On the 12th floor of Protection House, at the junction of Parliament Road and Haile Selassie Avenue, Philip Ochieng was sitting on a swivel chair – his legs, as usual, on the table.
Behind him was a shelf full of books and a mahogany coat hanger. A designer coat was hanged revealing the pocket square – a fashion statement since antiquity days.
On the desk were more books – and a pile of unpublished stories. There was a bin, as I came to learn later, of ‘dead-on-arrival’ stories: The unsalvageable; the unreadable. There was a manual Olivetti typewriter on the table, its ribbon in place, and an unfinished story neatly held by the rubber rollers.
These were the offices of Weekend Mail, a publication that was financed by State House insiders – among them Franklin Bett and a city lawyer, Simon Mauncho. Philip had just been kicked out of Kenya Times, and this was his new baby, whose chairman was a publisher, Tom Openda. A new newsroom – away from the troubled KT - had offered him a lifeline. Philip looked happy.
The computer age had hardly spread to newsrooms. Stories would be typed on the manual typewriter and two carbon copies – one for the sub and one for the chief editor – before being re-typed with the changes and taken for typesetting. Unless he was reading, PO, as he was fondly known, would hang his reading glasses on his neck with a lanyard. It was the early 90s and President Moi had won a disputed election against Kenneth Matiba and a divided opposition.
Kenya Times editor-in-chief
Since his days as the Kenya Times editor-in-chief, Philip had shown his aversion to pro-democracy champions whom he dismissed as “thieves and ne’er do wells”. He once dismissed the US Ambassador, Smith Hempstone, as the nyama choma envoy, much to the chagrin of diplomats.
It was my second visit to Weekend Mail – which had published my first full-page article on Louis Leakey: The Man who doubled as Mau Mau hunter, at night, and as paleontologists, during the day. I was to bring a sequel on how Leakey lost the Njoro River cave beads, retrieved from the earliest known human cremation site in Africa. I was an archeologist, or I wanted to be – before I met Phillip. Writing was a hobby.
As I dropped my typewritten article to Ann, Philip’s secretary, she told me that PO wanted to see me. “Kijana, have a seat. What are you doing with yourself…?” I mumbled something about archaeology. “Forget about the dead! Do you want a real job?” He stood up. It was lunch time. He reached the shelf and retrieved two books, The Kenyatta Succession and his newly published, I Accuse the Press. “Come, ” he said while giving me the two books.
“This is Andrew Ngwiri (now Nation columnist Magesha Ngwiri). He will show you where to sit.” I took one of the empty seats.
Besides Philip and Ngwiri, the only other person was Senda wa Kwayera, the news editor. Senda trained me how to type, how to fix the ribbon, and how to estimate the story length, by the number of folios. A week later, I was sent to go and look for David Karanja, an anthropology third-year University of Nairobi student who had been sending articles. While in first year, Karanja’s first novel, The Girl is Mine, had been published by East African Educational Publishers and he was working on his second book, A Dreamer’s Paradise.
Two polished business writers, George Kimenyi and Michael Otieno, soon joined us.
I was to be hired alongside Karanja, but after the accountant, a Mr Kirui, paid us as correspondents, we found we could earn thrice the amount we had asked. Weekend Mail had the best pay for correspondents. Later, somebody complained to Philip that we were earning like editors and I heard that Philip dismissed the person.
“Let the boys earn,” he said, according to Ann.
The cracking of Philip’s Olivetti typewriter as he banged copy with two fingers, his jokes and generosity, was what we loved most about him. He loved long reads and loved academic research. He had also brought in a historian, Prof Ben ole Kantai, into the board and Philip always insisted that I write a history feature.
But the sales of the paper with a blue masthead were embarrassingly low. Kenneth Matiba’s Ford Asili had dominated Nairobi politics. He was the love of Nairobi and any publication that attacked him, or his “Moi must go stand”, had no place among the vendors. Then the flow of cash seemed to stop. And twice, I remember, Kirui sent me and Karanja with a note to Exchange Bank to collect our pay. Exchange Bank was Kamlesh Pattni’s bank, which was at the centre of the Goldenberg scandal. His instructions were that we hand the envelope to the lady at the counter. We did and got some money.
When I saw Philip’s name among those who had received the Goldenberg cash, and his later admission that he received Sh250,000 when Weekend Mail was troubled, I remembered Kirui’s note. “What is shocking in the Justice Samuel Bosire report, later in 2006, is that it is completely silent on the rest of Sh6 million and says not a single word about Bett and Mauncho, the two individuals who had instigated the Weekend Mail and involved me in it, or Openda who acted as our executive chairman and was in charge of its financial transactions,” said Ochieng in his autobiography, The Fifth Columnist, written by Liz Gitonga-Wanjohi.
If this was the money that we were busy munching, I would be as guilty as sin. I was then poached from Weekend Mail by my friend Kamau Ngotho, who had been asked to look for writers for a new pro-opposition weekly, The People, financed by Kenneth Matiba. We whitewashed the Weekend Mail and other political publications out of town – but not Ochieng.
Philip Ochieng and Joseph Karimi’s book, The Kenyatta Succession had thrust the two into the limelight.
As I came to learn later, the Head of Criminal Investigations Department, Ignatius Nderi, had shared some of the intelligence files (Ochieng denied when I asked him) with his first cousin, Joseph Karimi, and through the connivance of the Charles Njonjo camp, they managed to weave the Ngoroko story about an assassination plot on Moi supporters.
The book gave credence to Moi’s purge on the security agencies in the Rift Valley, but interestingly, he never disbanded the anti-stock theft unit, which was touted by Ochieng to have been the hit squad. He had alleged that a group had wanted to use this unit to stage a palace coup if Kenyatta died in Nakuru.
It was Njonjo who had first revealed the existence of Ngoroko and it is not surprising – and Ochieng says as much in I Accuse the Press. “Njonjo is reported to have described it as a very good book.”
The hidden story is on page 40 of I Accuse the Press: “Karimi supplied most of the facts , especially with regard to the so-called Ngoroko Army, which Njonjo had claimed had been set up by the Kihika-Koinange-Mungai nexus to try to prevent Moi from succeeding Kenyatta…”
“Secondly, the co-authorship caused certain well-known Njonjo confederates, such as the powerful Nderi family (to which Karimi belongs), to appear as angels in a game in which nobody was an angel.”
Newspapers found themselves in an awkward position. "If the Nation felt uncomfortable about the book, The Standard reacted to it with pained embarrassment," according to Weekly Review.
There was a reason for that. During the ill-fated change-the-constitution movement, The Standard supported it through Henry Gathigira, its Editor-in-Chief, while the Nation opposed it via George Githii. Now Githii was in The Standard.
Gathigira was so stung by the general thrust of the book that he feared that he may have done a major blunder by supporting forces out to block Moi. This scared him and he penned a remorseful column desperately trying to prove that whatever else he might have been in the past, he had always been close to Kenyatta and Moi. But he was not to blame. The Standard was then part of the Tiny Rowland Lonhro empire whose local chief executive was Udi Gechaga, Dr Njoroge Mungai’s nephew.
But as soon as Moi came to power, Tiny Rowland jumped to his side and recruited Charles Njonjo’s village friend and editor George Githii into Standard. Here, he would start a campaign to bully Vice-president Mwai Kibaki.
Githii wanted to serialise Kenyatta Succession: “(He) tried everything, including a cash offer much bigger than what we finally accepted from the Nation, to serialise in The Standard ,” wrote Ochieng in I Accuse the Press. It was in this book that Philip admits that the reason Njonjo described the Kenyatta Succession as “so good” was “because of a well-known fact that the book suffers from certain serious faults which were not remediable at that time”.
Recruited best journalists
The story about a plot to riddle Kenyatta’s body with bullets, if he died in Nakuru and later blame it on the anti-Moi group was farfetched. But with that, the Kanu mainstream loved Philip – and he remained close to Moi’s heart. When Robert Maxwell bought a stake in Kenya Times, and shipped the first colour press in the country, Ochieng was invited to lead the newly designed paper.
He recruited the best journalists in town, started poaching those he wanted and gave them a good pay. He changed the face of journalism and gave them freedom to write. The man just loved good copy and not material things.
That was before the push for multiparty saw him side with Kanu, and with no apologies.
Our paths later crossed at the Nation. Much had happened in between, but he was still the good man – always clutching a book; always a good editor. He was the only man who continued to churn copy – until senility caught up with him in his final years.
He was a journalist caught between fast-paced politics of succession and survival – but never stopped writing.
