Argwings-Kodhek:
It is of interest to note that history has now indicated that the death of C.M.G. Argwings-Kodhek earlier in 1969, attributed to a road accident, may not have been such. An exhumation the body of this once powerful minister, who was also a close confidant of Kenyatta’s, suggested that his death was actually the result of a gun shot fired from a police-issued rifle. Many close to the family actually believe that this was President Kenyatta’s first political assassination. Closely held family records indicate that former cabinet minister Paul Ngei actually identified the police vehicle that carried the assassins to the ambush point on Hurlingham Road (now Argwings-Kodhek Road). The vehicle in question was part of Vice-President Moi’s Vice-Presidential Escort detail. The testimony of former cabinet minister Andrew Omanga, then C.M.G.’s Permanent Secretary indicate that when Omanga met him lying in the road shortly after the ‘accident’ C.M.G. stated that he had a ‘shock’ and that he heard a ‘gun shot’. Formerly powerful Attorney-General Charles Njonjo confirmed as C.M.G. lay dying the next morning that the ‘wounds are consistent with gun shot wounds’. It is commonly known that Kenyatta, frustrated with Oginga Odinga, had already notified Argwings-Kodhek that he was going to be appointed Vice-President — a position C.M.G. had turned down and suggested that it be given to Moi, instead of Mboya — to become the first African to join the colonial Legislative Council. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mboya
Some noted political assassinations:
Although Kenyatta did not instigate ethnic clashes, he targeted eminent persons from ethnic groups that he felt were a threat to his leadership. Many people were assassinated including Pio Gama Pinto (Kenyan Indian), JM Kariuki (Kikuyu) Tom Mboya, D.O Makasembo, Arwgings Kodhek (all Luo) Ronald Ngala (Mijikenda of Coast), among others. http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/46094
Land ownership:
The extended Kenyatta family alone owns an estimated 500,000 acres approximately the size of Nyanza Province according to estimates by independent surveyors and
Ministry of Lands officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. http://blog.marsgroupkenya.org/?p=92
Hi,
Though i’m ‘new’ to you all, however, i’d humbly like to hereby express my views on the subject simply cause there really is a need for all to thoroughly do our homework proper!!
Having said that, let me assure fellow Kenyans in the diaspora that most of what really happened and is being said isn’t th ‘Gospel Truth’ per se.
Please, let us all study the issues deeper and go all out to researching on things like what John Perkins calls “Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man”-(available on Youtube.com)- where he goes on to mention things like an “Economic Hit Man”, “The Jackals”, and even the “Military Intervention” when the other two fail!!
Now, my question to you all is- How many of us are aware of this?
The reality is we still need to go deeper than ‘politickin the Kenyan Style’
Saturday, 21 April 2012 10:26 Written by The Standard By WAINAINA NDUNG’U
Few Kikuyu will admit to participating in the oathing in Gatundu in 1969, let alone disclose what they entailed.
One elderly Nyeri resident who at first confessed to having taken one oath developed cold feet when asked about the details. Like the oathing done during the Mau Mau era, the Gatundu rituals were not always conducted with willing participants. And, like the oathing two decades earlier, they faced strong opposition from Christian groups within the community and soon came to an end.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a Kikuyu said: “I’m going to Gatundu for a cup of tea,” it often meant something else. Those seeking political or economic favour would marshal delegations to visit Gatundu and pledge their loyalty to the embattled President Kenyatta. There was talk that some of these delegations also took oaths to defend the ‘House of Mumbi’, the name given to the central Kenya community.
Kenyatta’s biographer Jeremy Murray Brown wrote: “Ridges of Kikuyu-land seethed with activity as lorry-load after lorry load made its way to Gatundu to ‘have tea’ with the president.” Brown writes that the oathing quickly got out of hand. “Enthusiastic but crude sycophants targeted committed Christians, leading to a protest from the Church and a call for an end to the oathing from the president.”
Simple oaths
The simple oaths, which had many variations, often involved biting some bitter leaves dipped in animal blood or biting, chewing and swallowing a piece of goat meat and pledging loyalty to the government of the day. This tribal exercise came after close to a decade of ethnic power struggles that finally boiled over with the 1969 assassination of Cabinet minister and Kanu Secretary-General Tom Mboya.
In the book, Church, State and Society in Kenya, Galia Sabar writes oathing ceremonies were imposed on the Kikuyu to foster unity and ensure Kenyatta and his ruling clique kept their grip on power. That grip had been badly shaken after the assassination of Mboya, a powerful Luo ally of the President, galvanised support for KPU, the Luo-dominated opposition party led by Oginga Odinga.
The gunman was believed to be Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, a Kanu member put to the task by an unknown munene (big man).
There has all long been talk Mboya was being groomed for bigger things. Many historians believe his killing was linked to his attempts – at Kenyatta’s request – to rid Kanu of corrupt politicians.
Bitter mistrust
Many of them were already envious of his high-profile role in fighting Odinga and the communist threat. The assassination divided not only the Luo and Kikuyu, but also the ‘House of Mumbi itself. A bitter mistrust developed between the Southern (Kiambu) and Northern Kikuyu (Nyeri) over who might be a credible central Kenya successor.
Josiah Mwangi ‘JM’ Kariuki and to some extent Finance minister Mwai Kibaki were fancied in the north, while the south had the more powerful and ambitious pretenders to the throne, including Mbiyu Koinange, Njoroge Mungai, and Attorney General Charles Njonjo.
Sabar writes, “As KPU’s vision of change took hold among sections of the population, existing conflicts within Kanu were sharpened; between Kikuyu and non-Kikuyu… and between Kiambu leaders and the more socialist-inclined Nyeri and Murang’a Kikuyu, from whom most Mau Mau fighters had come and who continued to suffer under Kenyatta’s regime.”
The frustrations included the 1964 refusal to register the Kenya Freedom Fighters Union. In February 1969, two other ex-freedom fighters’ unions – the Kenya War Council and Waliolete Uhuru Union – were banned as “dangerous to the good government of the Republic”.
The ban was linked to the connection of the ex-freedom fighters and their three most prominent political sympathisers: Odinga, Achieng’ Aneko and Bildad Kaggia, who had formed KPU after acrimoniously exiting Kenyatta’s government in 1966.
This relationship between KPU and the ex-freedom fighters arose from a shared view of how Kenya should have dealt with wealth distribution at Independence (see related story). The failure to recover land taken over by settlers or to redistribute wealth was an issue the land-starved ex-Mau Mau and the socialist-minded Kanu leaders agreed upon.
It arose directly from a compromise made during the Lancaster House conferences of 1960, 1962 and 1963 by the Kenyatta/Mboya group, securing independence, but conceding the right to protect settlers’ property. Odinga opposed this deal at Lancaster, favouring wealth distribution. But he lost the battle to Mboya when the latter brought in a respected American jurist who proposed a solution others involved in the negotiations accepted.
Odinga’s unhappiness with the deal was evident from the very early days after Kenya became independent.
A Time magazine article from June 1965 read the situation thus: “Ever since Kenya became independent two years ago, Jomo Kenyatta’s rallying cry has been harambee (Swahili for “all pull together”). Most Kenyans have been quite happy to put aside their tribal and political rivalries and give pulling together a try. The notable exception: Oginga Odinga, 54, Vice-President of the nation.”
The US magazine, whose writers may have held anti-communist biases, wrote of Odinga travelling around the country “heaping red-tinged scorn on Kenyatta’s ties with the West”.
The VP went as far as to tell a rally in Nyanza that Kenyatta was taking instructions from the UK and US, prompting five party leaders to sign a petition demanding his resignation. Kenyatta bided his time then dropped the VP from a delegation to the British Commonwealth conference.
Unnamed people
He then gave a speech criticising unnamed people who he said wanted to trade Kenya’s colonial masters for new ones.
“Some people deliberately try to exploit the colonial hangover for their own selfish purposes, or in order to serve some external force,” the President said. “We must reject such people publicly. It is naive to think that there is no danger of imperialism from the East. In world power politics, the East has as many designs on us as the West.
This is why we reject Communism. To us, Communism is as bad as imperialism. What we want is Kenya nationalism. There is no place for leaders who hope to build a nation of slogans.”
Nine months later, Odinga led a walkout from Kanu to the newly formed KPU. Kanu responded by amending Kenya’s constitution to force a ‘little general election’ in which KPU was only able to win parliamentary seats among the Luo in Nyanza province, whereas its candidates in then Kikuyu-dominated Central province were trounced. There followed three years of political harassment and detention of party leaders.
The final act for KPU was the confrontation over Mboya’s death in 1969 at the New Nyanza General Hospital (now the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital). Kenyatta and Odinga traded abuse at the opening of the Soviet-funded facility. As the president was leaving, his motorcade was stoned and at least a dozen people shot dead by the president’s bodyguards.
Not long after, KPU was banned and Odinga detained for two years.
Released in 1971, Odinga went into political limbo until Kenyatta’s death in 1978.
The decade saw the ailing Kenyatta and others close to him continue to feed their greed for land at the expense of the poor, particularly the Northern Kikuyu most closely connected to the forest Mau Mau of the early 1950s. Odinga would later say Kenyatta had degenerated from a statesman to a simple land grabber. The statement would cost him his post as chairman of the Cotton Lint and Seed Marketing Board, with Kenyatta’s successor promptly sacking him after angry reactions from then powerful Constitutional Affairs Minister Charles Njonjo and others.
Then President Daniel Arap Moi would later place Jaramogi under house arrest for agitating for multi-partyism. He died on January 20, 1994 aged 83.
I think that we were unlucky though in the sense that our leading tribe, the Kikuyus, also unfortunately happened to have settled in the land most covetted by the white invaders. The sociological trauma of a whole community getting uprooted overnight and being enslaved on their own land perhaps created an experience that can only be paralleled to the african american identity disembodiment experience. It doesnt help that the custodians – (Kenyatta and the Kiambu Mafia) – left with the charge to restore order took it upon themselves to not only disenfranchize their own kith and kin but also to create imaginary enemy scapegoats to deflect on the injustice they had done to the land. In a sense we are all paying the high price of a disembodied Agikuyu community trying so desperately to restore the ancient order in a world that has already fallen apart. While the rest of Kenya is trying to find ways of getting onto the globalization bandwagon, Kikuyus are trying to restore hegemony of nyooba ya Mombi.
KENYATTA’S ‘NYAKUA’ PHILOSOPHY and POLICY WILL DESTROY KENYA
By David Bett
The Nyakua philosophy has not only created tensions among Kenyan different tribes, but has also caused the economic disparities and inequalities in Kenya. Its recent development into major economic corruption and election dishonesty, is threatening to create hatred and drive the country into untold civil war. Most of us who were old enough, remember the 1960s and 1970s when Kenyatta personally took upon himself to promote the NYAKUA philosophy in the newly independent Kenya. I was a young boy then and I used to really get scared because it sounded like declaring war among Kenyans. What the philosophy really meant was that whoever is able to grab should grab all that he could whether land or goods including financial resources. We all remember Magendo and Chepkube business. It was a philosophy of survival for the fittest; law of the jungle style.
In my community, people talked of Kikuyus coming to take the land and render the locals landless or kill them. Every time Kenyatta spoke on the radio, especially because he was fond of addressing the nation in Kikuyu, many felt that the Kikuyu who were strategically positioned in the government, were preparing to start MAU MAU war against other Kenyans so that they could grab (nyakua).
Now it seems that the fears were precisely what they were. At that time, the coastal people requested Kenyatta for tractors and farm machineries to help them till their land and Kenyatta responded well; he sent Kikuyus in thousands to till the coastal land. He, himself Nyakuad (grabbed) thousands of acres there. So, the land tilling problem was solved in the coast. In the Rift Valley, thousands of Kikuyus were moved from central province to grab the huge farms left behind by the white settlers. But it went beyond the white settlers? farms. In some areas like in Molo/Olenguruone, about fifteen thousand(15, 000) Kikuyus were moved from central province and given free land against and at the expense of the locals. I remember when my 70 year old father was beaten up (canned six strokes) by chiefs askaries for trying to resist the takeover of his 100 acre land by Kikuyus in 1974/75. My 5 brothers , 6 sisters and I were squeezed into a 5 acre plot. I still remember the names of every Kikuyu who took-over the land. We became friends and freely lived together for years while the tension simmered underneath.
From the experience, I now understand the Kalenjin psychology and behavior than I thought I did. They rarely express their real inner feelings until when they cannot hold it anymore. From the takeover of my father´s land, the resistance by the Kalenjins intensified and I remember my father and the neighbors taking their bows, arrows and spears to go to war against the Kikuyu and the government. They managed to win the first day pushing the Kikuyus and the government surveyors and askaries towards Molo. But then, they bounced back few days later fully reinforced with police armed with guns and many of the local people were shot dead or wounded. Many including my father chose to give in and lost their land. Our land was gone forever. The land was later recovered during the 1992 war but it went to the kalenjin grabbers who by then had acquired good skill in the Kenyatta´s nyakua philosophy. So, the landless are still landless despite the reclaimed land. The tension and bitterness still simmers from within.
During the early years of independence, people from central province were provided loans from the government to buy land in the Rift Valley. They formed many land buying companies to acquire such lands. I guess the locals did not see the need to rush to grab because they believed the land was rightly theirs but was taken away by the white settlers. They saw no sense in the government declare their land available for everyone. So they stayed put while others rushed to purchase and grab. Today the suspicion and the watch, wait and see? attitude is turning into real bitterness and hatred.
Why did the government in the first place utilize the law of the jungle to sharing out the resources? Is it not similar to what is happening in Zimbabwe today? White farmers have been dispossessed of the land haphazardly causing the worst food shortage in Zimbabwe?s history. Not only that, but there is now tension among the Africans themselves because the acquired land is going to the selected few. Mungiki of Central Kenya on the other hand, now know that the government dispossessed them of land in central and damped them in Rift Valley in the name of Nyakua.
Seeing what was going on in Kenya, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, the then vice president, wrote the Not Yet Uhuru and as a result, fell out of favor with Kenyatta government. Moi on the other hand compromised and stayed on to take the presidency in 1978 for 24 years but brought the country to its knees economically.
Chepkube and Magendo business was part and percel of this Nyakua policy. I remember those days along the Nakuru-Eldoret- Kisumu or Nairobi-Uganda highways were opportunities for a few to get rich. Many Kikuyus lined up or hid in the bushes around Mukinyai, Salgaa, Aremi in Elburgon and Sachangwan hills waiting for slow moving lories so that they could climb up and offload the goods while the lorry negotiated the difficult terrain. This was completely an accepted moral by Kenyatta as long as you were not caught. And if by bad luck you were caught, Kenyatta often in his radio address explained that you mention not his name in your defense. What kind of moral foundation did this trend impact on our modern society overtaken by corruption and especially central province people who are notorious in breaking banks and other economic installations? Is it not the cause for the fear, suspicion and tension in the country today?
2007 GENERAL ELECTION AND THE NYAKUA BUSINESS
It was all about Nyakua. What happened in last year?s general election has now raised the fear of the’Kenyan people to another level. Over 350,000 people were displaced from their homes, their properties destroyed and many killed in the most brutal manner. Reasons? Nyakua. The government tried to nyakua the elections and democratic rights of the Kenyan people. Did this have t to happen? Could it have been prevented? Can it be prevented in the future? Could it happen again? According to the way the situation has been handled by the government, many now feel it is no longer whether there will be another crisis in Kenya, rather when it will happen. Of course, Kenyans are optimist people and talk against this fear. But many IDPS have complained that distribution of humanitarian aid has followed the ?Nyakua? policy in favor of one community. That the state resources have been used to construct police stations to protect one community against the other. Most state corporations and parastatals are headed by people from one community. The coalition government has failed to portray true power sharing. The Mt. Kenya leaders including the justice and constitutional affairs minister continue to incarcerate innocent young people who were rounded up in Kisumu, Eldoret, Kericho, Coast and in Kibera, Nairobi. These were mainly the opposition strongholds. The big guys responsible for the mess are still free and earning millions in office. Nothing is being done to fix the past inequalities and injustices. In reality, to the common Kenyan, it implies that the policy is still the same: to silence the rest of Kenyans and continue the policy of Nyakua. The fear, justified or not, is that the past mistakes have not been addressed. Until the past is confronted honestly, the fear will continue to build momentum and explode at a vulnerable time.
The Nyakua policy Today
The fear now is no more pegged on Kikuyu-phobic, than in the fear of the system itself. The NYAKUA PHILOSOPHY has now embedded itself in the system and in every social-economic fabric of the country to its core. Many point to the recent repossession of Grant Regency Hotel and its mysterious sale plan as part of the Nyakua ideology. Another good example is our own mps and leaders who are among the best paid in the world and yet they resist every suggestion that their pay be subject to taxation like every other Kenyan. They earn upto a million shillings monthly while the ordinary 50% of Kenyans earn average of 10,000 shillings a month. The rest of the population upto 40% in the rural, earn nothing at all. Leaders can no longer be reliable. They change their stance every day depending on who takes them home for dinner and what and how much they can grab for themselves in a particular party’s affiliations. Today they will talk about new constitution, but next day, they go into oblivion of silence watching to see what they will gain from that step. It is no longer about the interests of the country but self greed and self interests. It is about grabbing for one self in the shortest time possible. It is about Nyakua business. Nyakua will destroy Kenya if not confronted immediately.
The only surviving brother of Mzee Kenyatta, Peter Muigai Ngengi, claims that after their father (the father of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta) died and even before his body was lowered into the grave, Kenyatta ordered for removal of the beacons dividing Ngengi’s and Kenyatta’s land and his arrest. Ngengi says he was arrested and taken to Gatundu colonial prison as his house was demolished.
The President is said to have ordered later that Ngengi and his family be built a house in Mutomo on government land. Ngengi says he was moved together with his family to Munyu near Ndarugu River in the middle of the wilderness with no tent or permanent structure to call a home. Many of his children and grandchildren died of malnutrition.
Ngengi says he continues to suffer and languish in poverty and believes the Kenyatta family threw him out of his land because of greed. Ngengi alias Wakameme says that Kenyatta and his family took his land to satisfy their desire to expand their home to attain to the status of a presidential palace.
He claims in the court papers that the Kenyatta family owns huge chunks of land in the country. Ngengi pleads with the court to give him justice before he dies so that his children will benefit. “I pray that before I close my eyes in death I will get help. Countrymen, I fought for independence. God gave it to us. As for me it meant persecution and torture. http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-88646/kenyatta-kin-sues-mama-ngina-over-grabbed-land
Who’s Killing Kenya’s Jumbos?
Jon Tinker, New Scientist 22 May, 1975
At the present rate of attrition, Kenya’s elephants may be exterminated within a decade. Although the Kenya government banned the private export of ivory last August, Margaret Kenyatta, mayor of Nairobi and the daughter of the President, has since then illicitly sent over 6 tons worth $200,000, to People’s China.
Most of the world’s surviving elephants—and most of the ivory—come from the savannah and rainforests of east and central Africa: from Zaire and the rest of the Congo basin, from Tanzania, from Uganda, and from Kenya. By bullet and poison arrow the elephants are slaughtered, to make billiard balls and piano keys, delicate carvings and tourist curious—and to lie in the bank vaults of the shrewd and the rich as yet another hedge against inflation or revolution.
Kenya has perhaps 120 000 elephants, and every year between 10 000 and 20 000 are being killed for their ivory. At this rate, the Kenyan elephant will be virtually extinct within a decade. Kenya’s ivory trade is currently worth $10 million a year, but little of this money goes to poachers. Not much goes to the government of Kenya either, for officially it has banned all private dealings in ivory. The profits made by a few merchants in Nairobi and Mombasa, who bribe the game department and the wildlife ministry, the customs and the police to let them ship ivory by the ton to Europe, Hong Kong, Japan and People’s China.
The identity of these ivory queens is a matter of common gossip in Nairobi, and the most prominent of them are said to be Mama Ngina and Margaret Kenyatta, respectively wife and daughter to the President. In Kenya today, you can be sent to prison for what is called rumour-mongering, so in this article I shall confine myself to provable fact. And there is now documentary proof that at least one member of Kenya’s Royal Family has recently shipped over six tons of ivory to Red China. Moreover, in spite of repeated denials from the Kenyan wildlife ministry that they have issued any licences to deal in or export raw ivory, this trading is being carried out with the active connivance of the highest officials in the game department.
On March 5, 1975 customs officials at Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport held up an ivory shipment due to be flown to Hong Kong; over 4000 kilograms worth around $140 000. According to the customs, the documents were “irregular”; according to the Daily Nation, the shipment lacked an export license. A few months earlier, on December 29, 1974, a raid on a warehouse belonging to a Mombasa brick company in Nairobi’s industrial area found around 800 large tusks of 25-30 kg each, packed ready for shipment. Their value was placed at $1.4 million, but within a few days the haul had mysteriously shrunk to 295 tusks worth only $55 000. Although the name of the firm owning the ivory—a notorious Nairobi curio merchant—is well known in every bar, no arrests or charges have yet been made. Indeed, the same firm successfully exported at least one further large consignment of illicit ivory within a month of the raid.
Through the 1960s, the world ivory market was stable at the traditional price of £1 per pound; $6 per kilo. At the end of 1969, prices tripled to around $18, and in November 1972, they tripled to around $55. The second price rise is widely thought to have been engineered by a few big suppliers holding back their stocks: a classical instance of cornering the market. As prices peaked at $80, the word spread back to poachers throughout Africa. During 1973 and 1974, elephant-killing reached an all-time high. Today, the glut has lowered the price to $30-35 per kilo, although large tusks still fetch as much as $50.
With money of this sort at stake, the government’s half-hearted ban on ivory trading has had little chance in Kenya’s freebooting, entrepreneurial society. The “Harambee” (let’s-do-it-together) spirit which Mzee Jomo Kenyatta symbolized in the heady years after Independence has since 1970 given way to an unprincipled scramble for power and riches among the new ruling class—and surly, discontented rumblings among the people. As MP Martin Shikuku put it in 1972: “There is a wholesale grabbing of money in Kenya … These big men steal public funds, and they have friends of influence, and they get away with it.” Corruption is widely considered to start at the top, and Kenyatta’s Royal Family is the target of increasing dislike.
It is against this background that poaching in Kenya must be seen: a lucrative trade which involves the police, the civil service, the game department and at least one of Kenyatta’s closest relatives.
Who, then, was exporting so many tons of ivory to Red China (or to Hong Kong and Japan, depending on which documents one believes)? The exporter was the United African Corporation (Kenya) Limited, whose offices are on the third floor in the IPS Building on Kimathi Street, Nairobi. This company (unrelated to a Unilever subsidiary of similar name) was incorporated under Kenya law on September 8, 1964 “to carry on business as merchants, exporters, importers, growers, manufacturers, commission agents, brokers and warehousemen of commodities of every description…”. Its initial shareholders were two Zanzibari merchants, two Mombasa merchants, and a lady from Nairobi.
This lady at first held a 16 per cent share-holding in the £K 5000 company, but by September 30, 1974 she owned a 49 per cent stake worth a nominal £K 12 250. Today, she is chairperson of United African Corporation. She is also the Mayor of Nairobi. She is also the daughter of Kenya’s first President. She is Miss Margaret Wambui Kenyatta.
I rang the offices of United African Corporation, and spoke to the company secretary, Britisher Keneth Pusey. Could he tell me something about his company’s activities? “I don’t think my directors would want me to do that. They like to keep a low profile.” But surely, I said, one of his directors was Margaret Kenyatta, Mayor of Nairobi. “That’s why we like to keep a low profile,” he replied. Well, was it true that his company was engaged in ivory export? “No comment.” Was he refusing to deny that UAC was in the ivory trade? “I don’t know you, bwana, so I think we’d better cease this conversation.”
Kenya’s wildlife does indeed belong to the wananchi, the people of Kenya. It should not be treated as the private fief of the present ruling elite, a wasting asset to be ravaged and plundered into Swiss bank accounts. It is hard to believe that President Kenyatta can personally be aware of the way in which his own immediate family is involved in the ivory trade, and friends of Kenya must hope that since facts have now replaced persistent rumour, he will act decisively to save the inheritance of his people.
Pio Gama Pinto (Independent Kenya’s first martyr): http://www.goacom.com/culture/biographies/gamapinto/#gen
Argwings-Kodhek:
It is of interest to note that history has now indicated that the death of C.M.G. Argwings-Kodhek earlier in 1969, attributed to a road accident, may not have been such. An exhumation the body of this once powerful minister, who was also a close confidant of Kenyatta’s, suggested that his death was actually the result of a gun shot fired from a police-issued rifle. Many close to the family actually believe that this was President Kenyatta’s first political assassination. Closely held family records indicate that former cabinet minister Paul Ngei actually identified the police vehicle that carried the assassins to the ambush point on Hurlingham Road (now Argwings-Kodhek Road). The vehicle in question was part of Vice-President Moi’s Vice-Presidential Escort detail. The testimony of former cabinet minister Andrew Omanga, then C.M.G.’s Permanent Secretary indicate that when Omanga met him lying in the road shortly after the ‘accident’ C.M.G. stated that he had a ‘shock’ and that he heard a ‘gun shot’. Formerly powerful Attorney-General Charles Njonjo confirmed as C.M.G. lay dying the next morning that the ‘wounds are consistent with gun shot wounds’. It is commonly known that Kenyatta, frustrated with Oginga Odinga, had already notified Argwings-Kodhek that he was going to be appointed Vice-President — a position C.M.G. had turned down and suggested that it be given to Moi, instead of Mboya — to become the first African to join the colonial Legislative Council.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mboya
Tom Mboya: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/Thomas-Joseph-Odhiambo-Mboya-s-murder—the-return-of-one-party-State/62356
Tom Mboya Funeral: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NghXDf2tZo
Cabral Pinto: The Spirit of J.M. Kariuki Cries for Justice: http://kenyapolitical.blogspot.com/2009/03/cabral-pinto-spirit-of-jm-kariuki-cries.html
Some noted political assassinations:
Although Kenyatta did not instigate ethnic clashes, he targeted eminent persons from ethnic groups that he felt were a threat to his leadership. Many people were assassinated including Pio Gama Pinto (Kenyan Indian), JM Kariuki (Kikuyu) Tom Mboya, D.O Makasembo, Arwgings Kodhek (all Luo) Ronald Ngala (Mijikenda of Coast), among others.
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/46094
Land ownership:
The extended Kenyatta family alone owns an estimated 500,000 acres approximately the size of Nyanza Province according to estimates by independent surveyors and
Ministry of Lands officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
http://blog.marsgroupkenya.org/?p=92
An article from Duncan Ndegwa’s book, “Kenyatta’s Struggles”:
http://www.propertykenya.com/news/443872-insiders-view-of-jomo-kenyatta—president-farmer-and-family-man.php
Hi,
Though i’m ‘new’ to you all, however, i’d humbly like to hereby express my views on the subject simply cause there really is a need for all to thoroughly do our homework proper!!
Having said that, let me assure fellow Kenyans in the diaspora that most of what really happened and is being said isn’t th ‘Gospel Truth’ per se.
Please, let us all study the issues deeper and go all out to researching on things like what John Perkins calls “Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man”-(available on Youtube.com)- where he goes on to mention things like an “Economic Hit Man”, “The Jackals”, and even the “Military Intervention” when the other two fail!!
Now, my question to you all is- How many of us are aware of this?
The reality is we still need to go deeper than ‘politickin the Kenyan Style’
How battle of the classes became tribal
Saturday, 21 April 2012 10:26 Written by The Standard By WAINAINA NDUNG’U
Few Kikuyu will admit to participating in the oathing in Gatundu in 1969, let alone disclose what they entailed.
One elderly Nyeri resident who at first confessed to having taken one oath developed cold feet when asked about the details. Like the oathing done during the Mau Mau era, the Gatundu rituals were not always conducted with willing participants. And, like the oathing two decades earlier, they faced strong opposition from Christian groups within the community and soon came to an end.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a Kikuyu said: “I’m going to Gatundu for a cup of tea,” it often meant something else. Those seeking political or economic favour would marshal delegations to visit Gatundu and pledge their loyalty to the embattled President Kenyatta. There was talk that some of these delegations also took oaths to defend the ‘House of Mumbi’, the name given to the central Kenya community.
Kenyatta’s biographer Jeremy Murray Brown wrote: “Ridges of Kikuyu-land seethed with activity as lorry-load after lorry load made its way to Gatundu to ‘have tea’ with the president.” Brown writes that the oathing quickly got out of hand. “Enthusiastic but crude sycophants targeted committed Christians, leading to a protest from the Church and a call for an end to the oathing from the president.”
Simple oaths
The simple oaths, which had many variations, often involved biting some bitter leaves dipped in animal blood or biting, chewing and swallowing a piece of goat meat and pledging loyalty to the government of the day. This tribal exercise came after close to a decade of ethnic power struggles that finally boiled over with the 1969 assassination of Cabinet minister and Kanu Secretary-General Tom Mboya.
In the book, Church, State and Society in Kenya, Galia Sabar writes oathing ceremonies were imposed on the Kikuyu to foster unity and ensure Kenyatta and his ruling clique kept their grip on power. That grip had been badly shaken after the assassination of Mboya, a powerful Luo ally of the President, galvanised support for KPU, the Luo-dominated opposition party led by Oginga Odinga.
The gunman was believed to be Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, a Kanu member put to the task by an unknown munene (big man).
There has all long been talk Mboya was being groomed for bigger things. Many historians believe his killing was linked to his attempts – at Kenyatta’s request – to rid Kanu of corrupt politicians.
Bitter mistrust
Many of them were already envious of his high-profile role in fighting Odinga and the communist threat. The assassination divided not only the Luo and Kikuyu, but also the ‘House of Mumbi itself. A bitter mistrust developed between the Southern (Kiambu) and Northern Kikuyu (Nyeri) over who might be a credible central Kenya successor.
Josiah Mwangi ‘JM’ Kariuki and to some extent Finance minister Mwai Kibaki were fancied in the north, while the south had the more powerful and ambitious pretenders to the throne, including Mbiyu Koinange, Njoroge Mungai, and Attorney General Charles Njonjo.
Sabar writes, “As KPU’s vision of change took hold among sections of the population, existing conflicts within Kanu were sharpened; between Kikuyu and non-Kikuyu… and between Kiambu leaders and the more socialist-inclined Nyeri and Murang’a Kikuyu, from whom most Mau Mau fighters had come and who continued to suffer under Kenyatta’s regime.”
The frustrations included the 1964 refusal to register the Kenya Freedom Fighters Union. In February 1969, two other ex-freedom fighters’ unions – the Kenya War Council and Waliolete Uhuru Union – were banned as “dangerous to the good government of the Republic”.
The ban was linked to the connection of the ex-freedom fighters and their three most prominent political sympathisers: Odinga, Achieng’ Aneko and Bildad Kaggia, who had formed KPU after acrimoniously exiting Kenyatta’s government in 1966.
This relationship between KPU and the ex-freedom fighters arose from a shared view of how Kenya should have dealt with wealth distribution at Independence (see related story). The failure to recover land taken over by settlers or to redistribute wealth was an issue the land-starved ex-Mau Mau and the socialist-minded Kanu leaders agreed upon.
It arose directly from a compromise made during the Lancaster House conferences of 1960, 1962 and 1963 by the Kenyatta/Mboya group, securing independence, but conceding the right to protect settlers’ property. Odinga opposed this deal at Lancaster, favouring wealth distribution. But he lost the battle to Mboya when the latter brought in a respected American jurist who proposed a solution others involved in the negotiations accepted.
Odinga’s unhappiness with the deal was evident from the very early days after Kenya became independent.
A Time magazine article from June 1965 read the situation thus: “Ever since Kenya became independent two years ago, Jomo Kenyatta’s rallying cry has been harambee (Swahili for “all pull together”). Most Kenyans have been quite happy to put aside their tribal and political rivalries and give pulling together a try. The notable exception: Oginga Odinga, 54, Vice-President of the nation.”
The US magazine, whose writers may have held anti-communist biases, wrote of Odinga travelling around the country “heaping red-tinged scorn on Kenyatta’s ties with the West”.
The VP went as far as to tell a rally in Nyanza that Kenyatta was taking instructions from the UK and US, prompting five party leaders to sign a petition demanding his resignation. Kenyatta bided his time then dropped the VP from a delegation to the British Commonwealth conference.
Unnamed people
He then gave a speech criticising unnamed people who he said wanted to trade Kenya’s colonial masters for new ones.
“Some people deliberately try to exploit the colonial hangover for their own selfish purposes, or in order to serve some external force,” the President said. “We must reject such people publicly. It is naive to think that there is no danger of imperialism from the East. In world power politics, the East has as many designs on us as the West.
This is why we reject Communism. To us, Communism is as bad as imperialism. What we want is Kenya nationalism. There is no place for leaders who hope to build a nation of slogans.”
Nine months later, Odinga led a walkout from Kanu to the newly formed KPU. Kanu responded by amending Kenya’s constitution to force a ‘little general election’ in which KPU was only able to win parliamentary seats among the Luo in Nyanza province, whereas its candidates in then Kikuyu-dominated Central province were trounced. There followed three years of political harassment and detention of party leaders.
The final act for KPU was the confrontation over Mboya’s death in 1969 at the New Nyanza General Hospital (now the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital). Kenyatta and Odinga traded abuse at the opening of the Soviet-funded facility. As the president was leaving, his motorcade was stoned and at least a dozen people shot dead by the president’s bodyguards.
Not long after, KPU was banned and Odinga detained for two years.
Released in 1971, Odinga went into political limbo until Kenyatta’s death in 1978.
The decade saw the ailing Kenyatta and others close to him continue to feed their greed for land at the expense of the poor, particularly the Northern Kikuyu most closely connected to the forest Mau Mau of the early 1950s. Odinga would later say Kenyatta had degenerated from a statesman to a simple land grabber. The statement would cost him his post as chairman of the Cotton Lint and Seed Marketing Board, with Kenyatta’s successor promptly sacking him after angry reactions from then powerful Constitutional Affairs Minister Charles Njonjo and others.
Then President Daniel Arap Moi would later place Jaramogi under house arrest for agitating for multi-partyism. He died on January 20, 1994 aged 83.
Additional reporting by John
I think that we were unlucky though in the sense that our leading tribe, the Kikuyus, also unfortunately happened to have settled in the land most covetted by the white invaders. The sociological trauma of a whole community getting uprooted overnight and being enslaved on their own land perhaps created an experience that can only be paralleled to the african american identity disembodiment experience. It doesnt help that the custodians – (Kenyatta and the Kiambu Mafia) – left with the charge to restore order took it upon themselves to not only disenfranchize their own kith and kin but also to create imaginary enemy scapegoats to deflect on the injustice they had done to the land. In a sense we are all paying the high price of a disembodied Agikuyu community trying so desperately to restore the ancient order in a world that has already fallen apart. While the rest of Kenya is trying to find ways of getting onto the globalization bandwagon, Kikuyus are trying to restore hegemony of nyooba ya Mombi.
KENYATTA’S ‘NYAKUA’ PHILOSOPHY and POLICY WILL DESTROY KENYA
By David Bett
The Nyakua philosophy has not only created tensions among Kenyan different tribes, but has also caused the economic disparities and inequalities in Kenya. Its recent development into major economic corruption and election dishonesty, is threatening to create hatred and drive the country into untold civil war. Most of us who were old enough, remember the 1960s and 1970s when Kenyatta personally took upon himself to promote the NYAKUA philosophy in the newly independent Kenya. I was a young boy then and I used to really get scared because it sounded like declaring war among Kenyans. What the philosophy really meant was that whoever is able to grab should grab all that he could whether land or goods including financial resources. We all remember Magendo and Chepkube business. It was a philosophy of survival for the fittest; law of the jungle style.
In my community, people talked of Kikuyus coming to take the land and render the locals landless or kill them. Every time Kenyatta spoke on the radio, especially because he was fond of addressing the nation in Kikuyu, many felt that the Kikuyu who were strategically positioned in the government, were preparing to start MAU MAU war against other Kenyans so that they could grab (nyakua).
Now it seems that the fears were precisely what they were. At that time, the coastal people requested Kenyatta for tractors and farm machineries to help them till their land and Kenyatta responded well; he sent Kikuyus in thousands to till the coastal land. He, himself Nyakuad (grabbed) thousands of acres there. So, the land tilling problem was solved in the coast. In the Rift Valley, thousands of Kikuyus were moved from central province to grab the huge farms left behind by the white settlers. But it went beyond the white settlers? farms. In some areas like in Molo/Olenguruone, about fifteen thousand(15, 000) Kikuyus were moved from central province and given free land against and at the expense of the locals. I remember when my 70 year old father was beaten up (canned six strokes) by chiefs askaries for trying to resist the takeover of his 100 acre land by Kikuyus in 1974/75. My 5 brothers , 6 sisters and I were squeezed into a 5 acre plot. I still remember the names of every Kikuyu who took-over the land. We became friends and freely lived together for years while the tension simmered underneath.
From the experience, I now understand the Kalenjin psychology and behavior than I thought I did. They rarely express their real inner feelings until when they cannot hold it anymore. From the takeover of my father´s land, the resistance by the Kalenjins intensified and I remember my father and the neighbors taking their bows, arrows and spears to go to war against the Kikuyu and the government. They managed to win the first day pushing the Kikuyus and the government surveyors and askaries towards Molo. But then, they bounced back few days later fully reinforced with police armed with guns and many of the local people were shot dead or wounded. Many including my father chose to give in and lost their land. Our land was gone forever. The land was later recovered during the 1992 war but it went to the kalenjin grabbers who by then had acquired good skill in the Kenyatta´s nyakua philosophy. So, the landless are still landless despite the reclaimed land. The tension and bitterness still simmers from within.
During the early years of independence, people from central province were provided loans from the government to buy land in the Rift Valley. They formed many land buying companies to acquire such lands. I guess the locals did not see the need to rush to grab because they believed the land was rightly theirs but was taken away by the white settlers. They saw no sense in the government declare their land available for everyone. So they stayed put while others rushed to purchase and grab. Today the suspicion and the watch, wait and see? attitude is turning into real bitterness and hatred.
Why did the government in the first place utilize the law of the jungle to sharing out the resources? Is it not similar to what is happening in Zimbabwe today? White farmers have been dispossessed of the land haphazardly causing the worst food shortage in Zimbabwe?s history. Not only that, but there is now tension among the Africans themselves because the acquired land is going to the selected few. Mungiki of Central Kenya on the other hand, now know that the government dispossessed them of land in central and damped them in Rift Valley in the name of Nyakua.
Seeing what was going on in Kenya, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, the then vice president, wrote the Not Yet Uhuru and as a result, fell out of favor with Kenyatta government. Moi on the other hand compromised and stayed on to take the presidency in 1978 for 24 years but brought the country to its knees economically.
Chepkube and Magendo business was part and percel of this Nyakua policy. I remember those days along the Nakuru-Eldoret- Kisumu or Nairobi-Uganda highways were opportunities for a few to get rich. Many Kikuyus lined up or hid in the bushes around Mukinyai, Salgaa, Aremi in Elburgon and Sachangwan hills waiting for slow moving lories so that they could climb up and offload the goods while the lorry negotiated the difficult terrain. This was completely an accepted moral by Kenyatta as long as you were not caught. And if by bad luck you were caught, Kenyatta often in his radio address explained that you mention not his name in your defense. What kind of moral foundation did this trend impact on our modern society overtaken by corruption and especially central province people who are notorious in breaking banks and other economic installations? Is it not the cause for the fear, suspicion and tension in the country today?
2007 GENERAL ELECTION AND THE NYAKUA BUSINESS
It was all about Nyakua. What happened in last year?s general election has now raised the fear of the’Kenyan people to another level. Over 350,000 people were displaced from their homes, their properties destroyed and many killed in the most brutal manner. Reasons? Nyakua. The government tried to nyakua the elections and democratic rights of the Kenyan people. Did this have t to happen? Could it have been prevented? Can it be prevented in the future? Could it happen again? According to the way the situation has been handled by the government, many now feel it is no longer whether there will be another crisis in Kenya, rather when it will happen. Of course, Kenyans are optimist people and talk against this fear. But many IDPS have complained that distribution of humanitarian aid has followed the ?Nyakua? policy in favor of one community. That the state resources have been used to construct police stations to protect one community against the other. Most state corporations and parastatals are headed by people from one community. The coalition government has failed to portray true power sharing. The Mt. Kenya leaders including the justice and constitutional affairs minister continue to incarcerate innocent young people who were rounded up in Kisumu, Eldoret, Kericho, Coast and in Kibera, Nairobi. These were mainly the opposition strongholds. The big guys responsible for the mess are still free and earning millions in office. Nothing is being done to fix the past inequalities and injustices. In reality, to the common Kenyan, it implies that the policy is still the same: to silence the rest of Kenyans and continue the policy of Nyakua. The fear, justified or not, is that the past mistakes have not been addressed. Until the past is confronted honestly, the fear will continue to build momentum and explode at a vulnerable time.
The Nyakua policy Today
The fear now is no more pegged on Kikuyu-phobic, than in the fear of the system itself. The NYAKUA PHILOSOPHY has now embedded itself in the system and in every social-economic fabric of the country to its core. Many point to the recent repossession of Grant Regency Hotel and its mysterious sale plan as part of the Nyakua ideology. Another good example is our own mps and leaders who are among the best paid in the world and yet they resist every suggestion that their pay be subject to taxation like every other Kenyan. They earn upto a million shillings monthly while the ordinary 50% of Kenyans earn average of 10,000 shillings a month. The rest of the population upto 40% in the rural, earn nothing at all. Leaders can no longer be reliable. They change their stance every day depending on who takes them home for dinner and what and how much they can grab for themselves in a particular party’s affiliations. Today they will talk about new constitution, but next day, they go into oblivion of silence watching to see what they will gain from that step. It is no longer about the interests of the country but self greed and self interests. It is about grabbing for one self in the shortest time possible. It is about Nyakua business. Nyakua will destroy Kenya if not confronted immediately.
Kenyatta kin sues Mama Ngina over ‘grabbed’ land
The only surviving brother of Mzee Kenyatta, Peter Muigai Ngengi, claims that after their father (the father of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta) died and even before his body was lowered into the grave, Kenyatta ordered for removal of the beacons dividing Ngengi’s and Kenyatta’s land and his arrest. Ngengi says he was arrested and taken to Gatundu colonial prison as his house was demolished.
The President is said to have ordered later that Ngengi and his family be built a house in Mutomo on government land. Ngengi says he was moved together with his family to Munyu near Ndarugu River in the middle of the wilderness with no tent or permanent structure to call a home. Many of his children and grandchildren died of malnutrition.
Ngengi says he continues to suffer and languish in poverty and believes the Kenyatta family threw him out of his land because of greed. Ngengi alias Wakameme says that Kenyatta and his family took his land to satisfy their desire to expand their home to attain to the status of a presidential palace.
He claims in the court papers that the Kenyatta family owns huge chunks of land in the country. Ngengi pleads with the court to give him justice before he dies so that his children will benefit. “I pray that before I close my eyes in death I will get help. Countrymen, I fought for independence. God gave it to us. As for me it meant persecution and torture.
http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-88646/kenyatta-kin-sues-mama-ngina-over-grabbed-land
According to estimates done by the independent surveyors and Ministry of Lands, Kenyatta’s land may be little or more than 500,000 acres.
The parcel of lands include;
10, 000 acre Gichea Farm in Gatundu.
5, 000 acres in Thika.
9,000 acres in Kasarani Mwiki
5, 000-acre Muthaita Farm.
24, 000 acres in Taveta
50, 000 acres in Taita,
29, 000 acres in Kahawa Sukari along the Nairobi—Thika highway stretching all the way to Kilimambogo Hills in Ukambani.
Others include:
10, 000-acre ranch in Naivasha.,
52,000-acre farm in Nakuru
20,000-acre one, also known as Gichea Farm,
10, 000 acres in Rumuruti,
40,000 acres in Endebes in the Rift Valley Province.
i have also come across one in south coast and Lamu
Others are:
Brookside Farm, Green Lee Estate,Njagu Farm in Juja, a quarry in Dandora in Nairobi
Most of this land is uncultivated.
Who’s Killing Kenya’s Jumbos?
Jon Tinker, New Scientist 22 May, 1975
At the present rate of attrition, Kenya’s elephants may be exterminated within a decade. Although the Kenya government banned the private export of ivory last August, Margaret Kenyatta, mayor of Nairobi and the daughter of the President, has since then illicitly sent over 6 tons worth $200,000, to People’s China.
Most of the world’s surviving elephants—and most of the ivory—come from the savannah and rainforests of east and central Africa: from Zaire and the rest of the Congo basin, from Tanzania, from Uganda, and from Kenya. By bullet and poison arrow the elephants are slaughtered, to make billiard balls and piano keys, delicate carvings and tourist curious—and to lie in the bank vaults of the shrewd and the rich as yet another hedge against inflation or revolution.
Kenya has perhaps 120 000 elephants, and every year between 10 000 and 20 000 are being killed for their ivory. At this rate, the Kenyan elephant will be virtually extinct within a decade. Kenya’s ivory trade is currently worth $10 million a year, but little of this money goes to poachers. Not much goes to the government of Kenya either, for officially it has banned all private dealings in ivory. The profits made by a few merchants in Nairobi and Mombasa, who bribe the game department and the wildlife ministry, the customs and the police to let them ship ivory by the ton to Europe, Hong Kong, Japan and People’s China.
The identity of these ivory queens is a matter of common gossip in Nairobi, and the most prominent of them are said to be Mama Ngina and Margaret Kenyatta, respectively wife and daughter to the President. In Kenya today, you can be sent to prison for what is called rumour-mongering, so in this article I shall confine myself to provable fact. And there is now documentary proof that at least one member of Kenya’s Royal Family has recently shipped over six tons of ivory to Red China. Moreover, in spite of repeated denials from the Kenyan wildlife ministry that they have issued any licences to deal in or export raw ivory, this trading is being carried out with the active connivance of the highest officials in the game department.
On March 5, 1975 customs officials at Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport held up an ivory shipment due to be flown to Hong Kong; over 4000 kilograms worth around $140 000. According to the customs, the documents were “irregular”; according to the Daily Nation, the shipment lacked an export license. A few months earlier, on December 29, 1974, a raid on a warehouse belonging to a Mombasa brick company in Nairobi’s industrial area found around 800 large tusks of 25-30 kg each, packed ready for shipment. Their value was placed at $1.4 million, but within a few days the haul had mysteriously shrunk to 295 tusks worth only $55 000. Although the name of the firm owning the ivory—a notorious Nairobi curio merchant—is well known in every bar, no arrests or charges have yet been made. Indeed, the same firm successfully exported at least one further large consignment of illicit ivory within a month of the raid.
Through the 1960s, the world ivory market was stable at the traditional price of £1 per pound; $6 per kilo. At the end of 1969, prices tripled to around $18, and in November 1972, they tripled to around $55. The second price rise is widely thought to have been engineered by a few big suppliers holding back their stocks: a classical instance of cornering the market. As prices peaked at $80, the word spread back to poachers throughout Africa. During 1973 and 1974, elephant-killing reached an all-time high. Today, the glut has lowered the price to $30-35 per kilo, although large tusks still fetch as much as $50.
With money of this sort at stake, the government’s half-hearted ban on ivory trading has had little chance in Kenya’s freebooting, entrepreneurial society. The “Harambee” (let’s-do-it-together) spirit which Mzee Jomo Kenyatta symbolized in the heady years after Independence has since 1970 given way to an unprincipled scramble for power and riches among the new ruling class—and surly, discontented rumblings among the people. As MP Martin Shikuku put it in 1972: “There is a wholesale grabbing of money in Kenya … These big men steal public funds, and they have friends of influence, and they get away with it.” Corruption is widely considered to start at the top, and Kenyatta’s Royal Family is the target of increasing dislike.
It is against this background that poaching in Kenya must be seen: a lucrative trade which involves the police, the civil service, the game department and at least one of Kenyatta’s closest relatives.
Who, then, was exporting so many tons of ivory to Red China (or to Hong Kong and Japan, depending on which documents one believes)? The exporter was the United African Corporation (Kenya) Limited, whose offices are on the third floor in the IPS Building on Kimathi Street, Nairobi. This company (unrelated to a Unilever subsidiary of similar name) was incorporated under Kenya law on September 8, 1964 “to carry on business as merchants, exporters, importers, growers, manufacturers, commission agents, brokers and warehousemen of commodities of every description…”. Its initial shareholders were two Zanzibari merchants, two Mombasa merchants, and a lady from Nairobi.
This lady at first held a 16 per cent share-holding in the £K 5000 company, but by September 30, 1974 she owned a 49 per cent stake worth a nominal £K 12 250. Today, she is chairperson of United African Corporation. She is also the Mayor of Nairobi. She is also the daughter of Kenya’s first President. She is Miss Margaret Wambui Kenyatta.
I rang the offices of United African Corporation, and spoke to the company secretary, Britisher Keneth Pusey. Could he tell me something about his company’s activities? “I don’t think my directors would want me to do that. They like to keep a low profile.” But surely, I said, one of his directors was Margaret Kenyatta, Mayor of Nairobi. “That’s why we like to keep a low profile,” he replied. Well, was it true that his company was engaged in ivory export? “No comment.” Was he refusing to deny that UAC was in the ivory trade? “I don’t know you, bwana, so I think we’d better cease this conversation.”
Kenya’s wildlife does indeed belong to the wananchi, the people of Kenya. It should not be treated as the private fief of the present ruling elite, a wasting asset to be ravaged and plundered into Swiss bank accounts. It is hard to believe that President Kenyatta can personally be aware of the way in which his own immediate family is involved in the ivory trade, and friends of Kenya must hope that since facts have now replaced persistent rumour, he will act decisively to save the inheritance of his people.