Friends celebrate Weru, journalist who was so full of life

The Late Job Weru, a standard journalist

The desk where he sat infecting the Nyeri newsroom with laughter as he pounded the keyboard with stories is now desolate. The heaps of documents, aptly nicknamed “the archives” still tower beneath his ex-sitting position. In the newsroom, an eerie silence abounds.

Colleagues and news sources agree that Job Weru was the inimitable type in warmth, diligence, honour and spirit. His knack for striking relationships and stretching them beyond the newsroom, was legendary.

There was a building caretaker who called the office line every few days to ask him about land prices in Kieni. There was the children’s home whose story Weru frequently told to a near-boring point. He would regularly check on the kids’ welfare. When he died this week, the administrator reported that the children spent the day weeping.

“Job was so alive it’s difficult to imagine him lying there still, motionless. He found laughter in anything and everything,” his ex-colleague George Mulala says.

His colleague in Nyeri office Carol Nderi crafted a solemn psalm of Weru: “You have never seen a fellow so jolly, so full of life, so pure of heart, so full of adventure, so helpful, so full of charm, so full of love, so full of passion, so filled with charm, so full of charisma.... so...”

In the wake of his death, Weru’s amazing ability to charm all and sundry has attracted donations from all and sundry, from Cabinet Secretaries to ordinary villagers.

The county government of Nyeri even graded the road leading from Narumoru market to his father’s home at Muriru village. According to Lucy Wanyitu, the Nyeri County Secretary for Special Programmes, youths in the area volunteered to spread the gravel as a show of love to the selfless Weru.

Francis Ngige, his boss at the Nyeri bureau says the multitude of goodwill messages pouring in for the journalist is testimony to his special gift in creating and nurturing friendships. His journalism edge was writing captivating features.

All angles

One of the other stories Weru told with unmistakable passion was that of the beatification process of Blessed Irene Steffani “Nyaatha” the Catholic nun who is on course to become a saint.

“He explored all angles to that story using impeccable sources he had cultivated in the process,” Ngige adds.

To die at 36, and full of life, the affable Weru has affirmed the words of his Biblical namesake Job:

“Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down.

He fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not.” Weru who died a few weeks after a trip to Israel, has left behind a young widow and three children.