Wanjigi: Was he Kenya’s least corrupt politician?

If you are a member of a Sacco that occasionally rescues you from the jaws of poverty, you should thank James Maina Wanjigi.

He spearheaded the cooperative movement when he was the Minister for Co-operative Development. Today, Saccos have grown such that renowned coops like Muramati have morphed into Unaitas Microfinance.

Wanjingi was also the Minister for Tourism and MP for Kamukunji at one point, where he has a secondary school named after him in Eastleigh. He is arguably Kenya’s foremost corrupt-free politician.

As the Director of Settlement, he presided over the One Million Acre Project after independence and swears he never allocated himself even an eighth of a quarter of an acre!

The alumnus of Alliance High School graduated from Makerere University College in Uganda with a diploma in agriculture as Robert  F. Stephens notes in Kenya Student Airlifts to America 1959-1961: An Educational Odyssey.

Stephens, alongside Tom Mboya, Dr Gikonyo Kiano and Kariuki Njiiri, selected students for the airlifts at a time Wanjigi was an assistant agricultural officer in his native Murang’a, when Dr Kiano encouraged him to apply in 1958.

Wanjigi was awarded with six other Africans, with David Hopcraft, the only white settler ever to apply for the airlifts.

But nabobs at the ministry couldn’t grant Wanjigi study leave to take up “this prestigious scholarship.”

Wanjigi resigned and earned a Bsc in agriculture in one year from the University of Connecticut. A Rockefeller Fellowship to Stanford saw him graduate with a Masters in Agriculture Economics.

He returned in 1961, but the Establishments Officer thought Wanjigi was “over qualified” for a job! See, wazungus still controlled cash crops in Kenya and Wanjigi was condemned to the small-scale farming section dealing with Africans for  a $2,057 (Sh41,140) annual salary.

The man whose bio, A Shepherd Boy in Search of Virtue, was launched in 2013, made it big in business. He sold to the Catholic Church the vast land on which The Resurrection Garden sits in Karen, where his family own more acres.

His Kwacha Group of Companies holds a controlling stake in the multi-billion Carbacid Investments, where Wanjigi has been chair for 40 plus years.

He also has stakes in Centum (where he was director at independence), East African Cables, KQ, Barclays, Total Kenya, Paperhouse Ltd, East Africa Office Equipment and real estate in Nairobi, Nakuru and Mombasa.

These are besides coffee estates in Murang’a, Nyeri and the 1,000-acre Gitamaiyu Coffee Estate in Ruiru, where milling and roasting is done. His businesses also include the extraction of bio-diesel from the Jatropha tree.