Road to multipartyism: How Matiba and Jaramogi split ruined opposition

I first met Mr Kenneth Matiba at the offices of Waruhiu and Muite Advocates because he was a client of the law firm before he became my client. In fact, to be exact, he was then a client more of Sam Waruhiu, my then senior partner than my client. However, at Waruhiu and Muite, Waruhiu would be receiving the clients but the actual legal work as to whether the case would go to court or not, drawing the pleadings, going to court, most of it, it’s me who would do that.

And my recollection is that the first case that I did for Matiba was about defamation. He wanted to sue the then outgoing chairman of the Kenya Football Federation, Mr Dan Owino. Matiba won the elections and Owino made a statement that Ken considered defamatory and he was very forceful about it that he would go to court. I went to court and argued his case and he won.

But thereafter, I don’t know whether it was ever settled. In terms of impressions, my first was of a person who was very forceful. In fact when he was giving me instructions, I remember very clearly what he was saying: ‘I am only 44 years old!’ and so on and so forth. Anyway, I found him a likeable personality who reached out to people.

What impressed me about him from the word go was that here was a man who was part of the elite in terms of wealth around the Kenyatta Government and yet he did not have a superiority complex and the arrogance that one associated with the crowd around Kenyatta in those days. I interacted with many of them and I must say that I was personally never impressed with the arrogance, the short sightedness, the chauvinism, name it.

Matiba was the opposite. He reminded me of (the author and poet) Rudyard Kipling – dining with the kings but you don’t forget who you are – he really had a very common touch. Matiba related with people more or less as human beings. He never looked down on people, he was never condescending. He also did not despise poor people.

Let me be totally honest. (Former President Mwai) Kibaki reminded me of a person who lives in denial. He, too, came from a very poor family. But it is like he didn’t want anybody to remind him of that; he was living in denial. It’s like he would have wanted to be born in the homes of the chiefs – a very sharp contrast and I will come back to Kibaki later.

Matiba was the opposite; he was at peace with wealth. With Kibaki, if you were poor it was like you were somehow going to infect him with your poverty, if you see what I mean. He was an adopted son of the chiefs. Matiba would go with you and eat anywhere. Over time we became personal friends. I used to play squash with him and so on and so forth, and I’ll come to all that later. But that’s how I first met Ken Matiba.

After that case against Dan Owino, I would do a number of things for him. Thereafter he would bring me clients. He would bring me bits of legal jobs but I have to say that we were not the only law firm because I know that Daly and Figgis Advocates were also his lawyers but for any troublesome cases he would bring them to me.

Now, to come to the politics: we had already become close. And if you check, if you go back to the time that Moi became President, you will find that the most important political issue of that time was the change-the-constitution movement which sought to bar Moi from becoming president. It failed and Moi became President in August 1978.

But the group was still there as a force. Ken Matiba was, of course, in the change-the-constitution group.

He was pro-blocking Moi. In fact, the only Kikuyus who were on Moi’s side were Charles Njonjo and Julius Gikonyo Kiano. Matiba, with (George) Mwicigi in Murang’a were anti-Moi.

Somehow, Kibaki was not in that group – but that’s another story, let’s talk about Ken. The relevance of all this is that when the elections were called in 1979, Moi and Njonjo, and the system, used those elections to rig out all those who were pro-change-the-constitution.

They were propping up JJ Kamotho. Mwicigi was rigged out but Matiba, who was a man with tremendous resources and was also streetwise, outsmarted Dr Julius Gikonyo Kiano. Moi was relying on Kiano to do the rigging in Murang’a. After the 1982 attempted coup, Moi embarked on absolute repression in Kenya. The period after this was the worst in independent Kenya’s history, and it culminated in the notorious 1988 mlolongo elections.

All this time, I was interacting with Matiba but from a distance. At that time, we lawyers were going full throttle in our protests about the violation of human rights. In 1988, it is when the Kanu party elections were held after the parliamentary elections. It had been decided that Matiba had to be rigged out. But with his tremendous resources, he was able to beat back the provincial administration and the Special Branch in Murang’a and win.

In fact, Moi was so incensed at the result that he went to a public rally in Murang’a and sacked the DC on the spot. Matiba promptly gave the sacked official a job at Kenya Breweries. In the meantime, Moi perceived that Kiano, his point man in Murang’a, was a laid back man who was no match for Matiba. He settled on Kamotho to do his bidding.

Kamotho did a fabulous rigging job, brazenly and without any scruples. Matiba was rigged out of the party elections. When this happened, Matiba’s first port of call was my office at Electricity House. He told me straightaway: “I am going to resign. Even from the Cabinet, I am going to resign.”

And I encouraged him; I think he had a lot of frustrations also because the government was collapsing – economically, socially, and politically. I told him: “That’s a very good idea, Ken.” The other thing I must specify is that even at that time, Matiba had approached Kibaki with a view to their resigning together.

And I remember drafting a statement of how Kibaki was going to resign because he had been appointed Minister for Health after being dropped as Vice-President. At that time, resigning was an act close to treason. You waited to be sacked and, after being sacked, you thanked the President for it. But I remember the statement I drafted was very mild.

I know very well Matiba went to Kibaki with that statement. He had at first accepted to go along, but he later changed his mind and didn’t see Matiba again. So, Matiba left Kibaki alone and went to the side of the Opposition which was now being led by lawyers and clergymen like Henry Okullu, Timothy Njoya and David Gitari.

Now, I told Matiba: “Don’t make the mistake that my client Njonjo made with his resignation.” What mistake had Njonjo made with his resignation? When the ‘traitor’ issue (a campaign against the former Attorney-General) came up, Njonjo was in London. When he came back, he went to see Moi to ask him ‘what is going on?”

Moi told him ‘Charles, this is siasa. I have full confidence in you. Wacha hiyo (Ignore those things).’ Njonjo believed him. Immediately after that, they brought a motion of adjournment in Parliament to discuss ‘a matter of great national importance.’

That’s when the penny dropped. Njonjo knew that these were all Moi’s machinations. So he went and wrote two resignation letters, one resigning from the Cabinet and the other resigning as Member for Kikuyu.

The letter resigning as Member for Kikuyu he took to the Speaker of the National Assembly and the one resigning from the Cabinet was to be taken to the President. What followed then was that the Cabinet resignation letter was handed to Jeremiah Kiereini, then the Chief Secretary, by Njonjo himself.

Kiereini then delivered it to Moi. Moi read it and was shocked. He didn’t think Njonjo would have the courage to resign. He pulled a drawer and threw it in there. That same afternoon, he appointed a Commission of Inquiry to look into Njonjo’s activities. By then Njonjo was still in the Cabinet!

So I told Matiba: ‘Ken, don’t make the mistake of taking your resignation letter to Moi because he will not allow the public to know that you have resigned.’ So Ken asked me ‘what do we do?’ I told him ‘this is what you will do: write the resignation letter from the Cabinet, when you dispatch it to the Office of the President at Harambee House, give copies to the media.’

Matiba loved to laugh! When I gave him that idea, he laughed uproariously. He loved it. Then I walked with him from my office at Electricity House to his office at College House and we drafted his letter of resignation. We wrote the letter and he liked it very much. Then he summoned all the media.

As soon as he distributed copies of resignation letter to the media, he handed the President’s letter to a messenger to deliver to Harambee House. Armed with their letters, journalists went straight to GPO where President Moi was commissioning some buses. They asked him for his comment. He was staggered.

From the time Matiba resigned, he went full throttle into Opposition politics and with his wealth, his courage, his single-mindedness when he put his mind at something, he changed the political landscape. When I became chairman of the Law Society, we became even closer.

Along with Charles Rubia, Ken and I used to have many meetings in my house at Karen. They would come very early in the morning riding nondescript cars because the situation was very bad. We would not even meet in the sitting room; we held our meetings in one of the bedrooms. We had dinners with religious leaders quite often in the house of Philip Gachoka in Karen who was a very close friend of Matiba.

One other incident I remember very well was an intense discussion in my house. It centred around Jaramogi Oginga Odinga who was issuing statements on his own. We felt it would be better if a partnership was formed. After that, Joab Omino and Bishop Okullu had meetings with us. So, it was agreed that we must bring in Jaramogi and if we succeed in these reforms, Jaramogi would be the joint presidential candidate.

But of the many incidents that come to my mind, one of the most outstanding was when Matiba and Rubia held that press conference calling for a referendum to decide Kenya’s political future during which they called for multi-partyism. We drafted that statement with Gibson Kamau Kuria.

The only anecdote I want to add here is that when we gave them the statement and agreed that they were going to hold a press conference, I told them that it would be courteous to also give a copy to Ambassador Smith Hempstone of the US because he had been an ally and it wouldn’t be proper for him to read about it in the media. That was agreed to and I walked the short distance from Electricity House to the former US Embassy on Moi Avenue.

When Hempstone read the statement, he remarked: ‘How strange! This is exactly what I was talking about at the Rotary Club luncheon that I’ve just attended!” If you look at the Daily Nation of that day – May 4, 1990 – you will see the front page reports of Matiba and Rubia’s press conference and Hempstone’s luncheon.

To Moi and many people, it was all choreographed but I am telling you for a fact that it was nothing but sheer coincidence.

Let me now talk about his detention. When Matiba was detained I saw him as his lawyer four times. Twice I saw him at Nairobi Area Police Headquarters because the Provincial Police Officer for Nairobi was also in charge of detainees. I saw him in Naivasha and I saw him in Shimo-la-Tewa.

Matiba's health

Now, what I would like to emphasise is that the other person who would see him was his doctor, the late Dr Jim Nesbitt. It is a pity that you are writing this story when he has just died because I would have wanted him to corroborate what I want to tell you. Let me first tell you that you could not go and see a detainee all by yourself.

There would be about 20 people surrounding you. The show of might in a conference room! And that’s where Nesbitt also used to see him. When Matiba was going into detention, he had a mild case of hypertension. But it was completely under control. He was doing a lot of exercising. He was not given to drinking, he was healthy. Now, to be taken into detention you can imagine a person of his status. He’s been locked up – thinking about his businesses, the diet ...

When Nesbitt started seeing his patient in July shortly after his detention, he used to take him medicines to contain his blood pressure but the prisons authorities always flatly refused to allow him to hand them over to Matiba. So the blood pressure kept rising, the deliberate work of the authorities. And the person who was refusing was Dr Mwongera, the government doctor!

One early morning late in October, 1990, I found Dr Nesbitt seated in my secretary’s office. And I remember his exact words as we walked into my office with him. He told me: “Paul, I never discuss my patients with my wife Mary. But last night, I had to discuss your client’s condition with Mary and I am very worried. And that is why I have come to tell you.”

Nesbitt proceeded to describe the medical manifestations – the hair, the colour and all that and he told me Matiba’s blood pressure was completely out of control. He said ‘at best, he is going to have a stroke, and at worst, he is going to die.’ I remember sending a fax because that was the fastest means of communication those days to Amnesty International in London pleading for their intervention because he was going to die – I just reproduced what Nesbitt had told me.

I didn’t make much headway. And hardly six weeks later, Matiba suffered a stroke, exactly as Nesbitt had feared. Before he became impaired when he was released, I had several meetings with him as his lawyer, he told me with his mouth – his condition now may not allow him to remember now – but he told me that he suffered that stroke in the middle of the night in his cell in Kamiti.

And he knew it was a stroke. According to him as he told me this, he banged very hard on the door until two guards heard him and they came over. He requested them to support him one on each side under the arms. They spent the rest of the night walking him around the cell to keep the blood flowing. But in the morning, Dr Mwongera prescribed pain-killers.

It took another week or so of arguments, including arguments with the Attorney- General Amos Wako because they wanted to take him to the Armed Forces Memorial Hospital. Forces Memorial Hospital always said ‘even our own stroke cases, we don’t have the capacity to treat them. We refer them to Kenyatta National Hospital’. So in the end, Moi was persuaded to allow him to go to Nairobi Hospital. They put him there under a false name until the information leaked out. Eventually they lifted the detention order.

After his highly delicate brain operation in London, performed by the best surgeon in the business, Matiba became a different person. I will give you a good example. First, I can tell it is a fact that sitting in my own house in the presence of my wife, Matiba, Rubia and I had agreed that we would leave the presidential candidacy of Ford to Jaramogi.

I remember very well this meeting took place on a Sunday. We had agreed on that and it is a fact. And the two of them actually went to Jaramogi and told him the same. You know, they used to go to meet him in the Spectre offices at Agip House and then come to my office in Electricity House.

My recollection of what they told me in my office after their meeting with Jaramogi was that Jaramogi listened to them and then spoke in that shrill voice of his – he used to speak in a shrill voice – and he said: ‘I am not opposed to a partnership. But do you remember how our first marriage ended?’

He was referring to the Kikuyu-Luo marriage of 1963. ‘Now here again you are suggesting we become one team, what am I going to tell my people?’

That is when they explained to him at length that they had decided that he, Jaramogi, was going to be the candidate. They made that clear and they came and told me that that it is what they had told him and that was the agreement because that is what we had agreed to in my house.

And this for two reasons: one, to remove animosity between the two communities as a result of how he had been treated after independence. Secondly, Jaramogi had mellowed down, completely, and he was genuinely a nationalist. After Section 2A was repealed ending Kanu’s monopoly on power and after Matiba’s operation, Kikuyu leaders, people like Kimani wa Nyoike, made a bee-line to London to urge him to run.

Even Rubia. I remember him telling me that political pacts are not meant to be kept. Now, I myself went to London to see Matiba. And I tried to reason out with him. I told him: ‘All that which you have been told by those who are telling you, if you go along with them, FORD will split and Moi will come back. Two, hadn’t we sat in my house and agreed what we agreed? And you and Charles went and told Jaramogi? And you came to my office and reported your agreement to me? Number three, this is Kibaki.’

I was trying to reason out with him but from the word go I saw that this was not the Ken Matiba that I knew. He was a different person. Because Ken Matiba, even if he was strong-willed, he was very good in listening. Whenever he saw merit in something, he went along. But now I saw that this was another Matiba altogether.

First, I had travelled around the country with Jaramogi and I had seen how popular he was. But now here was Matiba who had been in the UK for a long time recuperating from his operation telling me: ‘Don’t you know, Paul, even those Luos, they will all vote for Ken Matiba, not for Jaramogi!’

But he was really being manipulated by the delegations of Kikuyus who went to see him. And all they were interested in was not him, but themselves.

But he became utterly intransigent. Then I made my last pitch.