Prime
Remembering Kenyan statesman Tom Mboya
Philip Matogo
What you need to know:
- ‘‘His legacy emphasises the bigger picture and may serve as an inspiration to Uganda”
Tomorrow will be 52 years since Kenyan statesman Tom Joseph Odhiambo Mboya was assassinated.
Mboya was a great Kenyan and an even greater African.
He served as chair of the first All African Peoples’ Conference in 1958, was a Member of Parliament for Nairobi Central (now Kamukunji Constituency) and served as secretary general of the then ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) party, besides having held several ministerial portfolios.
At the time of his death, he was minister of Economic Planning and Development.
All told, Mboya’s patriotic ideas lent a fig-leaf of respectability to the often naked cronyism of Kenyan politics.
Where anti-Kenyan vision was a revision of the historical record, Mboya’s ideological thrust was predicated on the need for restitution without revenge.
Immediately after Kenya’s independence, ‘spoils politics’ derailed non-aligned initiatives with policies which ensured Kenya became a mere colonial inheritance instead of a land borrowed from its children.
Through Mboya, however, Kenyans sought a new dawn in echo of the dreams of independence.
But, sadly, in Africa, a dawn so often implies twilight.
Mboya was gunned down on Government Road (now Moi Avenue), Nairobi, after visiting Chaani’s Pharmacy on July 5, 1969.
His ‘assassin’, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, is said to have been a cat’s paw for the real killers.
Since, when he was arrested, he asked: “Why arrest me? Why not arrest the big man?”
It may never be known who this shadowy “big man” was (or is). But finding out who killed Mboya is immaterial in the context of how he lived and the post-tribal politics he represented.
As to the latter, Mboya, a Luo, held a parliamentary seat in Nairobi Central, a Kikuyu stronghold. Thus, he personified a politics which went beyond ethnicity to ethicise the need for a leader who works for his country instead of any tribal enclave.
His legacy emphasises the bigger picture and may serve as an inspiration to Uganda, and the world.
For too often, we miss the forest for the trees and thereby focus on the petty at the expense of the grand.
In the US constitution, for instance, there are several grammatical and typographical errors.
Pennsylvania is even misspelled as “Pensylvania.”
But Americans ignore this since there’s no contradiction between American ideals and bad spelling. In fact, the very root and flower of any constitution is the errors we make or are prone to make.
For the best laws reflect the reality instead of the ideal. Thus, they portray our actualities as a way of reframing of our possibilities.
In this vein, Mboya’s life was not a testament to perfection but a test of what can be perfected in view of our imperfections.
John F. Kennedy once said: “A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honours, the men it remembers.”
In Uganda, we honour Members of Parliament and remember the Uganda Martyrs. This balances out the good with the bad.
With regard to both, though, most of us would rather get paid a king’s ransom than be burnt at the stake.
That means most of us, including myself, could never be martyrs.
We mostly dream of becoming Members of Parliament and enriching ourselves therefrom. This ‘dream’ of ours ensures our empty political ambitions are a national treasure insofar as they serve as a means to emptying the national treasury!
Indeed, our collectivised greed is different to the singular greatness of Mboya.
Hence, as we remember him, we are reminded of our shortcomings. So we may rise above where we fall short in order to stand tall, like Mboya.
Mr Matogo is a professional copywriter
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