Good evening folks, i would request for your time and patience while reading the article below. A business man , an NSIS officer in the department of Accounts has been letting the opposition down since his employment, the government murder cases are always known by the NSIS and assassins paid through this body. We have lost very high profile leaders since Kenya got its independent, may i ask Mr. Sammy Wakiaga why he allowed the following people to die , he was even to silently notice them that the rotten government was craving for their blood.
The late Dr. Crispin Odhiambo Mbai was born on October 25th 1954. He grew up a healthy, active and loving child under the care of his parents. Like his peers in the family Dr. Mbai spent most of his childhood life very close to his then retired and respected Ex – Senior Chief Obonyo Anayo an interaction that greatly influenced Dr. Mbai’s adult life attitude, character and personality.
In 1961, Dr. Mbai enrolled for lower primary education at Ligisa day primary school. Upon completing the basic level education in 1964, he transferred to St. Joseph Nyabondo Boys Boarding for upper primary education. He sat for the Certificate of Primary Education in 1969. In 1970, Dr. Mbai joined Mirogi Secondary School where he remained until 1972. In 1973, he transferred to Londiani Secondary School where he sat for the East African Certificate of Education in 1973. The following year, Dr. Mbai proceeded to Cardinal Otunga High School where he sat for the East African Advanced Certificate of Education (EAACE).
In 1976, he was admitted at the University of Nairobi for a degree course in the Faculty of Arts, which completed in 1976 graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Government and Sociology. During that same year, Dr. Mbai enrolled for a Master of Arts Degree at the same University, which he completed in 1981. On completing his M.A. programme, Dr. Mbai joined the civil service in the position of Personnel Officer II. Initially in the Ministry of Transport and Communication and latter in the Ministry of Health. In 1985 he moved to the Kenya Medical Research Institute as Principal Administrative Officer responsible for personnel and research administration.
Dr. Robert Ouko was Kenya’s Minister for Foreign Affairs when he disappeared on the night of 12 February 1990. Ouko disappeared from his farm in Koru near Muhoroni. On 16 February the government announced that his body had been found at Got Alila hill, near Ouko’s home. The body had been mutilated and burnt and was found with items including a gun, a diesel can and matches. All apart from the diesel can had belonged to Ouko. News of the crime set off riots in Nairobi.
Initial police reports suggested that Ouko had committed suicide but it soon became apparent that Ouko had been tortured and shot before his body was burnt. Public pressure led President Daniel arap Moi to ask British detectives from New Scotland Yard to investigate Ouko’s death.
In October 1990 Moi appointed a public inquiry into the case chaired by Justice (current Chief Justice) Evans Gicheru. The inquiry was terminated by Moi in November 1991 and did not produce a final report but its proceedings had brought many of the facts of the case to public attention.
Several government officials, including energy minister Nicholas Biwott and head of internal security Hezekiah Oyugi, were detained for questioning in relation to the murder but released after two weeks for “lack of evidence”.
Jonah Anguka, a former Distric Commissioner, was tried for Ouko’s murder in 1992 and acquitted, with the crime remaining unsolved. Anguka later fled into exile in the United States, fearing for his life. He has since published a book, “Absolute Power,” denying his involvement in the Ouko Murder. During Anguka’s trial witness Godfrey Mate who was the Kisumu DC when Ouko disappeared told the iniquiry that Anguka interfered with the Kisumu security committee’s work after Robert Ouko was found dead.
The investigations suggested that Ouko had been compiling a report on corruption in the Kenyan government and how it had affected his attempts to reopen a molasses plant in his Kisumu constituency. The report was not found after Ouko’s disappearance and it was suspected that his murder was an attempt to suppress his findings.
In March 2003 the newly elected government of Mwai Kibaki opened a new investigation into Ouko’s death to be conducted by a parliamentary select committee. It heard evidence from the 1990 British investigation implicating government officials including Biwott, who has denied involvement, and Oyugi, who died in 1992. In March 2005 the inquiry summoned former President Moi to give evidence.
On March 4, 2005 the Parliamentary Select Committee investigating Dr. Ouko’s death was told that it was President Moi who ordered the killing of his Foreign minister in 1990.
Committee chairman Gor Sunguh said Scotland Yard detective John Troon told the committee in London two weeks ago that Dr Robert Ouko was killed because of “an
executive order”.
Mr Sunguh said: “This executive order was issued by none other than President Moi.”
The Sunguh committee was in Britain two weeks ago to receive evidence from Mr Troon, who extensively investigated the murder, and Swiss business consultant Marianne
Briner. Mr Sunguh said the President fired Dr Ouko, who was the MP for Kisumu Town, and sent him to his Koru home as his security was withdrawn.
“No other person had such an executive authority” to order the killing of Dr Ouko, Mr Sunguh said.
“The President himself said at a public rally that people who poisoned Vice-President George Saitoti ‘…are the same ones who killed Dr Ouko…’ We would have liked him to tell us who these people are and how he came to know them,” Mr Sunguh said.
Mr Sunguh said Mr Troon had tried to interview Keiyo South MP Nicholas Biwott as the prime suspect but that Mr Biwott had been “shielded” by Mr Moi.
A letter from the British High Commission tabled before the committee showed Mr Troon had in 1990 concluded his probe and had said there was enough evidence to arrest Mr
Biwott and other senior officials but that Mr Moi had denied him permission to do so.
Mr Sunguh said President Moi had pledged no stones would be left unturned in the investigation but that, instead, “all stones and boulders were put in the way of investigations”.
Mr Sunguh said the Moi administration started parallel investigations to Mr Troon’s usingthe dreaded Special Branch. Then Mr Jonah Anguka, a district commissioner at the time
Dr Ouko died, had been “planted” in the matter and charged with the murder.
Mr Troon’s life was threatened and he had to leave the country in 72 hours, he said. President Moi’s government was guilty of a cover-up in Dr Ouko’s murder, Mr Sunguh
said.
“It also participated in elimination of witnesses to the murder,” Mr Sunguh added.
The chairman said the committee had counted more than 100 possible witnesses who had died in mysterious circumstances.
“These are some of the issues that should have been answered by Moi. We would have treated him with utmost respect . . . we are not going to bother him,” Mr Sunguh said.
He added: “It is unfortunate that we are now going to complete our report without his input.”
Although failure to honour a parliamentary summons was “illegal”, the committee would not take any action against the former president Moi.
“Having been an MP for more than 40 years, as vice-president for 13 years and as president for 24, the man should have been a supporter of the rule of law,” Mr Sunguh
commented. Mr Moi should not blame the committee if it rules that he was responsible for “certain things” in Dr Ouko’s death.
Committee member Kiema Kilonzo said the committee wanted Mr Moi to explain what transpired during the Washington DC visit to which he was accompanied by both Dr Ouko and Mr Biwott. Dr Ouko was murdered several weeks later.
Mr Kilonzo said the committee wanted to hear from Mr Moi whether he had sent Dr Ouko on leave and confined him to his Koru home after the visit to Washington. Mr Moi could also have explained a photograph tabled before the committee by Mr Biwott showing him saluting by the left hand.
Committee member Raphael Wanjala said: “The retired president’s appearance here could have been very important for us because the work of all commissions when he was head of state was frustrated.”
The MP for Budalang’i cited the premature disbandment of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry in 1991 and of Mr Troon’s investigation.
The Sunguh committee wanted Mr Moi to explain whether he and Dr Ouko travelled on the same flight from Washington.
About the road accident Dr Ouko was involved in on his way to Kericho on February 9,1990.
Whether the president communicated with Dr Ouko while he was on leave and
Whether he received documents by the BAK group’s directors complaining about mistreatment by some Cabinet ministers.
Mr Troon had also named permanent secretary Hezekiah Oyugi as a prime suspect in Dr Ouko’s murder. Mr Oyugi died of illness in 1991.
At the end of the inquiry the committee chairman, Mr Sunguh said: “We have information that a gang was hired by persons who have refused to be questioned by this committee. They (gang) were to be paid Sh3 million, but after complaining, it was raised to Sh8 million to kill Dr Ouko. Later some of the gang members killed their colleagues over the same money.”
Tom Mboya was assassinated outside a pharmacy on Government Road (now Moi Avenue). Up to this day, neither the real assassin nor the sponsors of it are known.
The trial of the suspected assassin, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, a one-time KANU youthwinger who occasionally made money on the side by harassing businesspeople with threats of his connections with powerful politicians, was so tightly controlled there can be little doubt that it was stage-managed.
Those in the public gallery were vetted and monitored; journalists, especially foreign journalists were mostly refused entry. Njenga had pleaded guilty to murdering Tom Mboya; the trial was merely a passage to his execution.
This smoothly managed showcase was however, almost ruined by a remark made almost casually by Njenga.
“What about the big man?” he asked as he was being sentenced to hang.
With that remark, he posed a riddle that is, in many ways, at the heart of independent Kenya’s politics.
Historians, journalists and others have speculated for 40 years now over the identity of the Big Man.
Fingers have silently pointed at individuals within Kenyatta’s inner circle.
There has been a fair amount of speculation that foreign intelligence was involved – or at the very least, had sufficient motive to want Mboya dead, and in many ways gained from it.
Or maybe it was a lone gunman, driven by pent-up personal grievances with the young dashing politician. Nothing has ever been proved or established.
The questions linger. Using recently declassified information from various sources, including the US State Department and documents from archives in Kenya and the United Kingdom, we will try to answer the basic questions surrounding Mboya’s assassination: Who ordered the hit on Mboya? Was there a second gunman? Was there a link between Mboya’s killers and an assassination plot almost six years later on Vice President Daniel arap Moi? Did Mboya know about the plot to assassinate Pio Gama Pinto? Was there a link between President Kenyatta, Bruce Mackenzie, Charles Njonjo and the MI5? Did the MI5 want Mboya out of the way?
Other questions: did Nahashon Njenga use Mboya’s gun as later alleged (part of the somewhat absurd theory that Mboya planned to assassinate Kenyatta, Njenga knew about it and, in a fit of patriotism, killed Mboya instead – using Mboya’s gun)?
Of Mboya’s murder, then Vice President Daniel arap Moi would later say to Parliament that it was “monstrously conceived but brilliantly planned and carried out”.
It was a strange way to put it especially because, Mboya’s death had precipitated the most severe riots in post-independence Kenya’s history and had deepened existing ethnic and political divisions to the point that they threatened to break the country apart.
There are more practical questions surrounding that statement: Considering Mboya had virtually no security on the day, was in fact by himself at a pharmacy in downtown Nairobi on a Saturday and at a time when the city is virtually deserted, it appears odd that Mr Moi would describe the assassination as “brilliantly planned and carried out”. What does the former President know?
Also telling, was the brevity of the aftermath of assassination.
‘Biggest manhunt ever for Mboya’s killers’, the Daily Nationannounced in its headline the following Monday and in somewhat triumphant fashion.
Three weeks later, on August 1, it was, however, Time Magazine that breached the unutterable: “A Kikuyu Suspect” announced its Mboya headline.
However, when the alleged assassin was found and arrested, his trial strongly suggested that other forces were at play.
Appearing in court on August 13, the trial was over in a matter of weeks, Njenga convicted and sentenced to hang.
Significantly, records of the trial in the Kenya National Archives have disappeared. Thus, in so many ways, the idea of the State’s complicity in Mboya’s killing is a major factor in the subsequent cover up.
At the same time, we also aim to explore the significance of Mboya’s life and the implications of his death.
In many ways, with the death of Mboya, the nascent enterprise that was “project Kenya” – the building of a nation from what American writer Paul Theroux once called “the querulous republic”, an assortment of ethnic communities fiercely competing for control of the centre – began to crumble.
The sense of optimism that had come with independence and somehow survived the ideological discord within KANU, was extinguished with the assassination of Tom Mboya on that Saturday afternoon.
Nairobi, and Kenya as a whole, became a nation of silences, suspicions and secrets.
The tenuous ideas of solidarity and nation building disintegrated.
The uhuru nationalist project, not six years old, was effectively taken over by the forces of tribalism and ethnic patronage.
Only Mboya, whose personal and public life had transcended beyond the preoccupations of ethnic chauvinism and parochialism, had possessed the imagination to lead the country in a new direction.
Mahathir Mohamed, the Malaysian Prime Minister and architect of that country’s post-colonial renaissance, was later to comment: “when you killed Tom, you lost 30 years”.
1969 was in many ways a watershed year.
Rumours in late 1968 that President Kenyatta had suffered a heart attack brought home to the nation but especially to the close circle around Kenyatta –known as the Kiambu Mafia – that the founding President was not immortal.
The politics of succession, which would become the enduring theme of Kenyan politics, began to play out in earnest.
Having neutralised the left wing of KANU in the mid-60s, first with the assassination of Pinto in 1965 and then the sidelining of Jaramogi Odinga at the Limuru Conference in `66, Mboya, the obvious successor to Kenyatta, himself became a target for neutralisation by the Kiambu Mafia.
There had been an attempt on his life in early 1969.
By the middle of that year, Mboya found himself increasingly isolated on the domestic political scene.
Internationally, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, an intimate friend and perhaps his biggest champion in the United States, was a big blow to Mboya.
With the British already quite nervous of his strong links with the United States, the jostling around the Kenya presidency acquired added urgency, and rendered Mboya increasingly more vulnerable.
There were, in short, many reasons and many people who wanted Tom Mboya dead.
But first, let us fast-forward to 1975 and examine the story of a man called Jones Mukeka.
On Friday February 7, 1975, less than three weeks before the body of Josiah Mwangi Kariuki would be found in the Ngong Hills and almost six years after the assassination of Thomas Joseph Mboya, a man showed up at the US Embassy in Nairobi with some disturbing information.
Politicians
Claiming to have contact with “high level Kamba and Kikuyu politicians” the man, Jones Mukeka, told of a plot to assassinate Vice President Daniel arap Moi.
Mukeka, a sometime trade unionist, councillor and unsuccessful parliamentary candidate, was a private investigator.
Towards the end of his life — he died in 2005 in Machakos and in penury — he would give an interview to Nation writer Bob Odalo.
In that interview, he speaks of his life and times with the high and mighty; his friendship with both Tom Mboya and JM Kariuki; how he attended future US President John F Kennedy’s wedding in Kennebunkport, Maine in 1963; his later association with JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy. He would remember where he was at lunchtime on July 5, 1969 as his friend Tom Mboya was being gunned down; how he was among the first people at the scene.
Seen in public
He would even claim he was among the last people to see JM Kariuki alive: they had sauna-ed together at the Hilton and then retired to the bar for a drink, soon after which JM Kariuki was picked up, the last time he would be seen in public.
By the time of his death, then, Mukeka had lived the full spectrum of the Kenyan experience of the past 60 years — from the bitterness of Emergency and the independence struggle to the euphoria and subsequent betrayal of uhuru. He was literally, a Kenyan everyman.
And, perhaps, sensing that the end was near, he speaks about it all in that interview.
Everything, except his meeting that Friday in February 1975 with an unnamed US Embassy official.
Mukeka’s disclosures were immediately dispatched by Ambassador Anthony Marshall to the Secretary of State in Washington.
Marshall, two years into his Kenya posting and a bit wary of Mukeka’s credentials, describes him as an “untested Embassy source”.
Already, Mukeka was falling down in the world. A graduate of Syracuse University in the mid-1960s, he had returned to Kenya and begun to cultivate high-level contacts in political and diplomatic circles.
He had been a close confidant of then US Ambassador, William Atwood, whose explosive book The Reds and the Blacks about the Cold War and its impact on post-uhuru Kenyan politics, was banned by Kenyatta.
Mukeka regularly wined and dined with Kenya’s leading politicians.
And although he still claimed to have contact with the likes of Vice President Moi and others, the fact that Marshall attempts to put some distance between him and the US Embassy suggests that he no longer enjoyed access to the high and mighty.
What Mukeka had to say, however, was explosive enough for Marshall to immediately fire off a telegram to Washington. The plot to assassinate Moi was motivated, said Mukeka, by “Kikuyu unwillingness to accept Moi as Kenyatta’s successor”.
Moi’s Kikuyu allies, Attorney General Charles Njonjo and Commerce and Industry minister Julius Kiano were also targeted, Mukeka claimed.
The assassinations would take place while Kenyatta was alive. Moi’s chosen assassin would be a Kalenjin, presumably to remove suspicion from the conspirators. President Kenyatta, alleged Mukeka, was aware of the plot.
While all this information was incendiary enough, it is with Mukeka’s revelation of the identity of the chief conspirator that the intrigues begin.
The plot, said Mukeka, was being organised by a man only known as Muigai, who also went by the nickname Lumumba. Furthermore, claimed Mukeka, it was the same Muigai who had arranged Mboya’s assassination.
Whatever truth there was to Mukeka’s claims was soon overshadowed by a real assassination — that of JM Kariuki, the wealthy former private secretary to President Kenyatta who had turned populist politician.
His body was found by a Maasai herdsman in the Ngong Hills after days of official deception and foot-dragging.
Discovery
Within days of the discovery of the mutilated body, Mukeka was picked up by the police for questioning and was detained for four days at the Kileleshwa Police Station as police sought to know why he had told the Americans that there was a plot to kill Kiano.
He denied seeing the Americans or giving them any information. Admissions of this kind came with dire consequences. Nevertheless, he was “exiled” to Machakos and prevented from testifying at the Mwangale Commission (probing JM’s death).
This was the price of “knowing too much”.
The Kenyatta regime, increasingly paranoid following the events of 1969 — the assassination of Tom Mboya, the Kisumu riots, the arrest and detention of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and other leaders of the Kenya People’s Union — was silencing its critics by any means necessary.
For JM Kariuki, who had loudly criticised the rampant accumulation of wealth and corruption of the clique around Kenyatta, this resulted in death. For Mukeka, exile to Machakos was the beginning of a journey into obscurity, invisibility.
At JM Kariuki’s funeral in Nyandarua, Alphonce Okuku, Tom Mboya’s younger brother addressed the crowd composed predominantly of Kikuyus.
In a speech that borrowed from the German anti-Nazi dissident priest Gerhart Niemeyer’s famous exhortation to stand up against dictatorship, Okuku intoned: ‘When they killed Pinto, you said it was because he was Indian. When they killed Tom Mboya, you said it was because he was Luo. Now what are you going to say about JM?”
His bullet wounds were also inconsistent with claims that the murder victim was shot while sitting in the driver’s seat.
The post-mortem exam report shows that he was shot several times on his right hand at close range.
If Juma was abducted and then shot, why would his attackers bandage his wounds? If they intended to kill him, why try to stop the bleeding?
Jacob Juma had a blood-soaked gauze — a type of bandage used for dressing wounds or stopping bleeding — on his neck and right hand when his body was presented for autopsy.
According to one autopsy report seen by the Nation, the bandage was on his neck and right hand above the elbow, raising questions about the theory presented so far by police about the place and manner of his death.
Police think he was shot in his car by assailants who waylaid him on the road. Did someone stop to help him at the scene of the shooting or was he shot elsewhere?
After interviewing witnesses, visiting the site and reviewing the autopsy report, it seems there is a possibility that the controversial businessman was not killed in his car at all; that he may have been killed elsewhere, his body placed in his car and the vehicle pushed to the side of the road to create the perfect crime scene.
His bullet wounds were also inconsistent with claims that the murder victim was shot while sitting in the driver’s seat.
The post-mortem exam report shows that he was shot several times on his right hand at close range.
He also had a bullet wound on the left of his neck and on the right, at an angle in which the projectiles ruptured his lungs. The wounds show he was shot from a distance.
This is in addition to two shots to the centre of his chest.
Guards at a construction site less than a kilometre from where Juma is reported to have been shot told the Nation they did not hear anything to arouse suspicion.
“We heard three loud noises, not like gunshots, but sounding as if a car had jumped bumps,” said one of the guards.
Police have concluded that the businessman was shot with an AK47 assault rifle, a large calibre weapon which makes a racket when fired.
Juma’s car had more than seven bullet holes from what appears to be AK47 and the sound of such a weapon fired several times would have carried far and wide.
Police reports said an officer stationed at a nearby construction site was approached by two men who told him they had seen a stalled vehicle.
The guards at the two construction sites in the area told the Nation there was no police officer at their sites that night.
Also, though the vehicle was at a busy junction in a generally insecure stretch of the road where motorists are likely to be on alert, none reported seeing a stalled car until a police officer called Karen Police Station.
The guards near the crime scene said that section of the road was quite busy that night until after midnight.
If Juma was abducted and then shot, why would his attackers bandage his wounds? If they intended to kill him, why try to stop the bleeding? Did they have a change of mind?
The bandages and their significance appear to be some of the clues in the investigation that homicide detectives are unable to explain.
Nation inquiries also revealed findings that seemed to contradict early reports about the management of the scene of crime as well as the official account of the assassination.
There were earlier claims that the crime scene was contaminated.
However, witnesses have since said that the scene was secured and that crime scene specialists and detectives combed through Juma’s car for almost two hours before his body was removed and the car towed to Karen Police Station.
According to witnesses, the police are said to have taken photographs of the body, searched the car and his pockets.
The state of the crime scene and interviews with early responders raise questions about the assumption that the businessman was shot in his car on that roadside.
The autopsy report showed that his right hand was shot several times, with a high velocity gun at close range, puncturing a major artery.
A pathologist said in such cases the patient bleeds a great deal and dies of blood loss within minutes.
A tow truck attendant who was involved in the recovery of Juma’s Mercedes said there wasn’t much blood on the driver’s seat.
The towing company was informed by a Karen Police Station officer — identified as Murongi — that a car had stalled on the road.
“Police officers cordoned off the area and told us to stand some distance away from the car. They went on searching the car for over an hour as if looking for something important,” said the attendant.
He said the tow team arrived at the scene a few minutes past 10pm but were not allowed near the vehicle for over an hour.
“The engine was off when I went inside the car. There was very little blood on the driver’s seat while there was some blood on the passenger side. The blood appeared smeared,” recalled the attendant, only identified as Joshua.
He said he put the car in neutral, hoisted it and headed to Karen Police Station.
The body was carried in a police Land Cruiser. A Corporal Khaemba registered the body at City Mortuary at 0157 hours that morning.
