Jimmi Gathu’s guide to reinventing yourself

Jimmy Gathu.

Jimmy Gathu, 52, is the king of re-invention, thanks to his Da Vinci-esque litany of talents. He has been a singer-songwriter, radio host, TV show host, actor, brand ambassador – successful at all of them.

But wait, there is more! He is also a trained fine artist (I can draw you right now,” he says, adding that he needs to get back to painting), an interior designer and a dancer, having been a breakdancer back in the day. He is shopping for a piano because he wants to get back into songwriting.

If you search ‘Jimmi Gathu song’ on YouTube, you will find two of his songs from back in the day - Look, Think, Stay Alive, a song about road safety in the matatu industry.

You will also find Righteous Lover.

“That was a project I did with Tedd Josiah. I was getting married. Tedd and I go way back. So we sat and just talked about relationships and about the big decision I was making. And he was like, ‘So let us just do a song! Let us write a song! And boom! And I sang it during the evening party. I wish I had the pictures man,” he says, smiling at the nostalgic memory.

He was also in a band called Impulse (not Five Alive, a common mistake people make) and they recorded an album, but never got to release it. It still exists, alongside another one he recorded at Suzanne Gachukia’s studio - also never released.

Beautiful music, he says, but Look, Think, Stay Alive ended up getting him into KTN, and those took a back seat for the moment. Exploring his musical talent inadvertently opened the door to an amazing career.

“That is where my highs started,” he says. Six years later, he became the Coca-Cola brand ambassador and became a millionaire, by 26, in the 90s. 

Think ahead

“God has blessed me with a certain gift, where I am able to think five steps ahead,” he says.

He gives an example of this.

“I joined KTN as a continuity announcer. That is somebody who says, ‘Coming up next is this programme’ and so on. I was lucky as a continuity announcer I was also a presenter on a show called Show Time."

He does not remember how he figured it out, but he quickly realised being a continuity announcer would not last long. He had to move to the next level, so he decided to learn how to produce.

His boss showed him the ropes. Six months later, he had a confirmation letter as a production assistant on a salary of Sh8,000. Just as he had suspected, after two years, the role of continuity announcer was dropped. He would have been out of a job.

“Ever since, I have had this thing of always re-inventing myself,” he says.

Have something to help you focus

While he was running several of KTN’s music shows, the most popular one dubbed, Kass Kass, Coca-Cola got on board as a sponsor, he became their youth brand ambassador and it occurred to him he was growing older.

“Two years after I became the Coke youth ambassador, I had a family. I made a choice: Am I a father and a husband, or am I Jimmy Gathu the public figure, and which one means more to me than anything else? So I chose being a father and a husband,” he says.

“The detriment of that was that there was a very high possibility my brand would stagnate or completely disappear, so I had to reinvent myself,” he says, a decision they talked about with the late Lorna Irungu.

“We did one big show for Club Kiboko where we toured the entire Coast, historical places. When we came back, we redesigned Club Kiboko to what you are seeing now. We gave it to the children and then we pulled out,” he says.

Keep your finger on the pulse

Gathu likes people and he loves talking, so he decided to start doing interviews.

“I developed a show called What It Takes and that helped me ease the pressure of all music, because (international) music publishers such as Sony were closing down (locally), and that affected my music video supplies and evidently affected music shows. And then there was South Africa coming with Channel O, and I saw it,” he says.

In his uncanny way of seeing five steps ahead, he knew Channel O would deal a deadly blow to local music shows. When he told his boss they could not let the channel come to Kenya until local musicians started making music videos, because if they did the local music shows would be shut down, it fell on deaf ears.

“He asked me, ‘Jimmy, have you been to the Carnivore? What music do they play?’ I said, ‘They do not play local music… because we haven’t promoted it.’ He said, ‘Yeah. Do not waste my time.’

“Ten years later, I looked at him and I was telling him, ‘What were you saying?’ Had he listened, foreign music would not have overtaken us the way it did. I think we messed up that early.”

When he saw that happening, he started developing the interviews and did a teen show called Niaje, which lasted one season because it was too expensive to produce at that time. His intention had been to develop a magazine show, a talk show built around the concept of shows such as the Arsenio Hall Show.

“That is where Nazizi, Redsan and DJ Styles were discovered, and some politicians who were in university then came to the show. Production costs were huge and we could not afford it then, so we had to can it.”

Do not be afraid of starting from scratch

FM radio stations then came up, around 1996, and by 1998, Gathu was working in radio. “Imagine, I have built a brand for over 12 years and FM stations come and take you back to square one. I had no clue how to be a radio presenter, so I had to learn. Yet another re-invention.”

He was poached by another radio station, where he realised their music strategy was very different, and he could not do things the same way, so he had to re-invent himself again.

Shortly after, a completely new political dispensation was coming in with former President Daniel arap Moi’s retirement, so he saw an opportunity in it, and launched a show where people could talk about politics.

My listeners called it Our People’s Parliament. That is the line he has largely stayed along since then, tweaking it and adding his own flair to fit the essence of Gathu – mixing music, satire, serious talk, the way forward, albeit making it comfortable enough for the listener to tune in to political discourse while being entertained.

Expect the unexpected

Gathu had been on the rise for his entire career, having never been fired or looked for a job, always getting poached, until he was laid off by Nation Media Group.

“It took me time to accept that. It was painful. The fact that I did not get high blood pressure or depression? Kuna Mungu.”

From 2016 to 2019, he had to figure out exactly who he was. “I believe that was the reason for so many things that went wrong in my life. Not understanding who I was,” he says.

Until then, everything in his life had been happening at dizzying speeds, before it all came to that screeching halt.

“I did not know what it was like to be a father. I had to learn through mistakes. I thank God that my children are there and very supportive. But it was a roller coaster of just bumping into walls, going through walls, falling down,” he says.

Analyze your reasons

During this period, Gathu started a communications company. “Again, purely out of anger. I wanted to show these guys, ‘I will show you I can start this and be more successful than you guys.’

“I believe God did not allow me to have more investors, maybe because it would have been more of, ‘I told you so, than really building people like Yvonne Okwara. Hence why that didn’t go far and I had to sit back and re-evaluate myself.”

He still has the communications company and still does a lot of consulting work, but it is not as fully-fledged as it could have been.

“It was still that anger. I was angry at everyone. I was angry at the people who sent me home, I was angry at the people who were successful – I was angry at everyone. My children recently told me I was angry at them. That killed me. They said that at some point in life I kind of wasn’t there. And it is true.”

They were the ones who would call him every day during that period to check on him, regardless of that.

“They kept me going. They kept me alive. If it wasn’t for them, I can guarantee you, I wouldn’t be sitting here. You’d have been talking about this guy that was!” he says with a laugh.

Realise that your part-time talent may just become your solace

Throughout all this, Gathu has also been an actor. He was at Phoenix Theatres and was one of the founding members of Mbalamwezi players, founded in 1989.

Acting had been a place where he would go to express himself, but it became his bread and butter when things fell apart.

“When everything fell, the silver screen is what brought me back up. When I had nothing completely to do. I had almost given up hope,” he says.

“The emotions and experiences on Kina (a new show on Maisha Magic and Showmax) allowed me to figure things out on a personal level from every facet of life." 

That allowed him to have conversations with people in media on what he wanted to do if he got back in the game.

He’s back on the airwaves, on Spice FM Saturday afternoon, 2 pm to 7 pm. When Tom Japanni asked him to pick a name for the show, he picked names he thought were funky, it went a bit differently than he had anticipated.

“So he says ‘No,’ and does this (pushes an imaginary piece of paper in my direction). ‘We are going to call it Jimmy Gathu Live.’ I almost broke down,” he says.

He was well and truly back.

His final word on re-inventing himself? Always re-evaluate yourself.