles. Steer clear of people’s malicious goals. Be a man of integrity. Bring honor to the blogging profession. Finally, I wish you best of luck now and in all your future endeavours.

Signed,  City Girl.