The purge in Kenyan media houses continued on Wednesday with the Nation Media Group (NMG) firing one of its senior managing editors.
Eric Obino, a vereran journalist, had been heading the Sunday Nation team before he was let go.
Obino is reported to have been summoned to the Human Resource office where he was handed his termination notice and later directed to the counsellor’s office.
NMG had recently announced strategic downsizing aimed at reorganizing its business strategy.
“We are now reorganizing all our operations across the group...Regrettably, this will result in a reduction of our workforce through job redundancies. This exercise will be undertaken January 2017 with due respect to our employees and within the provisions of the law,” Clifford Machoka, the head of corporate and regulatory affairs at NMG, announced in December last year.
Sources who spoke to Kenyans.co.ke explained that Obino may have been dropped after his position became redundant.
Obino’s Sunday Nation will be merged with Saturday Nation, meaning only one managing editor will be needed.
Obino becomes the second senior editor to be fired by NMG in the last one year.
Early last year, journalist Dennis Galava was fired from his position of managing editor in charge of Special Projects, after he published a hard-hitting editorial against President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Here is a reaction from one of the journalists who has previously worked with Obino:
