'City Girl' did not commit plagiarism

Nation Centre, which houses the offices of the 'Nation' newspaper's parent company, Nation Media Group, on Kimathi Street in Nairobi. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • In his article, “#NMGUnderSiege: Njoki Chege exposed as a serial Plagiarist”, he accused the 'Saturday Nation' columnist who writes the popular but controversial “City Girl” column of “lifting articles from international media” and making them look like her own creation.
  • The articles in question were not plagiarised.

Beginning Sunday, the hashtag #NMGUnderSiege was trending for the better part of the week, courtesy of Cyprian Nyakundi, the controversial Kenyan blogger who describes himself as a corporate fraud buster, among other things.

In his article, “#NMGUnderSiege: Njoki Chege exposed as a serial Plagiarist”, he accused the Saturday Nation columnist who writes the popular but controversial “City Girl” column of “lifting articles from international media” and making them look like her own creation.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines plagiarism as the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one’s own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas of another.

Newspaper editors see plagiarism as the “unoriginal sin”. They believe plagiarism violates trust and credibility in journalism. As one editor puts it, it is a “break in the bond of trust” between the newspaper and readers.

At the Nation Media Group (NMG), there is zero tolerance for plagiarism and in severe cases it could mean the end of a career. When and if NMG publishes plagiarised material, it is breaking its trust with readers and failing to uphold its editorial policy standards and guidelines.

Mr Nyakundi claimed Njoki Chege’s article “Ladies, want to get to C-Suite? Get a sponsor!” published on July 16 was cribbed from an article, “The Real Benefit of Finding a Sponsor” by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, published on January 26, 2011, in the Harvard Business Review. He also ran one of her articles, “Behind obese, lazy mothers are chubby and fat children” published on March 4, through an online plagiarism checker and “confirmed” it was plagiarised”. His findings showed the article was 100 per cent plagiarised. I took those articles through various plagiarism checkers but found no evidence to support Mr Nyakundi’s claims of plagiarism. I thought maybe I was missing something. So I called him asking how he arrived at his findings. He neither picked my call nor responded to my email.

Inspired by Mr Nyakundi’s article, Nairobi Wire also tried to run a poll: “Do You Think This Article by Njoki Chege is Plagiarised?” But in an accompanying article, David Koech threw doubts on Mr Nyakundi’s findings.

'NO EXCEPTION'

“Nyakundi has never let facts come in the way of a good story, and this was no exception,” he wrote. “He grossly misinterpreted how online plagiarism checkers work. Most free tools check submitted text against the Internet. So, when Nyakundi submitted Njoki’s article for plagiarism checking, it is highly likely that the software actually compared it to Njoki’s actual article on Nation’s website, and that may explain why it found 0% cent uniqueness.”

Mr Koech went on to explain that most plagiarism checkers are designed to be used with offline text that has never been published on the Internet. “For instance if you submit this article you are reading at this moment on a plagiarism checker, it will mostly likely be regarded as plagiarised. That’s because it is already published on the Internet.

If I did the same while it was still in its draft form, the results would have been different. The most widespread use of plagiarism tools is lecturers checking students’ assignments for originality.”

He added: “Nyakundi provided an article from Harvard Business Review that he claimed Njoki Chege stole from. We’re having a hard time deciding whether there is any plagiarism here. Read the two articles and help us decide”. But eager to be absolutely sure whether the articles in question were indeed plagiarised, I resorted to the time-consuming method of googling every sentence of the articles.

I found one sentence in “Ladies, want to get to C-Suite? Get a sponsor!” that Mr Nyakundi could claim with some justification that it was not original. It was her concluding sentence: “Let them hate, after all, this week they hate you, next week they love you, both weeks you get paid!” The sentence was an adaptation of the popular saying “One week they love you. Next week they hate you. Both weeks I get paid”.

The author of the saying is unknown. In intellectual property terms, the saying amounts to commons—everybody can use it without attribution, or permission just like grazing your animals on common land.

Indeed, the saying is often found emblazoned on T-shirts, mugs, key ring holders, phone and tablet cases, teddy bears, tote bags, and so on. As commons, it’s like the Kiswahili saying “Siku za mwizi ni arobaini (A thief’s days are forty; a thief is bound to be caught), which everybody uses as common folklore. Besides, I can’t think of a person better entitled to use the line “One week they love you; next week they hate you; both weeks I get paid” than the City Girl. And she used it so creatively. Mr Nyakundi and his credulous followers owe Njoki Chege an apology.

The articles in question were not plagiarised.

Send your complaints to [email protected]; call 0721989264.