Somewhere over the Atlantic in 1986, a Pan American World Airways flight attendant picked up the intercom and made an in-flight announcement. When he set it down, passengers applauded at the deep, confident voice. Some waited until the plane landed and stopped him in the aisle to tell him he had a voice unlike anything they had heard on a commercial flight. His name, Jeff Koinange.

On one of those flights, a media personality told him that voice belonged on television, not on a plane. Jeff filed the advice away and kept working.

The household he grew up in was strict, and the standards it imposed gave him the self-possession that would, years later, make him impossible to ignore in a room. His father, Frederick Mbiyu Koinange, died in Jeff's infancy and his 28-year-old mother, Hilda Wambui, took the role of raising four children by herself. She was a headmistress and she ran the household the way she ran her school: on discipline, clear expectations, and a demand that each child take education seriously. 

Pan Am held him for about a year and a half before she met a girl named Sonya. She was a Panamanian flight instructor, and when Jeff fell in love with her, he made a decision that changed the direction of his life. He left the airline, followed her to New York, and married her in 1988. New York was also the place the advice from the plane finally had somewhere to go. He enrolled at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, graduated top of his class in Broadcast Technology and Management, and earned a scholarship to New York University where he completed his BA in Broadcast Journalism in 1991.

He landed his first job at ABC News in New York. He worked alongside Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, watched how they prepared, how they questioned, how they held a room, and covered the 1992 US presidential election. 

In 1994, he moved to NBC News as a producer where he would work for a year before joining Reuters Television, covering the Africa from a Nairobi base. Reuters also let him anchor part-time at KTN. His American accent was the first thing the KTN audience noticed, and it divided them: some saw a polished broadcaster, others saw a man who had spent too many years abroad. Neither reaction was irrelevant to him or his career, or at least that is what he believed. 

In 1998, Reuters made him West Africa Bureau Chief and moved him to Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He later relocated to Johannesburg where he rose to the rank of Chief Producer by 1999. He was thirty-three years old, stationed in Africa's largest city, and running one of the continent's most important wire service operations.

In 2001, CNN held the MultiChoice African Journalist of the Year Awards in Johannesburg, which Jeff attended. Chris Cramer, CNN's Senior International Vice President, found him at the event and made his pitch: CNN was opening a bureau in Lagos, and he wanted Jeff to run it. Jeff said no, but Cramer pressed. He sent Jeff a ticket to Atlanta, told him to spend a week, and said that if he saw nothing worth staying for, he could return to Johannesburg. 

In Atlanta, CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan walked Jeff downstairs to the building lobby and introduced him to Doc, the shoe shiner who worked by the entrance. Doc studied Jeff for a moment, told him he was going to be fine, turned to Jordan, and winked. Jordan high-fived him, looked at Jeff, and said: "I like you, young man. I think you are going to fit in fine." That was Jordan's method for reading whether someone had what CNN needed. Jeff accepted the offer and Jordan hired him as Lagos Bureau Chief.

He became CNN's Senior Africa Correspondent, based in Johannesburg, and the first Black African journalist to be a prominent, recurring presence on international network television. Over six years, he covered the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the genocide in Darfur, and the famine in Niger. His Niger famine reporting won him an Emmy Award in 2005, the first Emmy ever won by a Black African journalist. By early 2007, he had built a reputation that made him one of the most recognized African journalists alive.

Then, in February 2007, he filed a report on the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, known as MEND, in Nigeria. The footage showed Jeff in a speedboat surrounded by masked gunmen, who took his crew to a group of Filipino hostages the militants were holding. The Nigerian government accused him of staging the scene and paying gunmen to perform for his cameras. The accusation was damaging, but it was not what ended things. That came from an email. A Swiss businesswoman named Marianne Briner had been corresponding with Jeff after he contacted her about a book she had co-authored on Kenyan political corruption. She gathered those emails and sent them to his boss at CNN's Atlanta headquarters. One email from Jeff read: "Of course we had to pay certain people to get the story. You do not get such a story without bribing." The two problems, the Nigerian government's accusation and the emails, arrived in Atlanta at the same time.

On May 29, 2007, Jeff was driving when his phone rang. His boss told him to pull off the highway. "Listen man, there is too much crap, too many rumours and Nigerians think you stage-managed that story. I don't think we can sustain you any longer, we will need to let you go." Jeff denied staging anything: "How do you stage that? It's not Hollywood here." He acknowledged the emails, calling them "an obvious error in my judgment." 

Seven months later, in November 2007, he joined K24 as Chief Anchor. K24 was launching as Kenya's first 24-hour all-news television station, and it needed a face that could command attention from the first broadcast. Jeff gave it that. He hosted Capital Talk, an interview program that drew politicians, business figures, and public intellectuals to the studio. 

K24 was where Jeff built the format that would define the second half of his career. Jeff Koinange Live, popularly known as JKL, took shape there: the bench, the deliberate pacing, the silence held long enough to make a guest uncomfortable, the "Oh my!" timed for maximum effect. 

He left K24 five year later to join Arise Television in Johannesburg where he worked as Chief Anchor, covering pan-African stories. Here, he stayed for just eight months before returning to his home country.

KTN gobbled him up again to do JKL on Wednesday and Thursday nights at 10 PM. The show drew major political figures, foreign dignitaries, and cultural personalities. By Jeff's own count at the end of his run at KTN, the program was hitting 10 million viewers every time it aired and he did 300 episodes. It was one of the most-watched programs in the country and the bench had become a national institution.

Then came the night of November 16, 2016.

Jeff was hosting Nairobi gubernatorial aspirants Miguna Miguna and Esther Passaris on JKL. Midway through the exchange, Miguna turned to Passaris, attacking her appearance, her character, and saying derogatory things to her. The clip left the studio and spread across Kenyan social media before the broadcast ended. Gender Affairs Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki condemned the program. The Media Council of Kenya cited JKL for violating the Code of Conduct for the Practice of Journalism and KTN had to suspend the show.

A week later, Jeff opened what looked like a routine episode by hosting gospel artists Emmy Koigei and Sinach. At the end of the broadcast, he told his audience: "This will be the final Jeff Koinange Live right here on KTN. We'll take a break, but rest assured JKL will be back on another station in the coming weeks. JKL is not going anywhere, it is just changing homes." 

Three months later, in February 2017, Citizen TV confirmed Jeff Koinange Live was moving to Royal Media Services (RMS). SK Macharia, the founder, had watched what JKL did to an audience and the numbers it was drawing. Macharia had spent years constructing Citizen TV around a single principle: find the talent that moves audiences and overpay for it. 

Jeff joined Citizen TV, brought the bench to the most-watched television station in Kenya, and the audience followed. Royal Media also placed him on the Hot 96 FM breakfast show as co-host, the English-language radio station in the RMS portfolio. JKL has aired on Citizen TV since February 2017.

This story first appeared on episode one of Kenyan Founders, The History and Business Strategy of Royal Media Services