On March 27, 1971, Jaramogi (Oginga Odinga) was released from detention and was on his way home.
I remember when I saw Jaramogi step out of the police car, he looked weak and worn down just like he was when we last saw him. He was accompanied by Nyanza Provincial Police Officer (PPO) and was in high spirits, as usual. We later went to his house in Kisumu to take stock of his personal affairs. His transportation company, Lolwe Bus Company, had been run down in his absence. Earlier when Raila (Odinga) came back from Germany, he tried to take over the business from the managers who were fleecing and looting it.
He was not successful as he didn’t have the power of attorney. Jaramogi also wanted to revive the Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation, a public company he founded, because it was also overly mismanaged. When Jaramogi finished taking stock of his businesses, he called me and asked me to resign my position at the municipal council. I quit my job after three years of service to the Kisumu Municipal Council. I became the general manager of Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation and finance director for Lolwe Bus Company. Although the businesses had been run down, I was confident that we could revive them as most of the assets were still in good condition.
We had 20 buses (at Lolwe Bus Company) in serviceable condition and we wanted to purchase more and expand our routes. An American company called TWA Tours was winding up its businesses in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia just as we were laying down our plans for expansion. They had 12 buses, all of them almost new.
The fleet was attached to a bank loan and we agreed to take over the loan. There was no problem in the transaction because the owners of the 12 buses had been servicing their loans very well when we took over. With the new acquisition, we now had a fleet of 32 buses. The General Election of 1974 was just around the corner and I stood for councillor in Kisumu municipality, where I won in East Kisumu/Stadium ward. I thought life was now good and the future looked bright. Little did I know that this was just a lull before a big storm.
In 1975, something strange happened. The manager of National Bank of Kenya in Kisumu, where our loan facility was being serviced, asked me to go to his office. He solemnly informed me that the bank had been informed to recall our loan for the 12 buses. He went on, “If you don’t have all the cash to settle the outstanding loan immediately, we may be forced to engage auctioneers.” I was surprised by the turn of events, because we had been servicing our loan well and had never defaulted. The manager told me our good record did not matter because he was just following instructions.
The house in Kileleshwa, Nairobi, that belonged to Jaramongi Oginga Odinga, which was auctioned to recover a bank loan.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
The National Bank of Kenya was a government owned bank, so it was easy to see where the instructions were coming from. I demanded to know under what powers he was taking such punitive and unfair measures against us. He produced the forms we signed with Jaramogi and asked me to read the addenda somewhere at the bottom written in very small print. It stated that the ‘bank reserves the right to recall the loan balance without giving any reasons whatsoever’.
The manager gave me 14 days to settle all the outstanding debt. Then the auctioneers came. Instead of re-possessing only the 12 buses in question, they took all our 32 buses owned by Lolwe Bus Company.
The auction was done rather secretly, and the buses sold at throw-away or ridiculously low prices. They were not done with us. They came back and said the money was not enough and attached the building which we operated from. It was a huge building smack in the middle of Kisumu town whose cost alone was enough to offset the entire loan with money to spare. Then they sold it and came back yet again insisting that was not enough.
Since Jaramogi and I were personal guarantors to the loan, they now came for our personal assets. I was living in Mosque Estate, house number 27, which I still own to date. They took everything from my house, including furniture, carpets and all the beddings. They only left two cooking pans and two plates, not even enough for my children and wife, who had graduated from university in Russia and was now living with us.
Finally, they took my car, a Mercedes 250S. They then went to my father’s house in Milimani estate in Kisumu, where they wreaked havoc and literally went on a rampage. In a plot hatched to humiliate him, they literally swept everything from the house. They appeared in our Bondo home and collected everything from my mother’s house, including carting away the two tractors in the compound.
They dismantled the posho mill and hauled it away. They were yet to stop because they went to our farm in Miwani and cleared out everything including cows, sheep and goats. Our cats and dogs probably survived because they ran and disappeared into the sugar plantation. The entire saga was calculated to wreak maximum damage to Jaramogi.
There were many auctioneers in Kisumu but they brought one from Nairobi. This ensured that everything attached was trucked to Nairobi, therefore increasing the costs of recovering them. The auctioneer, one Kimaru, could not even get trucks big enough to carry the things he had attached and had to hire railway bogies to ferry our property to his open yard in Lang’ata.
We travelled to Nairobi with the hope of seeing the executive chairman of the National Bank of Kenya, Stanley Githunguri, in effect the bank’s CEO. We tried to see him several times but were told that we couldn’t do so without an appointment.
When we tried his phone, his secretary was adamant we did not have an appointment to speak to him. The bank’s lawyer Paul Muite, a future politician, also informed us he did not have instructions from the bank to speak to us.
We decided to sell Jaramogi’s house in Kileleshwa to offset the debt and just before a bankruptcy suit was filed against him. This latest action was one of the highest forms of malice I have ever encountered. It was calculated to ensure Jaramogi was unsuitable to hold any public office. He was to be knocked out politically.
Our lawyer, Satish Gautama, informed Jaramogi that it would take time to sell the house and by that time his foes in government would have succeeded with their aims. The lawyer decided to buy the house himself and he advanced Jaramogi the cash to get his property back. We were able to rescue the garages and the offices, but not the buses or the main building. When we went to pick our property we found another huge bill to pay. Now we had a case on taxation in our hands.
We picked another law firm, owned by Onyango Otieno, later to become a judge, to represent us in the new case. Onyango assigned an advocate called Arum to our case. Many people feared any association with the Odingas in those days and I wasn’t very surprised when on the material day I went to court, Arum vanished into thin air.
When the judge called for our case, I stood in the area reserved for advocates and said I was going to represent myself. The judge told me to get out of the area because I was not an advocate and pointed to the spot I was allowed to speak from.
I told him about my family and the persecution we were going through. I also mentioned the lawyer who had just disappeared. I asked the judge to allow me to use their library, where I could study about the law of taxation and thereafter come in the afternoon or the following day to argue my case. He said that was a reasonable proposition and ordered the registrar to allow me to use the library.
When my case was called, I laid down the figures about charges and commissions. The judge listened keenly and in the end he agreed with me that auctioneer Kimaru had grossly inflated his charges. We ended up paying less than a quarter of what he was demanding. I didn’t know that a huge shock awaited me when we went to pick our property the following day.
The vehicles had been thoroughly vandalised, with many essential parts missing. I could not even drive my Mercedes home. I just took it to our factory in the Industrial Area and parked it there to be cannibalised by anyone in the family in need of spare parts. As a young man with a family and budding career, the whole episode was a very big loss.
Even today, I feel bad when I remember how I loved that car and what finally happened to it. Nonetheless, it was Jaramogi who suffered the biggest hit. His biggest loss was the building in Kisumu town which was eventually bought by Amir Jamal, a local Indian. I could not understand why this man decided to take advantage and acquire my father’s building at his time of need.
Amir Jamal was the first Kenyan of Asian origin to get elected to Parliament to represent Kisumu. I remember seeing him in earlier years coming to see my father and pleading for my father’s political support. Jaramogi had supported him and Amir got elected on Jaramogi’s African District Association (ADA) party. His family still owns the building today.
As far as our family affairs were concerned, more harrowing challenges awaited us. One of them involved United Africa Corporation, a company Jaramogi established soon after independence. Jaramogi had singlehandedly funded the establishment of the company but he also later incorporated President Jomo Kenyatta in the business. United Africa Corporation was an export company with great promise. There was a huge demand for soya beans in Europe and Asia during that period.
The company was started initially to export grains to these countries and it turned over a good profit. Kenyatta’s stake in the company was managed by his daughter, Margaret Kenyatta while Jaramogi’s stake was managed by Wilson Okondo, a protégé who hailed from Rarieda. Wilson Okondo took almost complete control of the company when my father was in detention and things started going downhill, even though profits continued to increase.
Jaramogi had given loans to the company, which he expected to be refunded as agreed. The company’s accounts were at the National and Grindlays Bank, which was renamed Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB). Some of Jaramogi’s personal accounts were in that bank too. It happened that Jaramogi had given Okondo the power of attorney to withdraw a certain amount of money from his account to help in the business. The manager of the bank was a white man called Mr Pusey, from Australia. It appears he conspired with Okondo to withdraw all the money from my father’s accounts.
When Jaramogi came out of detention there was no money in his accounts. Now it appeared Jaramogi would lose all his money from all his personal accounts and the initial investments he had loaned the company. To make matters worse, the Indians with whom he had founded the company collected their profits and fled the country.
The Kenyattas continued receiving their dividends but there was nothing for Jaramogi. To make matters more complicated, the white bank manager Mr Pusey who had conspired with Okondo to withdraw Jaramogi’s money had since resigned from the bank and was ironically now the managing director of Jaramogi’s company.
It was a neat and complete conspiracy. When Jaramogi discovered what had happened during his absence, he hired a Nakuru based audit firm to do calculations for him and determine the extent of the theft. All the while, he was confiding in me that he really never wanted to go to court. He wanted the matter settled out of court, no matter the percentage of money that would be recovered.
Okondo and Pusey destroyed all the documents that incriminated them to the theft, or so they thought. One of Jaramogi’s accountants was a man from Muhoroni called Muga Odonde. He had been there when the conspiracy was hatched and he was actually the man who had been directed to destroy the documents. But since Muga adored Jaramogi more, he hid them instead and gave them to us.
Jaramogi instructed me to summon Okondo, who still thought Muga was on their side and that the vital documents had been destroyed. When Okondo heard what happened, he was so shocked that he could not even reply to the questions Jaramogi was asking him.
I only saw him wipe some tear drops with his hands. It could now be proven that Okondo had even used my father’s money to acquire some shares in the company for himself.
Jaramogi informed him that he didn’t want the matter to go to court. He then gave Okondo a week to think about it and dismissed him. Although he didn’t want the matter taken to court, Jaramogi meticulously spent the week collating evidence just in case Okondo and Pusey refused to cooperate.
Jaramogi finally made a painful decision to go to court. Margaret Kenyatta, who took care of her father’s stake in the company, was not happy about the turn of events. She informed Pusey and Okondo that she could not join them to testify against Jaramogi. She insisted that Jaramogi’s money must be paid and the dividends remitted just like had been the case with other shareholders.
But when the hearing started in Nairobi, strange things followed. Wilson Okondo was in Nairobi on the eve of the first hearing. He booked a room at the Boulevard Hotel where in a twist of fate, he collapsed before he could attend court the following day to testify. He was rushed to Nairobi Hospital and was declared to have apparently suffered a stroke. He could not talk and remained dumb and somehow crippled for the rest of his life. Pusey had in the meantime travelled to his native Australia.
While there, he also suffered a stroke and died before he could come back to give his testimony. The Indian judge before whom the case was heard later travelled to Toronto Canada for a visit and we were told that he also later died while away. It was the strangest turn of events I have ever witnessed. Technically, the case collapsed and my father gave up his investments in the United African Corporation.
Kibaki’s first betrayal of the Odingas and Ruto’s role in 2002 NDP, Kanu merger that left many political casualties
The period starting 1998 heralded a landmark year in the alliance building history of Kenya’s politics. It was a period filled with unseen political dangers as we embarked on novel experiments that were unusual in the country’s governance scene. I had believed in creating alliances with other leaders across the country since I joined Parliament. It was impossible to grow without sharing ideas, pulling together, and learning from each other. The Sunday Nation issue of July 24, 1994, splashed my image on the front page with the banner headline reading “I’ll Work With Moi”.
TOMORROW IN THE DAILY NATION The MP who wanted to punch Raila Odinga and knock out Moody Awori over Simeon Nyachae; George Saitoti’s sense of entitlement and Narc wars that led to confrontation with President Mwai Kibaki.
