Few men or women live to be 79 years old and leave big marks on society. Among them was Bernard Chege Waruingi, a big man of body and vision who was proud of his mixed Kikuyu-Maasai blood. In choosing, like other people of prominence, to be cremated instead of being buried, he was probably influenced by his father, Kinyanjui Waruingi, who was cremated at Langata. Friends and relatives, therefore, organised ‘memorial’ rather than funeral services, with the climax being at windy Olepolos.
In life, he had an adventurous and rebellious streak. It manifested itself at Alliance High School, forcing the principal to go looking for him and take him back to class, where he displayed brilliance by winning a trip to England because of writing a good essay. He defied odds and expectations by going to Ohio University, where he acquired degrees in zoology and commerce before going to Indiana for a PhD in marketing.
He returned as a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, where, Kariuki Ngotho remembers, he ensured that Kariuki was elected Dean of the Faculty of Commerce. He later used that political acumen to help his youthful friend, Prof George Saitoti, in politics. The two kept close contact. Besides his involvement in national high politics, Waruingi served as a board member of Magadi Soda and advisor to successful corporate entities. Most importantly, he was well known for education advancement and turning a rocky hill in Kisamis into a popular international meat-eating club.
Waruingi was synonymous with the United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) in its transformative period in the 1990s. He quit the University of Nairobi in 1983 to join Lillian Beam, who, as campus director, was trying to stabilise a fledgling USIU-Africa at a hotel in Parklands. It was struggling to be accepted as a university when the idea of a private university in Africa sounded strange. Having started around 1969 as an African branch of the San Diego-based multi-campus United States International University, it had sold its land and frequently changed location.
For that reason, the government reportedly established the Commission for Higher Education (CHE) to regulate private universities, with former University of Nairobi Vice Chancellor Prof Maina Mungai as its first chief executive. With CHE requiring that a university must have at least 50 acres of land for it to operate, USIU had to move out of the hotel environment, and Waruingi would become part of that shift from the hotel to Kasarani, where the family of former minister Jeremiah Nyagah made its 20-acre home available.
Joining a university that was in many ways an experiment and Waruingi liked educational challenges. USIU offered a pre-university programme to boost university entrance grades as a way of attracting students, had few instructors of its own, relied on imported, mostly American temporary instructors through a ‘Teachers for Africa’ programme and on part-time lecturers mostly from public universities. Waruingi’s challenge, therefore, was to help change the public image that USIU was simply a ‘hotel’. He helped in two transitions: the physical shifting from Parklands to Kasarani, and the change of campus directors from Beam to Freida Brown, a former ‘Teacher for Africa’ psychology instructor from San Diego. He also helped to recruit faculty, to publicise the university worldwide, and to ensure that the university received its Kenyan charter to become independent of San Diego. He also helped to create Gretsa University in Thika.
Waruingi, emphasising his maternal Maasai past, remained an educator. He established a Maasai cultural centre between Kiserian and Magadi, planted trees, and named it Olepolos Country Club. His marketing mastery attracted national and global ‘meat eaters’, exposed them to Maasai ways, and changed the environment of a rocky and windy hill. He boosted Maasai cultural heritage, provided opportunities for the youth, and kept dreaming of the next challenge to tackle. The man of Olepolos was unique.
