Faith Nyasuguta
Today, July 5, 2023, marks 54 years since one of Africa’s and Kenya’s most promising leaders was felled by a bullet on what is now known as Tom Mboya Street in Nairobi, Kenya.
Joseph Mboya was hailed for his unmatched oratory skills, intelligence, focused leadership style and ability to charm his way into seemingly hostile grounds.
The gentleman from Ol Donyo Sabuk was 38 years old at the time of his death, a period within which he had achieved more than what many take a lifetime to attain.
ACHIEVER
As young as 23, he had risen to become the Secretary-General of the now-defunct Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL) that was replaced by the current Central Organisation of Trade Unions (COTU).
Five years later, he was elected as the chairperson of the first All African Peoples Conference (AAPC) in Accra, Ghana.
Mboya was not done as he would soon become Kenya’s first Cabinet Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs when the country gained independence. He was serving as the Minister for Economic Planning and Development when a bullet ripped through his flesh in 1969 and nipped all the accolades in the bud.
STATUE
A few yards from where he was assassinated stands the statue of a man who has over the years been aptly nicknamed Kenya’s Martin Luther King.
Although the gunman remains unknown over five decades later, it is believed that Mboya was stopped in his tracks as part of a plot to curtail communism in Kenya. This is explained in the tell-all book ‘The Reds and The Blacks’ by one time US Ambassador to Guinea William Attwood, and which was banned in Kenya in 1966.
It is interesting to note that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had the news of the brazen assassination even before Kenya’s national broadcaster Voice of Kenya (VOK).
Family Man Mboya was married to Pamela, the daughter of a fellow politician, Walter Odede with whom they had five children; Maureen Odero, Susan Mboya, Lucas Mboya and twin brothers Peter and Patrick.
Patrick died at the tender age of four while the remaining twin, Peter, lost his life in 2004 after being involved in a motorcycle accident.
After Mboya’s death, Pamela had another child with her late husband’s brother Alphonse Okuku named Tom Mboya Jr.
As the case remains unsolved, Kenyans only have a statue to look at as the only memory of a leader who never achieved his prime after being felled inside a chemist on Moi Avenue (formerly Government Road).
His remains rest in a mausoleum on Kenya’s Rusinga Island which was built in 1970.
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