Citizen TV anchor Yvonne Okwara has opened up about a rather risky decision she made in her career path that many felt would kill her fledgling career.
Speaking during an interview on Citizen TV, the outspoken anchor noted that during her stint at Nation Media Group (NMG), she made an unpopular job switch from NTV main screen to QTV that left her career hanging in the balance.
She revealed that shortly after she moved to NMG from Hot 96, she landed a role as a producer on QFM that was hosted by Citizen TV anchor Rashid Abdalla.
During her stay there, she began learning from a show host who was at the time the main face of NTV This Morning and after eight months she was bumped up to co-host the show.
“I worked on Rashid Abdalla’s talk show Maskani: a four-hour talk show that discussed political and socio-economic issues. It was citizen-targeted and citizen-driven.
"While producing this show, I began to shadow the host of ‘NTV’s This Morning’ for about eight months before I was given the green light to co-hosting the TV show,” stated Okwara.
After hosting the show for a while, Okwara deemed it fit to abandon the screen and move to QTV (now defunct), where she served as a producer of various shows.
She notes that her colleagues told her that the move was risky and that it was incomprehensible leaving the morning English show to produce a Swahili show on a less dominant network.
"Moving to QFM, a Kiswahili radio station, to go behind the scenes was a challenge in so many ways. People wondered why would I move from being on-air to a behind-the-scenes role?
"Why would I move from an English station to producing a show in Kiswahili? Why would I move to new stations like QFM and QTV? Why would I stop doing political interviews that are seen as the Holy Grail in my business to doing explainers?" She observed.
She, however, explained that she made the risky move as part of her quest to fully understand how the media industry worked.
"All of these helped me get a 360 degree understanding of the business, in front of the camera and behind it, producing and presenting, radio and television, scripting and editing, booking guests, and conducting research.
These made me a better journalist and gave me a greater appreciation of the entire team’s responsibilities to put out just one show or just one 3-minute story," she explained.
Her power as a news anchor was however realised in 2012 after she joined Standard Media Group and bagged a prime time news bulletin slot.
She pioneered Bottomline Africa and introduced Checkpoint shows before moving to Citizen TV where she hosts News Gang and Tonight shows.
In a previous interview, Okwara revealed that she developed her passion for media at the age of 8 years and started her media journey with the national broadcaster, KBC, where she was the host of Variety Show taking home Ksh 500 per episode.
"We were earning Ksh 500 at KBC and then the late President Mzee Daniel arap Moi later increased it to Ksh 1,000 per episode. I knew I wanted to be a journalist when I was around 8," said the senior TV anchor.
