The mourning mood is palpable and the questions on what led to Sunday helicopter crash innumerable.
The sense of loss over deaths of two ministers, two pilots and two government VIP security guards, is unbearable.
As is usual with VIP deaths in Kenya, conspiracy theorists are having a field day in face of contradictory statements by State officials.
The claims the crash could be the work of saboteurs is added fire by The Hague’s court admission that the late Internal Security minister Prof George Saitoti, was one of its key witnesses. Now, it is not clear if this was simply on the basis that his office was for some time the conduit or liaison for communication between International Criminal Court and Kenya Government.
Indeed, Saitoti was for a time acting Foreign minister while also chairing the Cabinet sub-committee on ICC-related matters. It is not inconceivable that because he was the direct recipient of ICC requests for certain evidence and documents from the government he could have put himself in a precarious situation given the sensitivity of what was passing through his hands.
But given that the sub-committee, which worked like a Clearing House for Kenya-ICC logistical and evidentiary cargo, was made up of Cabinet members from both sides of the Grand Coalition, it is unlikely Saitoti knew anything the others did not.
But even if we dismiss this claim as wild and a figment of the imagination, we also need to stop and look at the state of anxiety in the country over the upcoming ICC trials.
powerful forces
Riding on the back of the wild claims is the fact Saitoti was a Presidential candidate, and whether right or wrong, it is inevitable that claims he was a target for elimination cannot be ruled out. After all, we have a pattern of unresolved political assassinations targeting popular or influential politicians.
The fact that assassinations linked to powerful forces in government have taken place before makes it impossible to turn away the Kenyan mind from this pattern by suspicion, unless by way of truly independent and transparent investigations.
Anything short of this will only let the deaths of Saitoti, his assistant minister Joshua Ojode, as well as security officers Joshua Tonkei and Thomas Murimi, as well as police pilots Nancy Gituanja and Luke Oyugi, be subject of speculation for years to come.
We also owe it as a national duty and out of moral conscience to leave no doubt in the minds of the families of those who died in the crash, that the cause is made clear. It may be bitter, assuming it turns out the helicopter came down out of malfunctioning or failure of key systems and parts, or out of negligence or error of judgement on the part of those either piloting or guiding it from the ground.
The other reason why the team picked on Monday led by Justice Kalpana Rawal to head the investigations into what actually transpired must go through this task with a tooth comb, is that those killed were senior security officials and potential targets of terror groups that have detonated explosives across the country.
If, and God forbid, they ever had access to the helicopter, then that is the reason we must really fear for the safety of others in similar positions in the security network. After all only out of naivety can one argue against the fact that as part of its propaganda and strategies for instilling fear in the hearts of security forces, what better way than for Al-Shabaab to target the Minister for Internal security and his principal deputy in the hierarchy of the Grand Coalition Cabinet?
We must also appreciate the role Saitoti and Ojode were playing in the country’s protracted and often stifled war against drug lords, who are notorious for eliminating those out to cut off their lifelines. There is even talk that Saitoti or Ojode was about to give Parliament a breakdown of the people investigations have linked to drug cartels in the country.
free hand to hire
But even if it was an inevitable accident from either electrical or mechanical failure, or even a non-deliberate error in judgement by the pilots, the country needs to and is ready to confront that bitter truth — so long us it is just that, not a cover-up as we have seen in past cases of crashes.
The fact that the burden of unravelling the causes of this crash has been thrust on the shoulders of Appellate judge Kalpana Rawal, who is not an aviation or air accident investigator, may be unsettling, but for now we need to give a chance to pursue the missing link. She will after all be working with experts, who we believe she will be given the free hand to hire.
Finally, the investigations team must not focus on just the much-talked about last five minutes of the ill-fated flight, but the all rundown of acquisition of the helicopter, its maintenance, and the pre-flight arrangements as well as the state and competence levels of the pilots.
