Early in my journalism career in the 1990s, I got the scare of my life while attending a political rally addressed by Cabinet Minister Peter Okondo.
I had been assigned to do feature stories in Western Kenya, and happened to share a pool car with the team covering two separate rallies addressed by archrivals Okondo and assistant minister Moody Awori, who were in a vicious war for political supremacy in Busia District.
Okondo was the more crude of the two politicians. On that day, he had issued dubious instructions for journalists to give a blackout to his rival Awori who he derided as nusu waziri (half minister).
For some reason, President Daniel Moi had always appointed Awori assistant minister in successive administrations, earning the man — who was decades later fondly referred to as “Uncle Moody” — the nickname “Professional Assistant Minister”.
Of course, journalists did not heed Okondo’s bush directive and instead gave priority to the Awori rally. We arrived late to find Okondo already addressing a paltry crowd. On sighting the journalists, the visibly angry minister switched to vernacular and asked hired goons he had brought to the meeting to forcibly remove us from his meeting and toss us into Lake Victoria. He referred to us as “Moody Awori dogs paid to tarnish my good name”.
The hired thugs were throwing a cordon on us ready to strike when District Commissioner Ishmael Chelang’a quickly grabbed the microphone from the rogue minister and warned the goons that they would face the full force of the law if they dared touch any journalist.
The administrator asked us to move closer to the dais where he would personally ensure our safety. He also instructed the district police chief to make sure the media crews who had travelled from Kisumu were safely escorted out of Busia.
Such was vintage Okondo, malnourished of decency and loose-tongued. Ironically, he had a good upbringing, was well educated, and widely exposed with an English wife and divorced from another from South Africa. But he seemed to have lost his mind upon joining politics.
He was the first Kenyan African to graduate as a professional accountant, having graduated with first class honours from Cape Town University, South Africa.
On return to Kenya in 1950, he was found to be “too much educated for an African” to get employed by the colonial government or the European and Asian owned companies.
He was, however, given a job by one of the most thriving indigenous businesses of the day, the Luo Thrift Company, owned by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga.
But he soon fell out with his employer on discovering that the business practices at the firm “weren’t quite up to his standards”. He loudly complained that capital in the company till was treated as income; overheads were not factored in, and there was no provision for losses and insurance. He quit in a huff to found his own Okondo School of Commerce. He would co-found the first and most successive indigenous auditing firm, Tysons Habenga.
But the political bug would also bite him and that was when he lost the brakes to his tongue and what Prof PLO Lumumba calls “hygiene” in politics.
When serving as assistant minister for Works in the early pre-independence years, Okondo became the subject of a scathing attack in an editorial comment by The Standard newspaper after he claimed the newly independent nation was “setting too high standards for itself”. Okondo had said Nairobi was not yet ready to have buildings going beyond two storeys because they “were quite unnecessary and not wanted”.
He further claimed the Nairobi Airport was “too opulent” for a country like Kenya, and that Africans were “embarrassed” getting into hotels at the airport because “they weren’t used to such high standards and level of efficiency!” Tourists, he said, “come here to see Africa in the raw. They expect inefficiency, and would probably be happy to get it. It would be more like their conception of Africa.”
The Standard editorial regretted that a government minister could make such “degrading and provocatively heterodox observations on his mother country”.
Later that year when he lost elections, Okondo claimed it was because “elections were won by semi-illiterates who were totally useless, good for nothing to themselves and to the country!” Years later, when he was appointed minister for Commerce, he would tell Parliament that he intended to remove restrictions on imported goods “because most locally manufactured goods were of low quality”.
But his most smelly verbal diarrhoea was directed at rival politicians. At one time when his Busia Kanu branch met and resolved to discipline him, he scorned the move as the “moaning of a band of defeated candidates licking their wounds and attempting vainly to achieve through the back door what they failed to get by the ballot”.
Clerics and journalist were not spared either. He once described the Rev Timothy Njoya as one who had “the wisdom of a fool”, while foreign journalists stationed in Nairobi were to him “well-known lackeys of the Apartheid South Africa”. To Okondo, all Kenyans self-exiled on account of political persecution were “mentally deranged people with morals of alley cats”.
As for the Kanu national disciplinary committee, he said it was “boisterous, bloated and bombastic as to make utter nonsense of truth and reality”. He would later call a press conference in the ministerial boardroom to allege that his political rivals had brought in a hit squad from Uganda to assassinate him, his family and close political associates. Asked whether he had reported the matter to the relevant authorities, he said he had declined to do so as he suspected security organs were working in cohorts with his would-be assassins.
At a burial of assistant minister Achiya Echakara suspected to have been killed in a love triangle, Okondo claimed he was next in the hit list “of staunch supporters of the President targeted for murder”. For maximum impact, he told mourners he didn’t think he would go for “another one week before they kill me!”
He actually lived for another decade to die of cancer. But not before he had “revealed” yet another “plot” to kill him, this time round giving more graphic details. He said his two would-be assassins had their names starting with initials “J” and “S” and had been hired by a rival politician from the neighbouring Samia constituency. He said the two assassins were also responsible for planning cross-border skirmishes that had led to a shoot-out between Kenyan police and Ugandan army officers leading to three deaths.
Okondo’s utterances were a big embarrassment to the government and a diplomatic faux pas coming at a time when Kenyan Foreign affairs ministry had issued a statement saying Uganda was the aggressor, yet here was a Kenyan Cabinet minister claiming the border incident was the work of a Kenyan assistant minister!
Okondo was to make the goof of his life when in August 1990, he warned Anglican cleric, Bishop Alexander Muge of the Eldoret Diocese, that “he wouldn’t leave Busia alive if he dared set foot there”. It was this remark that he is most remembered for.
On August 14, a defiant Bishop Muge, a fierce critic of the Kanu regime, visited Busia in a convoy of three vehicles. He accomplished his mission without incident.
However, on his way back, he was involved in a fatal accident when his vehicle rammed into a stationary lorry on the Busia-Eldoret highway.
The driver of the truck was later found guilty of causing death through reckless driving and imprisoned, only later to be set free under mysterious circumstances.
Okondo’s threat was most likely one of his many thoughtless outbursts, and which some evil person(s) could have taken advantage of. But this time round it cost the minister his job — and reputation. Soon after, he disappeared from the political scene, altogether.
On his death in 1996, he was quietly cremated at Kariokor Cemetery, an irony for a man who had made a career making perplexing statements at funerals!
