The gospel truth on Willy and Pendo affair

By Pulse team

By the time some random Facebook page ‘exposed’ that Pulse magazine had been paid by Jimmy Gait to fix gospel star and friend, Willy Paul, everyone had gotten tired.

What had started as a fleshy piece of gossip had been left to hang for far too long in the vagaries of the elements; it was now oozing with maggots.

Of course, such outrageous statements are usually meant to drive traffic to some lazy thinker’s page. They were the same ones who put names to a story we had put about an artiste caught in a compromising situation during the Kisima Awards.

Another blog, notorious for abusing the veil of anonymity offered by online forums to post the most obnoxious claims, put Willy Paul and Pendo as the culprits.

What followed need not be rehashed; as they say, it is history.

With the string of poorly-managed denials, accusations and counter-accusations, more questions were left unanswered. The Facebook page even went as far as asserting that the two were actually an item.

First off the bat was Willy Paul. In a radio interview with One FM’s Tina Kagia, during which he dealt with issues ranging from his business with Gloria Muliro to saying he does not know Kizo B, he denied knowing Pendo and insisted that the photo of them on the red carpet was of him and  a lady fan.

He insisted that during the entire ceremony, he was in the company of his producer, J Blessing and only left his side to perform. This is the version he stuck to even in a later newspaper interview.

So comical was the entire episode that someone commented, cynically: “If they can’t even piece a simple denial together, they have more problems than we thought.”

Unbeknownst to many, Pendo’s friend, Saida Kinyala, ‘inboxed’ Pulse seeking confirmation of an ‘SMS’ she had gotten claiming that Pendo and Willy Paul were an item.

When we requested for more information, she responded by confirming that she had communicated with Willy Paul and “managed to get the truth out of Willy Paul on phone.” According to her, Willy Paul confirmed the relationship with Pendo.

Saida was to later promise to deliver more ‘exclusive’ information but after a series of SMSes she asked that we pay her first. Definitely a fan of the tabloids, she even went as far as alleging that one of the sites that was peddling the story had offered to pay her for an ‘exclusive’— perhaps in a bid to raise her value.

But on her Facebook page, Saida feigned ignorance of any such information when she shared a link from a popular entertainment website, with the same story.

A furious Pendo followed suit, first visiting the very same radio station that Willy Paul was on before going to the entertainment website’s offices. In a phone conversation with Pulse, she insisted that on the controversial day, she was in the company of musicians Chess and Rabbit. She further claimed that J Blessing did not attend the Kisima awards event.

Her version is that she and Paul know each other, but only as friends and that nothing happened on that day.

The allegation is that a certain Rose Njeri Karanja and Jimmy Gait paid Pulse to create the story and discredit Willy Paul. It sounds good, as would any steamy mound of heavily deodorised dog-poop!