University student missing for 12 years

Mrs Magdaline Mandago at their home in Chepterit village,Nandi County.Her son Mr.Joseph Kipkoech Rotich is yet to be traced 12 years since his disappearance. Efforts to trace him has never bored any fruits.07/3/2016 Photo by ELIUD KIPSANG

Weeks and months have turned into years. And at the end of this month, it will be 12 years since Joseph Kipkoech Rotich was last seen.

Although the wait has been long, his family at Chepterit Village, Nandi County, have not given up hope. They still believe their son will one day make a surprise comeback.

It has, however, been a traumatising time for his mother, Magdaline Mandago, who operates a shop at Chepterit Market on the Eldoret/Kapsabet road.

“I have shed many tears over my missing son. I always see people disembark at Chepterit bus stop and sometimes I think Rotich will be one of them, but it has never been so,” she says.

Rotich, who was a second year student at Kenyatta University, has not been seen since March 29, 2004, when his cousin in Nairobi dropped him in the City Centre.

Rotich, who was 22, was to board a vehicle to his home in Nandi for the April holidays after the end of the first semester. He never got home and has never been heard from ever since.

Mandago said when her son left home for college in January of that year, he was in a rather emotive mood.

“He told us he would disappear to Uganda or Canada. But we did not take him seriously. We gave him Sh5,000 for his accommodation,” Mandago recalls.

When Rotich failed to show up, the family assumed he had gone to visiting but when May 5, 2004 -- the date he was to resume his studies rolled by without any word from him, they were alarmed.

“We started looking for him at our relatives’ homes in Nairobi and they told us he had not been seen,” says Mandago.

It was then that they filed an official missing person report at the Central Police Station in Nairobi, where the police abstract describes Rotich as five feet tall, dark in complexion and speaks Kalenjin, Kiswahili and English.

“We also looked for him in hospitals to no avail. There were no reported accidents during the period he went missing nor any case of an unidentified body,” the sorrowful mother.

While she is optimistic that her second last born, among nine siblings, will one day come back home, she is pained because his husband passed away in 2008 while still asking for his son’s whereabouts.

“Rotich may not even be aware that his father is no more,” Mandago mumbles.

She is convinced her son did not get lost in Nairobi as he had been a student at the university for two years and before that a student at Moi Forces Academy in Nairobi.

She described her son as a disciplined student whose performance in school had brought hope to the family. “He had not been seen taking alcohol or drugs and his character was always good,” she says.

Mandago says she had placed her hope on Rotich to support the family upon completion of his university studies.

“In my heart, I feel my son is alive and look forward to seeing him soon. I appeal with him to come back home and if he is working somewhere out of the country, he should at least contact us,” she says.

Mandago is also asking anyone with information on her son’s whereabouts to reach out to the family via the [email protected] email.