Today marks 38 years since Nyandarua North MP, JM Kariuki, was picked up from the Nairobi Hilton Hotel by senior police officers only for his badly mutilated body to be found a few days later in Ngong Forest. In 2008, I wrote this article which was published in The Standard Newspaper. I share it again today as a tribute to a man who was assassinated when I was in Standard 2, but whom I grew to admire for what he lived and died for.
Posted on 01 April 2008
Note: Josiah Mwangi
Kariuki (March 21, 1929–March 2, 1975) was a
Kenyan socialist politician during the administration of the Jomo Kenyatta
government. He held different government positions from 1963, when Kenya became
an independent country, to 1975, when he was assassinated.
By Njonjo Mue
Had he lived a full
life, Josiah Mwangi Kariuki (popularly known as JM) would have turned 79 last
Friday.
But the late Member of
Parliament for Nyandarua North was brutally murdered on March 2, 1975, three
weeks short of his 46th birthday, robbing Kenya of one of the most dedicated
champions of the rights of the poor and a vociferous critic of inequality.
His death, though
largely acknowledged as a political assassination by people close to the
Kenyatta government, has never been resolved.
With the euphoria
surrounding the national power-sharing deal still in the air and talk of a new
political order in the offing, it is an opportune time to reflect on what JM
stood for, what difference he would have made to our body politic had he lived,
and how to safeguard his legacy and ensure that the ideals he lived and died
for are not lost to a new generation of actors on the social, political and
economic stage.
In the wake of the
crisis that has engulfed Kenya since the disputed election last December, which
plunged the country into unprecedented chaos, it is common ground that the
election results announced by Mr Samuel Kivuitu merely provided the spark that
lit the fire that threatened to consume this nation; the fuel had been
accumulating over a long time.
Tribalism, past
injustices and unequal distribution of resources such as land as well as
pervasive poverty and economic inequalities were a time-bomb ticking away and
waiting to explode.
And yet we cannot say we
did not see it coming, for had we listened to our prophets, such as JM, we
would not have come to this sad place. From the onset of independence in 1963,
JM constantly warned those that seemed to have acquired a new disease of
‘grabbing’ thousands of acres of land while the majority of Kenyans remained
landless.
“This is greed,” he
thundered in Parliament in March 1974, one year before he was assassinated.
“It is this greed that
will put this country into chaos. Let me state here that this greedy attitude
among the leaders is going to ruin this country.”
JM specifically warned
privileged elites from Central Province who were taking advantage of their
positions to buy up land cheaply from other communities.
“They have even gone as
far as Maasailand, saying that they are doing an experiment whereas the whole
Masailand has been taken by those greedy people.”
His insight into the
creeping inequality in the country acquired a prophetic tone when he warned
that if we were not careful, the Kenya would become a country on “ten
millionaires and ten million beggars”.
A walk through the slums
of Kibera, Mathare, Korogocho and Kawangware today clearly illustrates that
this prophesy has sadly come true.
Surrounded by rogues
JM foresaw the danger of
ignoring the youth even before formal independence was granted to Kenya.
“If we forget these
people (the youth)”, he told Parliament on November 14, 1963, “we will find
ourselves surrounded by rogues who are rogues not because they want to become
rogues but because they are hungry and this leads them into temptation. The
Government should take action immediately before the situation goes from bad to
worse.”
He called for a national
assistance scheme for the widows and orphans of those who had been killed in
the war of Independence and affirmative action for people living with
disabilities. He condemned corruption and proposed that no minister or
assistant minister should be allowed to sit on any board of a private company
because this would lead to a conflict of interests.
On freedom, JM reminded
us that political independence was not an end in itself.
“Political independence
without economic independence is like having a wedding without a bride,” he
told Parliament on March 21, 1974. He condemned dictatorship pointing out that
emergent African leadership had perverted democracy to mean “Government by a few
for a few on behalf of many, whether the many like it or not.”
Kenya is a country of
forgetting and moving on. We ignore injustice after injustice until a crisis
such as the one we are struggling to recover from catches up with us.
In these times of national
reflection, one cannot help but wonder how far ahead we would be along the
journey to true nationhood had we listened to prophets and statesmen like JM
instead of killing them; had we taken care of our weak even as we celebrated
our strong; had we understood the simple truth that there is enough to go
around if it is shared equitably; had we resisted the urge to use our positions
to take care of ‘our own’ because we understood that our own included all who
call Kenya home.
Mercifully, it is not
too late to build the Kenya that JM dreamed and spoke of. If we put our hearts
and minds to it, we can be the generation that recovered the promise of a truly
independent and democratic country where the individual and the state work
together to build a just society.
Only then can we be able
to enjoin ourselves to the hopeful vision of JM, proudly proclaimed in 1974,
when he said: “In Kenya today, I can only see the dawn of a June morning rising
majestically from the white oblivion into the serenity of life.”
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