Kenya has spent the better part of the year in political campaigns with the ultimate price being the election of the President who is also the Head of State.
It is unclear where we’re headed in these heady times, but if we get a president, then he better be like the late Thomas Sankara, the charismatic president of Burkina Faso, who was assassinated 30 years ago this month.
The ‘Che Guevara of Africa’ was cut from a different presidential cloth; he played the guitar and composed his country’s national anthem. He rode bicycles, jogged on the streets of Ougadougou, the capital, minus security detail.
The football-mad military captain eschewed wealth, drove a second-hand Renault 5, the country’s cheapest after auctioning luxury German limos. His presidential palace would have done with a fresh coat of paint.
The man who banned FGM, polygamy and forced marriages had no office air-conditioning (to save on energy bills) and did not want his portrait staring down at Burkinabes. At 33, Sankara rose to power via a military coup on August 4, 1983 and exited the same way on October 15, 1987 — when he got rid of Upper Volta and renamed his country Burkina Faso ‘Land of the Upright Men.’
Indeed, black Africa has never quite had a president like the smiling revolutionary who often tucked a mother-of-pearl pistol in his military belt — a gift from North Korean leader Kim II Sung — and waited in traffic like everyone else.
But that October, 30 years ago at around 4.30pm, a commando unit of the presidential security stormed a meeting Sankara was chairing with collaborators at the presidential palace. “Hold on, I am the one they are mad with,” he said, leaving for the hail of bullets that ended his life at 38. All the collaborators were also killed, except one who pretended to be dead.
At the time of his death, Sankara’s salary was $450 (Sh45,000), with his worldly possessions comprising the aforementioned Renault, four motorbikes and his beloved box guitar when disgruntled soldiers stormed the palace.
His frugality, courageous people-centred leadership and pro-poor reforms did not go down well with his colleagues who thumbed their noses at the Renault 5.
Does any of our presidential candidates - including whoever is not on the ballot — resemble Thomas Isadore Sankara?
Did you know that the 156-room Sankara Hotel in Westlands Nairobi is the only one in Kenya with rain mist rooms as part of its Angsana Spa? But the name has little to do with Thomas Sankara. In Sanskrit, a language in India, the name means ‘a cause of tranquility.’
That former Attorney General Charles Njonjo, a significant investor in the hotel and its chair, is said to have been a great admirer of Thomas Sankara, is neither here nor there in the hotel’s glass-bottomed, rooftop swimming pool.
