Listen To Cyprian Nyakundi and Xtian Dela Try To Extort 50 Million Shillings from Bidco

As if being expelled from Meru University and being sued by Safaricom wasn’t enough, Cyprian Nyakundi is in the news again. This time it’s for demanding 50 million from Bidco Refineries in exchange for taking down stories that he admits wrongfully slandered Bidco’s name. Nyakundi made this demand through his friend, Xtian Dela.

Before we can share the incriminating clip, we need to recap a bit. For the last one month, Nyakundi has been running a series of stories on his blog that he termed as investigations into Bidco’s illicit practices in Uganda. In this series, he tries to position himself as a champion of the people, whose rights have allegedly been trampled on by big bad corporations. At first glance this is a seemingly noble cause. However, the series of Bidco blog posts on Nyakundi’s website ended with him demanding that Bidco answer for their crimes. To begin with, this is a violation of basic media ethics, which state that parties affected by a story should be contacted BEFORE a story is run, in order to get all sides of it.

Under attack, Bidco reached to Xtian Dela-Twitter Bigwig and Radio presenter for help. If anyone could fight off Nyakundi-it was this guy because he had an equally massive following and a good reputation.  But the story took a different twist altogether.

Dela suggested paying Nyakundi to stop the attacks and delete the tweets-appointing himself as his middleman in the process. Apparently the two are friends and Nyakundi will listen to what he says.  Him and Nyakundi usually concoct Twitter trends in collaboration with each other. Xtian was present at the meeting, while Nyakundi was on standby via phone.

It’s a clever collabo when you think about it, one guy attacks the other cleans it up.

I have exclusively obtained an audio recording of this meeting, and what was said there will shock you. There was exactly zero effort from Cyprian Nyakundi or Xtian Dela to get to the bottom of the story. The two racketeers were only interested in money. And you just have to sit back in awe at the audacity of these fellas to demand 50 million for the stories to be taken down. You heard me right. These guys wanted 50 brary million Kenya shillings, no smiling! Sample this quote from the meeting:

Xtian: “the safest and the easier way is for us middlemen to meet and discuss on their behalf and come to an agreement. I think the other guys offered some good chunk of cash. An amazing good chunk of cash, but I told them at the end of the day it’s good to have the truth out. He was asking for 40m… he was actually saying that it’s low, that he would want to push it to 50.”

Notice how Xtian reveals Nyakundi was being paid to slander Bidco in the first place.

I really commend the Bidco rep for keeping a straight face throughout this conversation. If it were me, I’d have been like:

Then as if that wasn’t bad enough, Nyakundi and Xtian actually admit that the stories were false. See this:

Xtian: “I told him, lemme meet with you and see what you can do cause he was saying with such an amount of cash we will delete everything, post the truth and never, ever, ever, in his entire life, bash your guy.”

In the spirit of fairness, I contacted both Cyprian and Xtian, who denied any involvement in the matter. The audio evidence, however, is stacked against this claim. 

As a blogger it seems to me that Nyakundi and Xtian have let their Twitter popularity get to their heads. It’s mind boggling that people can think that since they have amassed some followers online, now they have enough muscle to go around bullying Captains of Industry, thinking they can destroy legitimate companies.

I have embedded a Facebook clip of the whole conversation between Nyakundi, Xtian and the Bidco representative below. Press the ‘CC’ button to view the subtitles

If you can’t see the video on mobile, click here https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=743255365798000

If you are as disappointed as I am in their behaviour, don’t stand for this sort of extortionist practice. Let your voice be heard on Twitter through the hashtag #NyakundiExposed and hold these two racketeers accountable for their actions