J M Kariuki, the political celebrity who was murdered 35 years ago this week, crafted an enviable political career doing what many in his day considered suicidal. He fearlessly took on founding President Jomo Kenyatta, always criticising him for having betrayed the course of the struggle for independence. In his day, speaking ill of or even criticising the President was considered political sacrilege.
JM would awe his audiences with open criticism of the manner in which the government was parcelling out land repossessed from British colonialists for the benefit of the elite who thought little of ordinary people. For his audacity, JM was felled by an assassin.
If his style and manner attracted powerful enemies, it also attracted spellbound admirers in equal measure. One such admirer was Lawrence Ngacha, the then deputy headmaster at Nairobi Primary School. JM’s son, John Kariuki, was a pupil at that school.
“He was a caring parent and would discuss the progress his child was making in school to the last detail. He’d be there to bring John to school, pick him up for half term and end of term and that’s how our friendship grew. I admired JM. He was courageous, even fearless,” Mr Ngacha told the Sunday Nation last week.
“He often went to the University of Nairobi to deliver lectures.” His most famous quote was: “Kenya has become a nation of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars.” He aired even more biting observations to his audiences;
“We fought for independence with sweat, blood and our lives. Many of us suffered for inordinate days – directly and indirectly. Many of us are orphans, widows and children as a result of the struggle. We must ask: What did we suffer for, and were we justified in that suffering?”
The acquaintance between JM and Mr Ngacha turned into friendship over time. In 1974, when JM contested the Nyandarua seat, he did it under difficult circumstances as all his campaign rallies were cancelled. Veteran lawyer Duncan Mindo was the man who helped JM coordinate his 1974 campaign.
“He was a hunted man,” Mr Mindo told the Sunday Nation . “We had to hide him in a room at the Sunset Hotel, and I would move to his constituency back and forth, supervising. I would then come back and update him since there were no cell phones in those days. I was using three vehicles.”
“On the week he died, JM came to school,” Mr Ngacha said. “We struck up a conversation. I had wanted him to tell me how he had won with a landslide despite the frustration from his powerful enemies, and I led him into my office.
“As we talked, he told me that he had prepared a pamphlet running 39 pages as his election manifesto, and that is what he had used to circumvent those who had cancelled his meetings. He walked to his car and brought me a copy. He repeatedly mentioned the then Rift Valley PC Isaiah Mathenge, a Mr Thuo and a Nakuru civic leader as the men who were frustrating him. And not once did he mention Kenyatta,” recalled Mr Ngacha, who in later years would venture into civic politics and rise to be Nairobi’s deputy mayor.
But Mr Ngacha noticed signs of a subdued man, unlike his usual charismatic self. “As the conversation deepened, he spoke of what he believed must have been an assassination attempt a week earlier,” Mr Ngacha said. As JM drove up Valley Road near the Panafric Hotel, he told the stunned teacher, a gunman had fired shots in his direction but missed. The teacher suggested that he leave the country for his safety, but the man swore he’d rather die in Kenya.
Mr Ngacha escorted JM to his white Mercedes 200 and that was the last time the friends would shake hands. Three or four days later, the government announced that JM was missing. The former Nyandarua North MP was murdered in early March 1975; his body was abandoned on a hyena path in the Ngong Hills.
Before his death there had been a spate of bombings in Nairobi. The day before he disappeared a bomb had exploded near the OTC depot, killing 27 people. On that day, JM had met Ben Gethi, the commandant of the General Service Unit (GSU), and had talked on the phone with Peter Kinyanjui who went by the alias “Mark Twist” and who was described by the parliamentary probe committee report on the murder of JM as “a criminal of the worst possible character”.
On the Sunday JM is thought to have been killed, he had attended a racing event at the Ngong Racecourse where he was seen with Gethi. They were later seen together at the Hilton Hotel, which they had left separately. According to the report, JM was murdered between one and two hours later under circumstances that remain unclear.
If he had rattled the Kenyatta government in his lifetime, he shook it to the core in his death. The President would, on an almost daily basis, feature in the news. After JM’s death, the public mood was so bad that the President did not appear in public for almost two weeks. When he did emerge, it was with an unprecedented show of might, complete with military salutes.
“I recall on an occasion when I had attended a house party hosted by a banker named Warugongo where Ben Gethi, JM, Charles Mukora and other dignitaries were. They appeared to be very close friends from the way they conversed, though I was surprised that JM kept his critical streak even then. But when I later heard that Gethi’s name was mentioned in connection with the murder, I was shocked,” Mr Ngacha said.
The post-mortem report indicated that five shots fired into his body had caused his death. During his life some saw a contradiction between JM’s wealth and his politics which he built on the altar of speaking for the poor. He was a wealthy man who owned huge tracts of land and many horses.
At the time of his death, JM was a millionaire. It is not clear how he amassed his fortune so quickly without somehow engaging in the same vice he so strongly criticised. His family did not benefit from his wealth as his political enemies conspired against them.
“I was his lawyer, and I can tell you JM was not immensely wealthy -- not in the terms that we know today of immense wealth among some people ... But his heart was connected with the poor,” Mr Mindo said. Before venturing into politics, JM had served as the personal secretary to Mzee Kenyatta. The fallout started over JM’s strong views against the way the President was running the government.
After independence, the British Government gave the Kenyatta Government funds to buy back land from the white settlers and redistribute it to Kenyans. However, the redistribution was skewed, and much of the land was handed out to the local political elite.
