Late President Daniel arap Moi.
When Mutula Kilonzo was elected the chairman of the Law Society of Kenya in 1982, the result did more than fill a line on the Society’s letterhead. It announced a new phase in the Bar’s cosy relationship with the State: an era in which the LSK would live on a knife-edge between confrontation and capture.
Through Mutula, Moi was able to bring LSK under tighter control at a moment when dissent was beginning to surface among lawyers and scholars at the University of Nairobi. With the growing rift of the Cold War era, Moi sought to portray his critics as “Marxists” promoting a “foreign ideology.” Much of the media and legal fraternity failed to present the broader context and fell into the same trap, neglecting to recognise these critics as champions of democracy and openness. Weekly Review, for instance, castigated Moi's opponents as people “trying to glorify ideas that were foreign to their traditional and cultural values.”
A young Mutula Kilonzo (centre) when he was chairman of the Law Society of Kenya. Here he is seen chatting with Attorney-General Mathew Guy Muli (left) and Vice-President Mwai Kibaki.
The era of capture
At the same time, Moi faced a dilemma over how to handle former detainees he had released and how (or whether) they could be reintegrated into national politics. If he continued to limit their freedom of association, he risked appearing no different from Kenyatta.
In mid-April 1980, Moi issued his first warning to would-be dissidents, insisting that he would deal with them firmly. He also cautioned those “scrambling for power” that he would have them detained if they failed to toe the government line.
Two university lecturers—Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, then chair of the University Staff Union (USU), and Willy Mutunga, the union’s secretary-general—pushed back, defending the university and its autonomy. This defiance drew the ire of the authorities: publicly replying to the president was effectively forbidden. Nyong’o was subsequently arrested.
Mutunga, for his part, later issued an ultimatum on August 1 demanding that the government restore academic freedom. As he put it: “We must be left alone to exercise this freedom.”
In June 1982, Kenya had become a de jure single-party state, when Parliament amended the constitution to insert Section 2A, making KANU the only lawful political party. It was a period when Oginga Odinga had attempted to register an opposition party.
Moi became paranoid – and started a crackdown on dissent. LSK, in a tail-between-the-legs detour, opted for silence under Mutula Kilonzo.
Koigi Wamwere during an interview with The Nation at his Sauti ya Mwananchi offices in Nakuru County on October 17, 2023.
In August 1982, politician Koigi wa Wamwere and Nairobi law lecturer Willy Mutunga (later chief justice) became the eighth and ninth individuals to be detained. Lecturer Maina wa Kinyatti was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for possessing anti-government pamphlets, and journalists were likewise arrested and jailed. In November 1982, James Orengo—then on trial for forgery and theft—jumped bail and fled the country, while fellow Luo MP Onyango Midika was imprisoned for theft. The 1982 coup attempt also became a pretext for sweeping changes in the police and the army, as well as renewed efforts to discipline the LSK and academia—part of Moi’s broader push to ensure these institutions were loyal to him personally.
The Society had learnt, through intimidation of its vocal members, and through surveillance, arrests, court gags and administrative sabotage, that speaking out could bring punishment. The Bench had also been compromised, and Moi had his way through the courts. The Moi state had learnt, just as clearly, that openly crushing the Bar was costly, noisy, and internationally embarrassing. The contest would be fought less through blunt bans and more through subtler methods: leadership contests, faction-building, and the slow work of bending an institution from within.
Kilonzo’s rise came after a decade in which the LSK had become, almost against its own instincts, one of the few institutions capable of talking back to power in language power could not easily dismiss.
But Moi governed through a familiar rhythm of reward and punishment, using the Special Branch’s James Kanyotu to discipline dissent and using patronage to cultivate loyalty. Some lawyers not only became the conduit of state corruption but were embedded into the system where silence and survival were Siamese twins.
The church, however, proved difficult to discredit, and the clergy carried moral authority and, crucially, did not look like a rival for State power. Lawyers, too, were awkward targets. They had international professional networks; an attack on an advocate could invite scrutiny from abroad in a way that a crackdown on students or unionists often did not. That international glare did not protect lawyers from harassment, but it raised the cost of open war.
Court of Appeal judge GBM Kariuki. Justice Kariuki had accused the Directorate of Criminal Investigations head of refusing to give him a Certificate of Good Conduct in time to apply for the positon of Chief Justice.
The rise of activism
In 1984, LSK members decided to rescue the organisation and elected a firebrand GBM Kariuki as their new chairman. Kariuki used LSK to fight back against the state’s excesses and brought some new fillip to the body. Charles Njonjo was now facing a commission of inquiry that was investigating his past and Lee Muthoga, a past LSK chairman and Njonjo critic, had been brought as lead counsel and to have a last word on Njonjo. Moi was also busy reorganising his politics and throwing out Kenyatta-era politicos. Obedience to the president became the national ideology.
It was GBM who confronted Kanu’s queue voting by declaring it unconstitutional and undemocratic. The pro-Kanu legal lobby dismissed Kariuki and mobilised opposition from within. Amidst that, another voice, Gibson Kamau Kuria, emerged to defend government critics in court. Others who had emerged in 1982 were two young lawyers, Gitobu Imanyara and Moses Wetangula, who had defended the Kenya Air Force soldiers charged with mutiny.
In February 1987, the government detained LSK’s most vocal member, Kamau Kuria, after he filed a habeas corpus application on behalf of Mirugi Kariuki, another LSK member. Kuria’s arrest signalled something new: legal work itself could be treated as political defiance. The detention drew domestic and international attention and pushed the LSK into open battle. As the Society became more outspoken about human rights abuses, the government responded with administrative weapons—regulations that would require annual practice licences and measures that, in the eyes of many advocates, were designed to make the right to practice law feel like a permission slip issued by the State.
Around the same period, the judiciary became another front. Justice Schofield refused to let the matter of the extrajudicial killing of Mbaraka Karanja fade into administrative dust. He condemned police conduct as “callous to the extreme,” ordered the exhumation of the body, demanded an independent post-mortem, and transferred the inquest from Eldoret to Nairobi. Rather than agree to a transfer to drop the case, Schofield resigned and left the country.
Before he left, the LSK hosted a dinner in his honour. Teddy Aswani, the Solicitor-General and reportedly the only senior government law officer at the event, was later fired. The lesson to the legal world was blunt: independence would be punished; solidarity would be punished too.
If the executive could not comfortably crush the LSK, the body bomb it from within. In 1989, KANU’s Stephen Mwenesi, an LSK member, suggested affiliating the LSK to KANU “to enhance national unity.” Lawyers reacted with outrage. Moi publicly rejected the idea as “absurd and obnoxious,” but his rejection came with a smear: lawyers, he said, were “brainwashed” and acted as “puppets” of foreign masters.
By the end of the 1980s, the LSK chairmanship was no longer a ceremonial prize; it had become a referendum on whether the Society would confront the Nyayo state or accommodate it. Fred Ojiambo, the cautious professional at the top, became a lightning rod. Activist lawyers accused him of being the wrong kind of leader in the wrong moment—too willing to avoid collision with a State that had already chosen collision.
Safina Party founder Paul Muite during the party's leadership transition ceremony at Ngong Racecourse in Nairobi on September 18, 2025.
The Muite revolution
It was the election of Paul Muite that would end the era of conservative lawyers. Muite’s candidacy was a war declaration. The Nyayo regime, now skilled at division, circulated the argument that Muite intended to use the Law Society as a political ladder and, more darkly, as an ethnic vehicle. Reform-minded lawyers answered with a manifesto urging colleagues to match words with action. Kamau Kuria emerged as the fiercest voice of the activist camp. Muthoga tried to play peacemaker, writing to both sides and begging for a ceasefire in the language of professional honour. But the conflict had moved past etiquette. For Kuria and other human rights advocates, the issue was existential: if lawyers would not defend constitutional rights, who would? For the pro-government camp, the issue was the survival of the Society’s “professional” character: a Bar that looked like an opposition movement, they warned, would invite ruin.
The LSK chair, Fred Ojiambo, cancelled the LSK’s biennial conference after officials expressed disquiet over its themes and presenters. When activists sought a special general meeting to remove Ojiambo, the struggle moved to court. Injunctions were sought to stop polls and meetings. Moi himself weighed in publicly in support of Ojiambo. It was now clear that State House supported Ojiambo.
The showdown returned in 1991. On March 9, Paul Muite won the LSK elections for chairman. At the AGM, Mutula Kilonzo—now leading the pro-government faction—attempted to block the reading of the scrutineers’ report, arguing that unresolved litigation from the previous year made it improper to proceed. Joe Okwach supported him. The meeting voted them down and declared the results. It then carried a motion urging repeal of the Preservation of Public Security Act, a direct challenge to the legal architecture that sustained detention and repression.
LSK was now the new opposition, led by Muite. GBM Kariuki, long associated with fearless activism, returned to the Council. Willy Mutunga became vice-chairman. Martha Karua joined the leadership. For the Moi state, this was not merely a professional election; it looked like the organised legal profession aligning itself with the wider pro-democracy movement.
Mutula Kilonzo, now a Moi lawyer, declared open war. If Muite were elected, he said, they would fight him from day one. After the results, he urged lawyers to form a coalition to remove Muite and his “clique,” accusing him of political posturing and of turning the Society into a platform against the government.
Muite responded by doing what he had promised: making the LSK speak. That very evening, he hosted a dinner attended by judges and delivered a speech that was both a warning and an indictment. The greatest threat to public security, he argued, was not outspoken lawyers or clergy or opposition figures; it was the government itself. He called for respect for freedom of association, the registration of new political movements, and the release of detainees, naming leading opposition figures and reminding members to remember Gitobu Imanyara, the publisher of the radical Nairobi Law Monthly.
A judiciary compromised
The backlash was immediate. Moi warned that “politics” in the LSK threatened the administration of justice. Pro-government lawyers moved to court and obtained injunctions restraining the Council from issuing “political” statements and campaigning for multipartyism. The plaintiffs included Aaron Ringera, Philip Kandie, Nancy Baraza and Nesbit Onyango—names that would become synonymous, inside the profession, with the attempt to gag the Society through the judiciary.
Despite a court order, Muite and his Council refused to be contained. They appealed the orders and, in the meantime, tested them. On May 13, 1991, Muite convened and presided over a Council meeting and later issued a statement arguing that elected leaders did not forfeit constitutional freedoms of conscience and speech. The response was a contempt application. For months, the case turned the courts into a national stage: lawyers appearing in droves, public crowds gathering to listen, international observers watching Kenya’s judiciary test its own credibility.
The Kanu Secretary General, Joseph Kamotho, advised the government to deregister the LSK. Moi declined, aware that deregistration would invite stronger international censure and possibly sanctions. Instead, he returned to the language of internal capture: there were enough “patriotic” lawyers, he said, to vote out “subversive” ones. Control would be achieved not by decree, but by politics.
Former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga during an interview with the Sunday Nation in Nairobi on October 22, 2021.
Political migration
The multiparty debate had started, and LSK was at the centre. The Society used its international standing to press for reforms and demanded that emerging political movements be registered. When multiparty politics was legalised, political competence migrated from the LSK to political parties. Many of the activist lawyers who had carried the Society’s confrontational energy moved into formal opposition structures.
That shift left the Society both freer and more vulnerable. Freer, because it no longer carried the entire national burden of dissent. Vulnerable, because politicians had learnt how to penetrate it, how to build factions within it, how to turn its elections into proxy battles.
With multi-partyism in place, LSK elected Willy Mutunga as its chairman, echoing the wind of change that was billowing. As a former Moi detainee, Mutunga brought back glory to the body and intellectualism.
Later elections within LSK became a proxy war between the government and opposition, between tribes and affiliations. More so, the body was infiltrated by the intelligence, and candidates would be lined up into these proxy wars, knowingly – or unknowingly.
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