Former Kenya Air Force soldiers believe there was a plan to get rid of the top leadership of the service before the 1982 coup attempt.
They say President Daniel arap Moi’s administration used the incident to punish soldiers who were not “politically correct”. The coup attempt was led by Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka and Sergeant Pancras Oteyo Okumu.
“The plot was known a few weeks before it happened and intelligence shared with the concerned persons but nothing was done to stop it,” David Gitau, 74, a former Air Force soldier, told The Weekly Review this week. The statement is supported by former KAF commander Peter Mwagiru Kariuki, who told a court martial that upon learning of the alleged plan, he passed the information two weeks before, to General Jackson Mulinge on July 14, 1982.
Kariuki’s application to summon Gen Mulinge, the then-Chief of General Staff, as a defence witness, was rejected by the court-martial. The court martial was presided over by Major-Gen James Lenges, with F. E. Aragon, then a Senior Resident magistrate, as the Judge Advocate. Attempts by Kariuki for summons to be issued by the court martial were rejected. It was his belief that Mulinge would corroborate his story that he had passed the information to him and it was, therefore, not true that he failed to prevent the coup.
According to Kariuki, General Mulinge then decided that the information be passed on to the military intelligence as well as the Special Branch for full investigations under his own coordination. After passing the information and being aware that it was being handled, Maj-Gen Kariuki retreated to his Timau farm after the Nyeri Agricultural Show on July 31, 1982.
The former soldiers and officers said only a small number of coup plotters knew about the plot and that the military intelligence had picked it up and passed it through the correct channels.
Njoroge Muigai, 67, then a corporal, recalls that the coup plotters stormed where sirens were located at Moi Air Base, then known as KAF Eastleigh and set off the siren. This meant there was an attack by air from an enemy country.
The standard operating procedure is that everyone gets up and rushes to the armoury. It was around 11pm when the siren went off. A few hours later, they were informed that the coup had been crushed and everybody went back to their normal routine not knowing that a rude shock awaited them.
It was on Sunday morning at around 11am when their counterparts from the Kenya Army stormed the base and rounded them up. The army men were from Nakuru-based 3rd Battalion. Muigai recalls one of his colleague in KAF hoisting a white flag to show that they had no problem. The army men would hear none of it and ordered them to remove their shirts and kneel down.
“We were made to walk on our knees for hours and they joked, calling us ‘educated rubbish’. This went on for hours,” he said.
They were then frog-matched to an awaiting lorry and driven to Kamiti Maximum Prison where more beatings awaited them. “At Kamiti, we found prison wardens in two lines and we were forced to pass in between as they whipped us with batons,” he added.
Inside the prison, the soldiers and officers were denied food for three days and on the fourth day, they were handed a bowl of porridge.
They were then driven to Naivasha, where they were interrogated and those who ‘feigned’ knowledge of the coup plot, were locked in water-logged cells. After spending hours inside the cells, one would be called once again and asked about the coup. The interrogation was even more intense as the interrogators were hell-bent on extracting a confession.
Muigai says the arrest and court martial process at Lang’ata were all against the procedures as those torturing them knew the end game. As noted in the case of Kariuki, the courts agreed that the military hearings were a sham and against the rules of fair trial. This was because in Kariuki’s case, a critical witness was not called and there was a sustained effort by the judge advocate – “cajoling here, haranguing there, to dissuade” –the defence from summoning a witness he desperately wished to call. The former military personnel filed a total of 10 cases, with some of them being consolidated and heard together.
And despite winning and getting compensation for the tortures they underwent, the now elderly men have been moving from one court to another seeking to enforce the judgements. In one of the cases filed by 384 personnel, the former servicemen and officers stated that they were conscripted, enlisted and or commissioned officers or servicemen of the KAF between May 14, 1964 and March 30, 1983.
After the court martial, they were dismissed from service by the commanding officer of an authority known as the ‘82 Air Force, which was created after the disbandment of KAF. KAF later reverted to its name after the High Court found that ‘82 Air Force did not exist as the KAF Act had not been deleted from the Armed Forces Act (cap 199).
Muigai said some were beaten ruthlessly with gun butts before they were locked up in the hangars. At night, they were forced to sleep on a concrete floor. Other than the illegal jail sentences, all of them were held incommunicado for periods in excess of eight months. After realising some of the mistakes, the bosses would review and reduce the sentences before being eventually released. Upon release, they were issued with dismissal certificates, which were later recalled and a “service no longer required” letter handed to them.
Muigai maintained that they were never involved in the planning or execution of the coup and some of them should be praised as KAF jet pilots saved this country when they dropped heavy bombs in Mt Kenya Forest.
The bombs were intended to destroy key installations in Nairobi and its environs. “None of us has even been caught up in any unlawful act since, many engaging in nation building as wananchi wema …. so our kind request to our government, please have mercy on us, we were just victims,” reads a petition they filed to the Senate.
In a petition by Samuel Chege Gitau and 283 others, the Employment and Labour Relations court awarded each of them Sh1 million as damages for wrongful imprisonment, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and for violation of their right to fair hearing in April 2016. Justice Mathews Nduma Nderi found that they suffered at the hands of an illegal authority called ‘82 Air Force, which had no authority to retire, dismiss or terminate their services.
According to Justice Nderi, the claimants were employed by the KAF under the Kenya Armed Forces Act, and not any other illegal establishment. A subsequent appeal by the Attorney General was dismissed by a bench of three judges of the Court of Appeal on November 24, 2023.
Another group sued before the limitation of action period lapsed and the court ordered the government to pay them their salaries and other benefits. They were never allowed to go back to MAB to pick up their belongings and valuables. Gitau recalls being dropped at Railways bus stop and given Sh20 and told to go home.
In the latest development, the former KAF men obtained a warrant of arrest against Defence PS Patrick Mariru for disobeying the court orders. The military police are the ones supposed to arrest the PS and present him to the police and present him to court.
