How Saitoti’s early life shaped his rise to tower of academic and political prowess

The narrow, dusty road leading to Mama Zipporah Musengi’s house at Olkeri in Upper Matasia, Ngong, belies the palatial edifice one meets on arrival and is indicative of the journey her son, Prof George Saitoti, has travelled.

In school they called him a moving dictionary because he had mastered the entire dictionary, according to accounts of his classmates.

One of the richest Kenyans, his Ngong home was just one of his properties, which included three other homes in Lavington, Kitengela and Molo South, where he has a ranch.

His immense wealth was said to be in real estate and farming. Read (Saitoti was a 'team player')

He was a towering political figure, a business magnate and an intellectual giant, but his rise to the mercurial status he had acquired at the time of his death last Sunday in an air crash barely 10 kilometres from the home of his childhood was laced with struggle and shrouded in mystery.

Prof Saitoti’s year of birth, 1945, was a year of destiny, a tumultuous moment in world’s history.

The Russian Red Army won the Battle of Berlin and Adolf Hitler allegedly committed suicide; the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the United Nations was formed, marking an end to the Second World War.

In the words of Winston Churchill, who incidentally left 10 Downing Street, the UK seat of government in 1945, Prof Saitoti had been born into “this world of strife and storm.”

And while Churchill’s words were directed at Prince Philip, who had been born in 1948, the speech could have also been meant for Kenya’s Vice President of 13 years, who despite straddling the country’s political landscape like the colossus for three decades, his background is somewhat obscure.

Also despite being a breath away from the presidency, he suffered humiliation under then President Daniel Moi.

The height of this humiliation came at a meeting in his constituency where Mr Moi explained his reasons for overlooking him in his succession plans.

Speaking in Swahili, Mr Moi said: “Huyu makamu wa rais ni rafiki yangu. Lakini urafiki na siasa ni tofauti...” (The Vice President is my friend. But politics and friendship are two very different things.)”

The two top most politicians in the country’s face-off at Kasarani in March 2002 has been immortalised with the words, “there come (sic) a time when the nation becomes more important than an individual,” uttered by the then Vice President.

While official records gloss over his early life, interviews carried out by Saturday Nation point at the present day Dagoretti Corner as his birth place.

At the onset of the Emergency in the early 1950s, the family is said to have moved to Ngong in Kajiado to escape colonial persecution targeting the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru communities.

A retired senior official, who was one class behind Saitoti, says they lived in a gichagi, a crowded village where families that had moved to escape colonial oppression.

“It was in 1952 at the onset of emergency. Many families from around Nairobi converged at Olkeri, near Ololua outside Ngong. It was natural that we spoke Kiswahili rather than our individual languages,” said a former a senior government official.

Mr Samuel ole Tawuo, 64, who is a retired chief of Olkeri, says he was three classes behind Saitoti at Ololua Primary School where he espoused his academic prowess and leadership.

“He was very good in random Maths where a teacher would shout six times four from afar and Saitoti would shout the answer straight away. He was a reserved boy who loved his books so much so that he would hide in the bushes to devour them,” said Mr Tawuo.

He added that he was a class prefect throughout their days at Ololua.

While it has been reported that Prof Saitoti had a difficult childhood, Mzee Elkana Kamau, a 73-year-old business man who is an in-law of the late MP, said initially, Mr Musengi — the minister’s father, was a fairly wealthy man and bought the first vehicle, a lorry, in the area.

“But after sometime things became difficult for them and they slumped back to poverty from which we all grew here,” said Mzee Kamau, whose son married one of Prof Saitoti’s sisters.

“At Mang’u we called him a moving dictionary because he had mastered the entire dictionary. Whenever you found a difficult word while reading you asked Saitoti,” Nation Media Group chairman Wildfred Kiboro, a class mate of Prof Saitoti, told Saturday Nation.

Mr Kiboro went on: “I was with him in Form One and Two between 1959 and 1960. He was very hard working, often reading in solitude and he was very good at Maths.”

Other classmates were Dr Ali Montet and Mr Harun Lempaka, now a businessman

It was this hard work which earned him an exchange programme at the Weston School at Eton, Massachusets, to complete his high school studies.

It is from here that he proceeded for undergraduate studies at Brandeis University on a scholarship.

He later left for Sussex and finally Warwick where he graduated with a PhD in Algebraic Topology.

From there he returned home where he was appointed an assistant lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Nairobi.

In the 12 years that he worked at the University of Nairobi, Prof Saitoti published widely in his area of specialisation – Algebraic Topology – and supervised many students.

He also organised symposiums on the teaching of mathematics in African universities and organised the first congress of African mathematicians,” said University of Nairobi Vice Chancellor George Magoha.

Dr John Muriuki, a lecturer in Pure Mathematics, says he is proud to have inherited Prof Saitoti’s office room 107 at the Computing and Informatics Building of Chiromo Campus.

“He was a towering intellectual who laid the foundation of post-independence Mathematics scholarship in Africa,” said Dr Muriuki.

While it is widely believed that Prof Saitoti’s near paranoia consciousness about his security was due to a poisoning in 1990, interviews with people who grew up with him revealed a man who led a dual identity life.

A former senior government official who schooled with him at Ololua says Prof Saitoti, who he says was called George Kinuthia wa Kiarie at school, was a man hiding from his past.

It would appear that Prof Saitoti begun his second life shortly before he left for Mang’u when in a bid to get a scholarship changed his name to Saitoti.

The late Reverend Christopher Rapasi, the next door neighbour, is said to have suggested the name so that George could access bursary.

He believes the name Musengi, which he says was an adaptation of the Kikuyu name Muthengi, arose out of the bingeing habits of the father.

“I think Saitoti’s problem throughout his life was to run away from his earlier life. When he came back from abroad those of us who stuck to our heritage referred to him as Kinuthia. I think it was out of this paranoia of hiding from his past that he had to step on some of us who reminded him about his past,” said the retired official.

Perhaps it is this ability to juggle the two worlds that gave him this uncanny ability to bounce back, earning himself the media tag of Kenya’s comeback kid with the proverbial nine lives of a cat.

While in politics he had been painted by some as a man who was too cautious while making moves, a long-time aide of the fallen politician, Mr Peter Sapalan, said the minister was a courageous man who risked his life many times.

“There was a time when we were flying back from Laikipia to Nairobi and while descending the Kerio Valley we found the weather was very hostile. Prof insisted we proceed but I pleaded until he accepted we go back,” said Mr Sapalan.

He eulogises the minister as having had a hand in the employment of many Maasai professionals.

“Nearly everybody who is who in Maasailand owes his success to Saitoti’s patronage,” he said.

Heritage minister William Ole Ntimama, with whom he had an on and off friendship, said despite party affiliations Prof Saitoti did not keep grudges and served all the Maasai clans without discrimination.

Prof Saitoti was affiliated to the Keekonyokie clan, which straddles Kajiado North and Narok North constituencies.

The second born and first son of the late Zachary Musengi and Zipporah Muthengi, all of his siblings are business people with only two being in salaried employment.

Whether his ethnic ambiguity would have been a plus in his presidential bid or what some said was the minister’s distant, academic, and non-tribal posturing would have denied him a solid ethnic backing, we will never know.

Prof Saitoti is survived by wife Margaret and one adopted child — 25-year-old Zachary Musengi who is undergoing studies in the UK.

He lives a vacuum in Kajiado constituency, which he has represented for 24 years, and in Kenya’s political landscape where he has been a major player.

Prof Saitoti is survived by wife Margaret Gathoni and one adopted child 25-year-old Zachary Musengi who is undergoing studies in the UK.

Prof Saitoti once told Saturday Nation that the the Wien scholarship to Brandeis University outside Massachusetts changed his life.

“It was a place of high, high academic quality. I think it also broadened our minds a great deal. Beinvg a Wien scholar at Brandeis laid the foundation for my success,” he said early this year.

The author of The Challenges of Economic and Institutional Reforms in Africa: Contemporary Perspectives on Developing Societies however left the scene without writing a memoir and little is known about his private life.