Tom Mboya: The chief architect of bad governance in Kenya

Biographer David Goldsworthy called him “the man Kenya wanted to forget.” That was Tom Mboya. Three bullets stopped his life in the afternoon of Saturday July 5, 1969. It has been half a century since that tragic day when the sun went to sleep with one of the country’s most shrewd and calculating political operatives ever.

In a population whose 80 percent are below the age of 35, the man must remain an oral narrative legend. He is a figure bigger than life itself.

I recall that Saturday afternoon and the next few months after. There are many reasons why I should. In the process, I have obviously wondered what path the country’s history would have taken, had this man lived on. It is hypothetical, in the end. Yet, the mind can’t help wandering and wondering. Where would we be today?

Would we have found the national unity that Mboya and President Jomo Kenyatta often preached? Would Kenya have stayed the powerful economic course she had begun? Would the superclass education that Mboya dreamt of have taken solid root in the country? Would we be the First World country he cherished in his visionary dreams? Would we?

Futile questions, maybe? Tom is dead and the rest is history. Yet in his passing on, he influenced both the direction and the route that his country has since taken. And yes, we are still reaping some of the not-so-wise fruits of his interventions and influence.

But so why should I think about this man, 50 years later? No single individual captured our mind and imagination as striplings in 1969 and for the next few years – certainty not until the assassination of populist politician J.M. Kariuki six years after Mboya.

I was a boy of 11, living in the same neighbourhood with Nahashion Isaac Njenga Njoroge. This was the man who would soon be paraded as Mboya’s assassin. We lived in block V 28 in Nairobi’s Ofafa Jericho estate.

Njoroge lived in block U 3, just a short distance from us. We attended the same school with his two girls and one boy. It was a small world and much of the drama happened around us. The Njenga kids went away quietly – we never got to know where. All the residents of U 3 were thrown out of their homes.

The building was veritably turned inside out, in the search for the killer’s instruments. Meanwhile Nairobi was a sad, violent and dangerous place to be in.

Kisumu and the entire Luo Nyanza went the same way. We lived under a curfew for the longest time I could remember. In Kiambu, they said, people were eating something they called kiapo. There was violence and fear in the slums of Nairobi because of this kiapo thing whatever it was. The kiapo, they said, was supposed to keep Kenyans divided along tribal lines.

They were supposed to be hostile to each other. Kiapo was, therefore, working well. And kiapo and Mboya have bequeathed Kenya with the legacy of political violence, fear and ethnic hate. Would it be different had Mboya lived? Don’t know.

Mboya was himself a great man who made great mistakes. Mama Roselyn used to tell us that he was in a rush to become the President of Kenya. She said that he exposed himself to his enemies too early. As a result, they not only cut him down to size, they snuffed life out of him.

Years later, I understood what Mama was talking about. For, was this not the man who tampered with the Independence Constitution to throw Kenya into a mess that remains unresolved almost 60 years later? 

Mboya it was, who led in the abolition of devolved government in 1965. He schemed to starve the Local Assemblies of cash to the extent that everyone wanted them thrown into the fires of hell. With a small elite political cabal around him, he dissolved the Senate and admitted the Senators to the National Assembly. They got rid of the Local Assemblies and buried devolution.

Mboya introduced a constitutional amendment that simply said the President was above the law – hawezi kushtakiwa. He killed the Opposition in the independence Parliament and made Kenya a de facto one party state.

This man, Tom Mboya, jettisoned Jaramogi Oginga Odinga from Kanu when it was the only party in Parliament. When Jaramogi formed the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), Mboya – Sungura Mjanja – swiftly moved a constitutional amendment requiring MPs who resigned from their parties to also resign from Parliament to seek fresh mandate from the people.

Elsewhere, he had been a trade union leader before independence. Come independence, and he clamped down on trade union leaders. He said that trade unionism had been all right when fighting against serikali ya wazungu. Now, however, anyone saying the kind of things he had been saying was fighting an African government. They should be stopped, Uncle Tom said.

Make no mistake. Uncle Tom’s assassination and the subsequent trauma were terrible things for our country. The seeds of negative ethnicity between two of Kenya’s more populous tribes germinated in these happenings. The bad blood goes on, now under this guise then under the other. Again make no mistake. Fifty years later, we ought to face the facts.

Tom was the chief architect of bad governance in Kenya. He tampered with the Constitution to entrench bad governance. Five decades later, Kenya is still striving to undo what this man Mboya did. When he said that the President was above the law, was he doing this for Jomo, or did he see himself in that position someday soon? When he killed the Opposition, did he do it for Jomo, or was he looking at Kenya through some telescope and seeing himself in Ikulu?

Before Odinga was jettisoned from Kanu, the independence party had two wings – a radical wing and a moderate one. The radical wing assembled around Jaramogi with Pio Gama Pinto as its chief strategist.

Joseph Murumbi, who took over from Jaramogi as Vice President, was also a member of this wing. And there were others. The so-called moderate wing agglutinated around Mboya. It had people like Mwai Kibaki, later President of Kenya, the ambitious Dr Njoroge Mungai, Attorney General Charles Njonjo na wengineo.

This man called Pio Gama Pinto became Kenya’s first political assassination in February 1965-and with it, the use of murder as a tool of political elimination. And some have asked, “Supposing Pinto had lived?” As with the Mboya question, this one is also a hypothetical one. We can never tell what could have happened. For, who knows what sits in the seeds of time?

Yet, kuna vile – when we were small boys – some elders used to wink (knowingly) whenever the assassinations of Pinto and Mboya were mentioned in the same sentence. Yes, kuna vile they used to wink. This man Mboya was truly a great man who made great mistakes. Methinks Kenya would still have gone the same way she has done had Mboya lived, only that she would probably have gone a lot faster. Kuna vile, my friends.

Barrack Muluka is a strategic public communication adviser

www.barrackmuluka.co.ke