As the first season of The Real Housewives of Nairobi finally wraps up with a reunion after 12 weeks of drama, fashion, events, and friendship ebb and flow, two big questions remain unanswered among the show’s viewers.
Will there be a season 2 renewal?
How much did the housewives make in the service of such opulence, drama and glamour?
In a recent interview, Caroline Wambui Ngunjiri, the show’s producer, hinted at the possibility of the Universal-owned franchise being renewed.
“I can’t say much at the moment, let’s wait and see, anything is possible,” she said.
But with the show’s success based on Showmax ratings, reviews and hype, season 2 of The Real Housewives seems a possibility, not a probability.
But how much were the six wives paid for the drama?
Nairobi News has since discovered that each housewife was paid more than half a million shillings to appear on the reality show.
“I heard that each housewife was paid Sh750,000, this is highly confidential information. Was it a good deal or a bad deal? I can’t tell you because it depends on the individual, but I can tell you that the figures are accurate,” a highly placed source told Nairobi News.
Attempts to verify the figure were unsuccessful due to non-disclosure agreements between both parties, the cast and the show’s production company.
In February, Lisa Christoffersen, one of the housewives, told the Business Daily that she didn’t join the show to make money as the production was unable to pay the fees she demanded.
The Lifestyle Nairobi sole proprietor said she was presented with a take-it-or-leave-it offer, with the production unwilling to give a cent.
With the need to popularise her Lifestyle Nairobi establishment, a sprawling botanical garden centre with restaurants, a furniture and fashion studio, among others, Lisa seized the moment.
“That’s why I agreed to be on Real Housewives of Nairobi, I want to put Lifestyle on the map. I want it to be known as a business hub. The money wasn’t really what convinced me because what they paid me was little. They had a budget and they didn’t want to pay a shilling. We couldn’t negotiate,” the mother-of-two told the Business Daily.
Lisa said the cast deserved to be paid more than they were offered.
“To be honest, it’s one of the things I really wanted to raise, considering the effort and time we put in every month. For example, sometimes the make-up people would show up at 6am and you would start shooting all the backstage stuff before you started shooting the actual scenes and you could end up with a 12-hour day. When you consider all that with the money you were paid, it wasn’t commensurate,” she added.
