The act of courage of just stepping forward as a witness and narrating what transpired in a tragic bombing incident landed a Kenyan a job at an international media house.
That Kenyan is none other but Zain Verjee. The bombing incident that struck the US Embassy in Nairobi on August 7, 1998, was a blessing in disguise for her career.
She gained courage and gave a step-by-step account of what had transpired. This was after she witnessed images of desperation, anguish, and pain of civilians who were victims of the attack on the American Embassy.
Her courageous act of coming forward and narrating what happened landed her a first news anchoring job. She got a job as an anchor and reporter at the Kenya Television Network (KTN) in 1998 as she sought to get more involved in “hard news” reporting.
Her breakthrough to becoming the first female Kenyan journalist to join CNN was not easy despite her witness account going viral. While still at KTN, Verjee sent several job applications to CNN and was rejected 12 times before being invited to a test screening in Atlanta, Georgia.
Eventually her role in reporting the tragic bombing incident paid off. She got the job and started her career at CNN in 2000 when she was 25 years old.
At CNN, she continued scaling the heights. Prior to leaving CNN in April 2014, Verjee was the anchor of CNN International‘s European daytime program “One World”. She also worked as a newsreader for The Situation Room, as a State Department correspondent, and as a co-anchor of CNN International’s Your World Today with Jim Clancy.
Verjee, however, considers her biggest moment at CNN as covering Condoleezza Rice who was then the head of America’s foreign policy.
“It was such a great experience being on the first and fast lane of foreign policy. It behooved me to research and know what was going on in the world in order to stay up to date, and this made me grow as a journalist,” Verjee stated in one of her interviews.
But being a journalist was not really her career and it happened coincidentally while she was in Kenya to gather data for her master’s research project. During that time, Verjee learnt that a new radio station, 98.4 Capital FM in Nairobi, was looking for someone to read Traffic News.
She applied and got the job. She later started the Love-Life show. Zain found her new job as a radio DJ to be fulfilling and decided to defer her studies to pursue her new found passion she had never envisioned in her life while growing up.
But the deep desire to impact more lives and share more insights with the people, pushed her to quit and start her own company.
Today, she is the CEO of the Zain Verjee Group. Through her leadership, she has managed a highly trained team of individuals who are driving her vision. She has so far managed to work with top brands like the World Health Organization, Bloomberg Media, Bloomberg Philanthropies among other foundations.
