Luther12
Elder Lister
Part III: Operation Stop Sonko
As much as the ordinarily nonchalant Kenyatta didn’t seem bothered by Mbuvi’s umatatu, allowing his anarchist tendencies to slide on repeated occasions, a coterie of senior civil servants felt differently. They were worried what would happen if he became Nairobi’s next governor.
Working with Kenya’s wealthiest business people, they hatched what would become known as “Operation Stop Mbuvi”, an intervention that Mbuvi himself lamented about publicly time and again whenever he experienced state harassment.
Stopping Mbuvi involved a series of legal and technical roadblocks that would make him ineligible to run for office. First prize would be ensuring that Mbuvi didn’t obtain a certificate of good conduct from the police. Given his criminal record, this ought to have been an easy win.
However, the conspirators backed this up with their own candidate, Peter Kenneth, a man who Mbuvi kept referring to as “The System’s candidate”.
Kenneth was as different from Mbuvi as day is from night, well connected in all the right circles of business, politics and high society. Two funerals that took place after the 2017 general election showed the Kenyan public Kenneth’s possibilities.
A funeral, they say, reveals more about a society than any other occasion.
The first was the non-state state funeral of Bob Collymore, the Kenyanised Guyanese chief executive of Safaricom, the Vodacom-founded telecommunications behemoth that is Kenya’s most profitable company. As much as he was a private corporate citizen, Collymore’s passing commanded national mourning, considering that being Safaricom chief executive — at least if one understands the role, its trappings and leverage and acts accordingly — is akin to being a deity.
Kenneth stood up as a replacement for Collymore as captain of The Boys Club, a not-so-loose formation of powerful business figures, covering business, banking, journalism and telecommunications. The invitation-only club had the power to decide some Kenyan fates, and deployed properly could have blocked Mbuvi’s ascendance.
The other funeral was that of Ezra Bunyenyezi, the debonair Ugandan businessman who had provided seed money for the founding of what became Radio Africa Group.
In his past life, Bunyenyezi had supplied Janet Museveni with a car to take her kids to school in Nairobi as her husband was waging the liberation war back in Uganda; he was one of two businessmen who financed the building of a bridge to assist Paul Kagame’s ragtag Rwandan Patriotic Front to make their way to Kigali; and he bought an air ticket for Raila Odinga, Kenya’s future prime minister, who was on the run in the late ’80s, on his way to Oslo.
In short, Bunyenyezi was entwined in Africa’s liberation story.
By being at Bunyenyezi’s funeral in a leading role — as if a captain of a different boys club, Kenneth was showing the public that his 2017 bid for the Nairobi governorship against Mbuvi came with serious support.
Make it all go away
Mbuvi and Kenneth both ran under the colours of the Jubilee Party, a product of a merger between Kenyatta’s 2013 party and that of his deputy.
As their competition intensified, Mbuvi’s criminal past surfaced in the press. A disqualification looked likely. But then Mbuvi sought a late night audience with Kenyatta. He reportedly broke down, asking Kenyatta why he was betraying him when Mbuvi had stood with the president during his trial at The Hague.
The police issued a certificate of good conduct by 8am the next morning, and Mbuvi went ahead to win the party primaries. Kenneth cried foul. But the horse had bolted.
With the president’s actions showing that Mbuvi had his ear, if not his backing, the senior civil servants and their patrons had to back down, slightly. And so they inserted a condition: Mbuvi would have a running mate of their choice — governors and their deputies ran on a joint electoral ticket. This was meant to keep Mbuvi’s umatatu in check by pairing him with a sober mind but, more importantly, this was also meant to secure certain commercial interests.
Politics mattered, but money mattered more.
Polycarp Igathe fit the bill, a loyal protege who had cut his teeth in corporate Kenya.
The plan was simple. Mbuvi would win the votes. Igathe would govern, with the end goal being to push Mbuvi out of office and allow the chosen few men to overrun Nairobi, with Igathe as the potential governor (Igathe had a slip of the tongue and made this confession in public during the June 2021 funeral of Chris Kirubi, his benefactor, one of Kenya’s wealthiest businessmen and a Kenyatta insider).
Rather than fight right then, Mbuvi played realpolitik. He obliged to the demands of those arrayed against him, feigning a fragile bonhomie with Igathe throughout the campaign period. They would pull up for publicity photoshoots at Emmanuel Jambo’s artelier — Jambo is Kenyatta’s official photographer — in an attempt to sell their newfound comradeship.
In their circus of campaign videos, Igathe was the tall caricature, Mbuvi the short one.
A video emerged of Igathe standing in a circle with a handful of middle-aged men.
With each of them wearing a matching Cheers Baba — a cynical alias given to sleeveless jackets worn by wannabes and midlife-crisis-approaching Nairobi males — an exuberant Igathe proposed a toast to his mates, most of whom were holding their black and yellow cans of Tusker, Kenya’s most popular beer.
Igathe called it an Australian Toast, and it went something like this: “Here’s to you, here’s to me; the best of friends, we’ill always be; and if by chance, we disagree; well, fuck you! Here’s to you!” Generous, perhaps: the toast usually ends with, “Here’s to me!”
First victory, then control
The unlikely combination worked. Mbuvi won with 871 974 votes — breaking his 2013 record for an individual politician not running for president. The bulk of those votes were from the Eastlands proletariat.
Igathe waltzed into City Hall, scolding workers when he encountered filth in the basement parking lot. City Hall’s Igathe-led corporate takeover was officially in high gear.
But Mbuvi was a step ahead.
He packed City Hall with loyal roughnecks from Eastlands. Most didn’t necessarily have job descriptions beyond being his eyes and ears. They meant that Mbuvi became omnipresent. No single piece of paper moved without his authorisation. He then surrounded himself with a barrage of bodyguards, PAs and hangers-on from his matatu kingpin days.
People started looking over their shoulders. Nairobi was now being governed by paranoia. To enhance the chaos, Mbuvi maintained a handful of cellphones and only he knew which one was used for what purpose.
He chose when to be accessible and when to go missing.
Afraid that an administrative maelstrom was looming, Igathe frantically attempted to unclog the City Hall bureaucracy. It was too late. Six months later, the man meant to keep Mbuvi in check and then replace him tweeted his resignation.
Another challenger
Mbuvi ought to have appointed a deputy. He didn’t. When the pressure to do so ratcheted up, he’d forward wildcard candidates to the county parliament for approval. They were automatically rejected. But each step bought time.
He then ensured that every phone conversation was recorded; cruise missiles that he released online depending on the amount of damage he wished to cause to who, where and when.
When Igathe resigned, Mbuvi leaked their conversations, painting Igathe in an unsavoury light. When he got into an altercation with the Nairobi women MP Esther Passaris, Mbuvi leaked screenshots of Passaris asking him to finance her campaigns.
The same Machiavellianism was practised in Mbuvi’s management of Nairobi. His cabinet walked on eggshells because he shuffled its membership every other week. In the same spirit of keeping everyone at City Hall on their toes, Mbuvi ensured the majority of senior officials served in acting capacity, so that their firing, transfers and demotions wouldn’t be complicated.
It was governance by fear and blackmail on one hand; chaos and confusion on the other.
Everything seemed to be going his way.
But the civil servants and businessmen had a new plan; a second apparatchik in Peter Kariuki, a lawyer and former civil society operative-turned-presidential adviser.
After a five-year stint at the president’s office, Kariuki was considered both an asset and an arsenal in curtailing Mbuvi, and was seconded to City Hall as county secretary, the equivalent of a company secretary. Knowing Kariuki and his masters were up to no good, Mbuvi resisted the appointment. When he was forced to give way, Mbuvi employed the same antics he had used against Igathe to frustrate Kariuki.
Knowing he was the last man standing in the fight to curtail Mbuvi, Kariuki brawled on until he couldn’t.
Mbuvi seemed to have won again.
As much as the ordinarily nonchalant Kenyatta didn’t seem bothered by Mbuvi’s umatatu, allowing his anarchist tendencies to slide on repeated occasions, a coterie of senior civil servants felt differently. They were worried what would happen if he became Nairobi’s next governor.
Working with Kenya’s wealthiest business people, they hatched what would become known as “Operation Stop Mbuvi”, an intervention that Mbuvi himself lamented about publicly time and again whenever he experienced state harassment.
Stopping Mbuvi involved a series of legal and technical roadblocks that would make him ineligible to run for office. First prize would be ensuring that Mbuvi didn’t obtain a certificate of good conduct from the police. Given his criminal record, this ought to have been an easy win.
However, the conspirators backed this up with their own candidate, Peter Kenneth, a man who Mbuvi kept referring to as “The System’s candidate”.
Kenneth was as different from Mbuvi as day is from night, well connected in all the right circles of business, politics and high society. Two funerals that took place after the 2017 general election showed the Kenyan public Kenneth’s possibilities.
A funeral, they say, reveals more about a society than any other occasion.
The first was the non-state state funeral of Bob Collymore, the Kenyanised Guyanese chief executive of Safaricom, the Vodacom-founded telecommunications behemoth that is Kenya’s most profitable company. As much as he was a private corporate citizen, Collymore’s passing commanded national mourning, considering that being Safaricom chief executive — at least if one understands the role, its trappings and leverage and acts accordingly — is akin to being a deity.
Kenneth stood up as a replacement for Collymore as captain of The Boys Club, a not-so-loose formation of powerful business figures, covering business, banking, journalism and telecommunications. The invitation-only club had the power to decide some Kenyan fates, and deployed properly could have blocked Mbuvi’s ascendance.
The other funeral was that of Ezra Bunyenyezi, the debonair Ugandan businessman who had provided seed money for the founding of what became Radio Africa Group.
In his past life, Bunyenyezi had supplied Janet Museveni with a car to take her kids to school in Nairobi as her husband was waging the liberation war back in Uganda; he was one of two businessmen who financed the building of a bridge to assist Paul Kagame’s ragtag Rwandan Patriotic Front to make their way to Kigali; and he bought an air ticket for Raila Odinga, Kenya’s future prime minister, who was on the run in the late ’80s, on his way to Oslo.
In short, Bunyenyezi was entwined in Africa’s liberation story.
By being at Bunyenyezi’s funeral in a leading role — as if a captain of a different boys club, Kenneth was showing the public that his 2017 bid for the Nairobi governorship against Mbuvi came with serious support.
Make it all go away
Mbuvi and Kenneth both ran under the colours of the Jubilee Party, a product of a merger between Kenyatta’s 2013 party and that of his deputy.
As their competition intensified, Mbuvi’s criminal past surfaced in the press. A disqualification looked likely. But then Mbuvi sought a late night audience with Kenyatta. He reportedly broke down, asking Kenyatta why he was betraying him when Mbuvi had stood with the president during his trial at The Hague.
The police issued a certificate of good conduct by 8am the next morning, and Mbuvi went ahead to win the party primaries. Kenneth cried foul. But the horse had bolted.
With the president’s actions showing that Mbuvi had his ear, if not his backing, the senior civil servants and their patrons had to back down, slightly. And so they inserted a condition: Mbuvi would have a running mate of their choice — governors and their deputies ran on a joint electoral ticket. This was meant to keep Mbuvi’s umatatu in check by pairing him with a sober mind but, more importantly, this was also meant to secure certain commercial interests.
Politics mattered, but money mattered more.
Polycarp Igathe fit the bill, a loyal protege who had cut his teeth in corporate Kenya.
The plan was simple. Mbuvi would win the votes. Igathe would govern, with the end goal being to push Mbuvi out of office and allow the chosen few men to overrun Nairobi, with Igathe as the potential governor (Igathe had a slip of the tongue and made this confession in public during the June 2021 funeral of Chris Kirubi, his benefactor, one of Kenya’s wealthiest businessmen and a Kenyatta insider).
Rather than fight right then, Mbuvi played realpolitik. He obliged to the demands of those arrayed against him, feigning a fragile bonhomie with Igathe throughout the campaign period. They would pull up for publicity photoshoots at Emmanuel Jambo’s artelier — Jambo is Kenyatta’s official photographer — in an attempt to sell their newfound comradeship.
In their circus of campaign videos, Igathe was the tall caricature, Mbuvi the short one.
A video emerged of Igathe standing in a circle with a handful of middle-aged men.
With each of them wearing a matching Cheers Baba — a cynical alias given to sleeveless jackets worn by wannabes and midlife-crisis-approaching Nairobi males — an exuberant Igathe proposed a toast to his mates, most of whom were holding their black and yellow cans of Tusker, Kenya’s most popular beer.
Igathe called it an Australian Toast, and it went something like this: “Here’s to you, here’s to me; the best of friends, we’ill always be; and if by chance, we disagree; well, fuck you! Here’s to you!” Generous, perhaps: the toast usually ends with, “Here’s to me!”
First victory, then control
The unlikely combination worked. Mbuvi won with 871 974 votes — breaking his 2013 record for an individual politician not running for president. The bulk of those votes were from the Eastlands proletariat.
Igathe waltzed into City Hall, scolding workers when he encountered filth in the basement parking lot. City Hall’s Igathe-led corporate takeover was officially in high gear.
But Mbuvi was a step ahead.
He packed City Hall with loyal roughnecks from Eastlands. Most didn’t necessarily have job descriptions beyond being his eyes and ears. They meant that Mbuvi became omnipresent. No single piece of paper moved without his authorisation. He then surrounded himself with a barrage of bodyguards, PAs and hangers-on from his matatu kingpin days.
People started looking over their shoulders. Nairobi was now being governed by paranoia. To enhance the chaos, Mbuvi maintained a handful of cellphones and only he knew which one was used for what purpose.
He chose when to be accessible and when to go missing.
Afraid that an administrative maelstrom was looming, Igathe frantically attempted to unclog the City Hall bureaucracy. It was too late. Six months later, the man meant to keep Mbuvi in check and then replace him tweeted his resignation.
Another challenger
Mbuvi ought to have appointed a deputy. He didn’t. When the pressure to do so ratcheted up, he’d forward wildcard candidates to the county parliament for approval. They were automatically rejected. But each step bought time.
He then ensured that every phone conversation was recorded; cruise missiles that he released online depending on the amount of damage he wished to cause to who, where and when.
When Igathe resigned, Mbuvi leaked their conversations, painting Igathe in an unsavoury light. When he got into an altercation with the Nairobi women MP Esther Passaris, Mbuvi leaked screenshots of Passaris asking him to finance her campaigns.
The same Machiavellianism was practised in Mbuvi’s management of Nairobi. His cabinet walked on eggshells because he shuffled its membership every other week. In the same spirit of keeping everyone at City Hall on their toes, Mbuvi ensured the majority of senior officials served in acting capacity, so that their firing, transfers and demotions wouldn’t be complicated.
It was governance by fear and blackmail on one hand; chaos and confusion on the other.
Everything seemed to be going his way.
But the civil servants and businessmen had a new plan; a second apparatchik in Peter Kariuki, a lawyer and former civil society operative-turned-presidential adviser.
After a five-year stint at the president’s office, Kariuki was considered both an asset and an arsenal in curtailing Mbuvi, and was seconded to City Hall as county secretary, the equivalent of a company secretary. Knowing Kariuki and his masters were up to no good, Mbuvi resisted the appointment. When he was forced to give way, Mbuvi employed the same antics he had used against Igathe to frustrate Kariuki.
Knowing he was the last man standing in the fight to curtail Mbuvi, Kariuki brawled on until he couldn’t.
Mbuvi seemed to have won again.
