A failed coup, a jailed airman and a lover who refused to dump him
Mr David Kisilu Mutua, 69, a former Kenya Air Force sergeant with his wife Ms Elizabeth Kanini, 61, a retired clerk at their home in Kitengela, Kajiado County on August 24, 2022. Kisilu was sacked and jailed after the botched 1982 coup.
What you need to know:
- Airforce sergeant who was three weeks to his wedding was jailed for 20 years by a court martial.
- His young fiancée faced pressure to get another man, but she didn't.
- The couple is now living a life full of worry. Ms Kanini is ailing and the family has no money to fund her medication.
You are 23 years old. Your fiancé is in the air force.
It is three weeks to your wedding and on the day you are to go to the tailor to see how your wedding dress is shaping up, he goes out and doesn’t come back.
The search takes you to police stations, hospitals and mortuaries, but you don’t find him.
After a period of uncertainty over his whereabouts, because many have been killed, you later learn that he has been taken to a court martial and jailed for 20 years.
That means he won’t be back until you are 40 or thereabouts.
As a young, childless woman whose family has received the bride price but whose prospects of a marriage look bleak, what do you do?
Also Read: The six hours that changed Kenya in 1982
Do you get another man and look at the possibility of a brie price refund as some relatives are telling you to? Or do you just wait and see how things pan out?
Years of waiting
Elizabeth Kanini stayed. Some thought it was foolhardy, but she waited.
Call it naivety, but she never once considered him gone. Today, she is 61 and living with her husband David Kisilu Mutua, 69, at their home in Kitengela, Kajiado County.
She is a retired clerk and he was unceremoniously sacked from the Kenya Air Force.
His firing will explain why he disappeared that morning. It was Sunday, August 1, 1982 — the day of the attempted coup against President Daniel arap Moi’s government.
Bride price had been paid in July and the two had just been allowed to live together. Mr Kisilu had also obtained permission to live outside their base in Eastleigh.
He came back that Saturday dog-tired after a taxing three-week exercise session.
By then, he was a sergeant attached to the Air Defence Control Unit, a component of the air force that dealt with engineering, tracking movement of aircraft and other technical aspects of flights.
He remembers telling her not to wake him up before 10 am that Sunday. She didn’t exactly obey that.
“She woke up early to prepare breakfast. At around 8 am, she came back and told me, ‘There are gunshots along Outering Road.’ I told her, ‘Ah, that’s (crime-buster Patrick) Shaw chasing thieves,’” recalls Mr Kisilu.
“She came back again and told me, ‘No, there is something happening.’ But I told her to stop disturbing me. So, she came with a radio. The announcement was: ‘Serikali imepinduliwa. (The government has been overthrown).’ It was a shocker,” he narrates.
He knew he had to head to Eastleigh as soon as possible.
“From a military point of view, this was an emergency. You are supposed to report either to the nearest military establishment or police station and communicate from there or get instructions from there,” he says.
As he left, he knew it would take a while to return home, and he told Ms Kanini as much.
“I told her, ‘From the look of things, I don’t know when I’ll come back.’ I didn’t know it would take more than six years,” says Mr Kisilu.
He would walk from Nairobi’s Umoja estate to Eastleigh to find wanton confusion among the military personnel there.
The initial order was that everyone at the airbase should be armed. Then they heard over the radio that the coup had been suppressed “by a contingent of the Kenya Army”.
Mr David Kisilu Mutua in this photo during his training in Garissa. He was fired and jailed after the botched 1982 coup.
Then he remembers the order that all who were at the airbase keep away their guns at their respective armouries.
Later that day, the communication centre at the base was bombed and there was also machine-gun fire from helicopters.
By then, Mr Kisilu recalls, no one at the airbase was armed as they had agreed to store their guns.
“The army has been creating the impression that we were resisting; that we were fighting back … They wanted to appear like they were securing the area (today’s Moi Air Base),” he says.
“They were accompanied by TV cameras from KBC, and it was childish because there was no resistance.”
Arrest
Later that day, he was among those arrested and taken to Kamiti Maximum Prison, where he stayed till August 11, 1982.
He was later taken to Naivasha Maximum Prison and then returned to Kamiti. On September 28 that year, he was charged in a court-martial at Lang’ata Barracks.
That is where he was jailed for 20 years for “looting and wandering on the streets”.
“But I never left the camp,” he says.
His jailing was announced on the radio, and that is how his wife and other family members knew he was still alive.
“It was on September 29 when they heard on the radio that I had been jailed for 20 years,” says Mr Kisilu. Before then, they had searched for him in vain.
“She (the wife) was going round morgues with my father, searching,” he says.
Over those days, Ms Kanini says, it never really hit her that her fiancé would be gone for decades.
“I never regarded myself as a single woman. For one, I had not accepted that he had gone anywhere, even at the time I didn’t know where he was. I believed that I would see him even on the next day,” she says.
Later, they found a way of communicating through letters and the assistance of friendly prison warders.
Says Ms Kanini: “I knew I was somebody’s wife. There is no way I would go looking for somebody else because David had been jailed. After all, he’s a human being. If he would have gone to jail when we were properly married, would I have left? No. So, I made a decision that I was not going to leave him. And then even my father called me and told me, ‘I’m not going to make any decision for you. The decision you’ll make, I’ll accept it.’ And I knew what he was pointing at. It was like if I didn’t feel like waiting for him, I was free to leave him because the bride price can be returned.”
“I didn’t respond. I just kept quiet and I waited for him until the time we started communicating through letters. Then after that, we were allowed to see them,” she adds.
Seeing an opportunity, a Kenya Defence Forces brigadier tried making moves at Ms Kanini, telling her he wanted a second wife. But she weathered the “harassment” from the brigadier.
Mr Kisilu would later appeal against the 20-year sentence and it was reduced to 10 years.
He had been asked to act as a state witness against some people and have his sentence reduced but he refused.
“I was supposed to witness and have my sentence reduced. Why should you go and testify against someone you’ve never met or whom you last met in 1979? For those who agreed, their sentences were reduced upon review. I remember one was slashed from 23 years to two,” he says.
Reunited
He left prison on May 26, 1989. His wife, who was by then living with his sister in Nairobi, came for him alongside other relatives.
“I won’t tell you how I felt. I don’t know whether I was excited; I don’t know if I was happy. I was just there, thinking, ‘Here I am, an old woman.’ I was now approaching 30. I was just thinking of having children,” Ms Kanini says.
“Straight away, we stayed together and the wedding was forgotten up to today.”
Their two sons were born in 1990 and 1993, and they are living with their parents as they try to make ends meet.
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Mr Kisilu has called us for an interview on the 40th anniversary of the botched coup to get some things off his chest.
We arrive at his home on a Wednesday mid-morning. The household is quiet and you can tell there is no power.
Ms Kanini is seated in the living room, her mask fitted because she has been advised to have it on when interacting with outsiders.
After the pleasantries, Mr Kisilu shows us a red booklet. It is his certificate of dismissal from the air force.
Had he left on good terms, the book wouldn’t have been red.
“It’s a book of shame, really,” he says, noting that most of the information in it, including his final rank at the force, is false.
“It’s a souvenir and I really love it,” he says with a tinge of sarcasm.
Page six of the booklet contains the general assessment, and it rates Mr Kisilu as “fair” in terms of his service conduct.
“(He) was enlisted into the armed forces on March 29, 1973, and attached to AFTC Lanet for basic military training,” it says in part.
One of the messages Mr Kisilu wants to drive home is the “inaccurate” perception that the Kenya Air Force was the main force behind the coup.
Also Read: How Moi brought down ‘traitor’ Njonjo
“The army has really tried to heap the blame on the air force,” he says, noting that he believes it is some elements in the army that carried out the coup but used the air force as the sacrificial lamb.
He says that, given decisions made by the Moi regime in terms of promotions, there was a “poor relationship between the Kenya Air Force and the Kenya Army” by the time the coup happened.
Mr David Kisilu Mutua (back left) in this photo during his time in the Kenya Air Force. He was fired and jailed after the botched 1982 coup.
Listing various things he saw which placed the army at the centre of the coup, Mr Kisilu says many events pointed at the Kenya Army’s involvement in the bloody coup that claimed at least 100 lives.
Most of the deaths recorded that day were a result of shooting soldiers who were at the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation offices.
In 2017, Justices Isaac Lenaola and John Mativo, sitting at the High Court in Nairobi, ruled on a petition Mr Kisilu had filed in 2008 alongside 17 others who had been dismissed from the Kenya Air Force following the coup.
In the petition, the court heard that some families had disintegrated due to the separation caused by incarceration.
Of the many orders, the 18 ex-airmen sought, two were granted by the court.
Damages
One was the declaration that their arrest, detention and torture after the coup “constituted a breach of their rights as provided for in Sections 70(a), 72 and 74 of the repealed Constitution of Kenya”.
The second was the award of general damages for the law violations they were subjected to.
The 18 were awarded varying amounts in damages ranging from Sh650,000 to Sh6.1 million. Mr Kisilu was awarded Sh700,000 and he is not happy with that amount.
“The judgment has an error. If it was based on the days I spent in prison before I was brought before the court-martial. The judges indicated 28 days instead of 59 days,” says Mr Kisilu. “I have never followed up on the payment.”
The couple is now living a life full of worry. Ms Kanini is ailing and the family has no money to fund her medication.
She had heart surgery in India some years ago and a kidney transplant in Eldoret in March. That means she has to take drugs every day and attend tests regularly.
“We rely on well-wishers; those who send. We keep sending messages to friends. Whoever is moved sends a little,” she said as she appealed for any alms to be sent on Pay Bill number 8045507.
Mr Kisilu himself is battling asthma, which he says came as a result of incarceration, and also arthritis.
He wants the government to have a uniform compensation policy against servicemen who were unfairly targeted after the 1982 coup — which caused the disbandment of the Kenya Air Force.
“We’re talking about 900 people, and the state can’t amalgamate those cases. In Uganda, we have about 18,000 in one case and one ruling that set a precedent for another 47,000,” he said.
“We should be exonerated. Let them review how the entire process was carried out. It was flawed,” he adds.
