May 17th 2013
By Standard on Saturday TeamWas there a plot to kill Vice-President Daniel arap Moi in February 1975?
Did the conspiracy involve the same people that assassinated Economic Planning minister Tom Mboya
six years earlier? Did President Jomo Kenyatta know anything about the
scheme? And what did this have to do with the murder of Nyandarua MP JM Kariuki weeks later?
These
are the explosive questions raised by the publication last month of
thousands of top-secret diplomatic and Intelligence messages sent
between 1973 and 1976 by officials at the United States embassy in
Nairobi.
The documents are part of 1.7 million new cables published in April this year by global whistleblowing website Wikileaks.
The
same site has in the past leaked information on police killings in
Kenya, US abuses in the Iraq war and secret American diplomatic
communications.
“Neutralise” supporters
The
new State Department documents are known as the ‘Kissinger Cables’,
after Henry Kissinger who was the US Secretary of State in those years.
While some of the cables had been declassified and added to public
archives in the US, much of the information in them has yet to be
published in Kenya.
One of the cables reports a plot to assassinate Moi
involving Kanu officials from Central and Eastern Kenya one year before
the rise of the failed ‘Change the Constitution’ movement meant to
block his rise to power. The same group allegedly planned to
“neutralise” two of Moi’s key supporters: Attorney General Charles Njonjo and Minister for Commerce Gikonyo Kiano.
“Motive said to be unwillingness to accept Moi
as Kenyatta’s successor,” reads the cable, written by ambassador
Anthony Marshall. “Conspirators reportedly believe they must move
against Moi
while Kenyatta still alive.” The most explosive claim, however, is
captured in one short line: “President Kenyatta reportedly aware of
plot.” The cable does not indicate what, if anything, the President was
allegedly doing about the plan.
The claims came from a Mr Jones
Mukeka, who Marshall describes in the message as an “untested embassy
source”. The ambassador, however, notes that the source claimed to have
had “frequent previous contact” with one of his superiors, Wendell
Coote, the director for East African affairs.
Independent
investigations by The Standard On Saturday identify the source as Jones
Wambua Mukeka, then the Machakos District Kanu Organising Secretary. In
2005, the former Kanu official told a local journalist he was later
questioned about talking to US diplomats about the plot to kill Dr Kiano
and blocked from testifying about the JM Kariuki
murder. Release of the cable confirming his meeting with US officials
proves Mukeka, who died in 2005 aged 74, took more secrets to the grave
than he was willing to reveal.
Mukeka told embassy officials that a man named Muigai was planning the attack, which would involve an assassin from Moi’s ethnic community. He claimed Muigai (“nicknamed Lumumba”) also planned the 1969 assassination of Tom Mboya.
While
we have established that there was a Mau Mau veteran called Muigai
Lumumba alive at the time, we cannot determine whether this is the man
Mukeka referred to in his warning to US officials.
The Kanu
official, who claimed contact with high-level Kamba and Kikuyu
politicians, also reported that a meeting later that same day would
discuss the succession issue. Several Cabinet-level politicians were
expected to agree on “a compromise candidate” for the presidency from
Central Kenya who would have a deputy from Eastern Kenya.
A
confrontation between northern and southern Kikuyu leaders appears to
have influenced their plans. Less than one month after Mukeka’s warning,
several other diplomatic cables document the “bombings and other
disturbances” that took place before the killing of JM Kariuki.
One
tells of the March 1 bomb attack on a bus at the OTC station in Nairobi
that killed 27 people. Another analyses the climate of fear created by
the other disturbances.
“Rumours suggest that some or all of these
events reflect inter-tribal action by northern Kikuyus to embarrass
(Kenyatta’s) Government,” the cables read.
Backlash from killing
A
Central Intelligence Agency report issued in October 1971 noted growing
opposition to “Kenyatta’s inner circle of southern Kikuyu politicians
not only among other tribes… but also among clans of the northern
Kikuyu, which have not gotten their share of the spoils of office”.
Did
this erupt into violence with the bombings and other scares of March
1975? Top officials around Kenyatta appear to have thought so, leading
to the murder of JM Kariuki.
“On
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, there were 18 bomb scare
hoaxes involving Government and commercial buildings in Nairobi and
Mombasa,” reads a cable dated March 7.
“No bombs were found,
although normal activities were disrupted by building evacuations. On
March 5, a goods train derailed near Voi causing nine petrol tanker
wagons to explode. The wreck, in which three railway workers injured,
appears to have resulted from sabotage of rails at the point of
derailment.
JM,
who was often critical of the Government, disappeared on March 1 that
year from the Special Branch headquarters at Kingsway House, on
Nairobi’s Muindi Mbingu Street. Almost immediately, there was talk that a
presidential bodyguard had murdered him.
A parliamentary inquiry into the killing later identified that guard
as Mau Mau veteran Arthur Wanyoike Thungu and suggested his activities
be investigated. However, as another cable documents, President Kenyatta
had the report amended to remove the names of Thungu and Mbiyu
Koinange, then the Minister of State in the Office of the President.
Researchers reconstructing the killing have reported Thungu shot and injured Kariuki
during a confrontation at Special Branch headquarters then got the
go-ahead from Koinange, Kenyatta’s right hand man, to finish him off.
Other reports claim Kariuki
got into a fight with Thungu during interrogation over the bombings and
was shot in the arm by Ben Gethi, the head of General Service Unit. A
call to Koinange allegedly sealed his fate and he was driven to Ngong’
where he was tortured and murdered.
The backlash from the killing seems to have scuttled the scheming against Moi.
When the plotters made their move a year later, they chose to try and
change the Constitution to prevent him succeeding Kenyatta automatically
in the event the president died or was incapacitated.
They failed.
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