When Dr. Odhiambo Mbai was killed, the police concluded it was a robbery gone wrong. However, Mbai quickly became a political martyr and this ‘robbery gone wrong’ angle became part of a ‘cover up’.
Forced to cast the net wider, the police abandoned it and pursued the political angle they were being bombarded with. The Luo political class had concluded the murder was a political assassination with Norman Nyaga, then a powerful Kibaki inner-circle man and government chief whip, fingered.
Hon. Nyaga, though a Kikuyu/Embu was Mbai’s next door neighbor in that Kenya where Kikuyus and Luos live side by side when times are good.
Both lived in the same court in Adams Arcade estate, off Ngong Road.
It was Mbai’s daughter who rushed to Nyaga’s house requesting help.
Hon. Nyaga, acting purely as a good neighbor, drove the badly bleeding Mbai to hospital where he bled to death as Nairobi Hospital hospital management demanded payments before admission.
In the hours that followed, Nyaga’s ‘Good Samaritan’ actions would be the reason to suspect him as Mbai’s murder had by now assumed a political context.
Mbai had been a delegate at Bomas Constitution Making Conference. He chaired the devolution technical committee.
Around this time, there had been a fallout in the NARC government. The LDP had taken a diametrically opposed posture to the NAK group, largely made up of the the Kikuyu/GEMA group.
We were told this Kikuyu/GEMA/Kibaki group were opposed to devolution, preferring the imperial presidency that concentrated power at the national executive. This was the reason for the murder.
Whenever someone engaged in politics is murdered there are usually two prosecutions. The prosecution before the court of public opinion and the prosecution before the court of law.
In the court of public opinion, often the prosecutor is always the judge. Hon. Nyaga was prosecuted viciously by Luo politicians of the time, with the late Kasipul MP Peter Otieno Owidi using immunity granted by parliamentary traditions to name him on the floor of parliament.
In an angry retort, Nyaga said if he were to find Dr. Mbai in the same circumstance he would take the same actions (lessons in humanity he learnt at the Boy Scouts) to try save him. He maintained his innocence.
He also said all those who accused him of killing Dr. Mbai will die before him. He’s still alive.
What was interesting is that two years after the then LDP/Luo politicians accused Norman Nyaga of Mbai’s murder — a murder that remains unsolved — the party which morphed to ODM ended up with Nyaga’s own brother, Joe Nyaga, as a Pentagon member and a future ODM minister.
There are two lessons to be learnt with the Mbai murder.
First is the danger of a single story. An entire community can be fed a single narrative. Not many Luos know that Nyaga was Mbai’s next door neighbor.
Second, politicians use murder plots for politicking and Luo politicians have perfected murder as a political card. The easiest way to destroy someone is to tie him to murder.
Sadly, same Luo politicians who could name Nyaga with the protection of parliamentary immunities while debating on the floor of the house never named him outside parliament and never recorded any statement with the police on the matter to help with investigations and prosecution of the matter.
Third, Luo politicians do not care about the criminal/court prosecution. Loud in funerals and other party platforms in the immediate post-murder period, they keep off court trials, never recording any statements or giving evidence during trials.
Fourth, because such murders get highly politicized, investigations usually get poisoned by politics. The people who quickly get arrested and arraigned are usually acquitted in the long run for failure to prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that they did commit the crime. This is because most prosecution witnesses go to court to say the same things they heard in political rallies and funerals — rumours.
Lit ndi.
