COMMENTARY By Leo Odera Omolo In Kisumu City
I have sat down for a length of time perusing and scrutinizing the report released last week by the Truth and Justice Reconciliation Commission and found them to be shallow shoddy and hollow, not even worth reading any sane person.
Perhaps the Bethwell Kiplagat team just wanted to justify the millions of taxpayers money its members had consumed during the stormy period it conducted it half-baked inquiries.
The TJRC did not caste its net wide open, though it came up with some names of leaders both in the present and past it has recommended should be probed further so as to ascertain the truth about their wrong doing.
In regards to past politically motivated assassinations TRC reported is highly rubbished for merely bush-beating, which are devoid of any iota of the truth.
The TJRC chairman Kiplagat himself had long been rejected by the entire Kenyan society that he was not the right person for the job, but insisted on carrying it out and even went to court so that he could be clear to proceed on with the job. Those had loudly raised objections knew it pretty well that Kiplagat was not the right person taking it into account his covert operations and flirting with RENAMO of Mozambique and its renegade forces under the rebel leader Dr Dhlakama .
The TJRC came out with the large number of names of innocent Kenyans, which it has recommended should be probed further in connection to human right abuse of the past regimes.
Conspicuously missing from the names that the TJRC wanted to be investigated was the name of the late James Kanyottu, the former director of the security intelligence police unit, which was known as the {Special Branch}.
Kanyottu who has since died after retiring from the security intelligence service which he headed ever since 1965 after succeeding Benard Hinga might have gone into his grave with the heaps of secrets about the past political assassinations in this country, therefore any inquiry report which exclude his names is considered by Kenyans of average intelligence as shoddy and shallow and not worth its salt.
Kanyottu might have not personally participated in actual assassination exercises, but definitely knew the political enemies of the victims who might have been involved in hatching plots to eliminate those whom their perceived to be their political enemies.
During Kanyotu’s rein as the head of the security intelligence five senior Kenyan politician were gunned down or killed
The victims were Pio Gama Pinto, a specially elected member of parliament who was the first to die I a series of well hatched plots of assassination, Thomas Joseph Mboya, C.MG.Argwings-Kodhek, Ronald Gideon Ngala, Josiah Mwangi Kariuki {JM} and finally Robert John Ouko being the last one to die.
From my own intelligent guesswork Kiplagat ‘s commission job was only to rekindle the communal emotions of families and relatives of the victims while serving the interests of some evil and invisible forces still operating lie mafia groups in this country.
For Mr Kanyottu, there was no way someone of the late Tom Mboya status could be assassinated without the knowledge of the head of the national security intelligence unit unless the unit’s operations had long collapse or were on the verge of total collapse.
If it was so Kanyottu couldn’t have lasted on his job for close to 40 years after those painful events of the early and late 1960s.
We have been eagerly waiting to read from the TJRC report as to who ordered fro the closing down of all the phone communications between Nairobi an Addis Ababa as from June 29,1969 to July 4,1969 on the very day Mboya and his delegation to the UNCEA returned home to be killed the next day July 5,1969.
There were strong rumors making the round in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi ad its environs, that some of the late Mboya’s closes friend who hah heard o the assassination rumors made frantic effort to reach him in Addis Abba by phone for the purpose of alerting him about the dreadful rumor in Nairobi, but Nairobi Addis phone were severed off at the external-telecom. Surely such events if it is true they took place could not have escaped the knowledge of the head of the nation’s national security organ, and here is where the name of Kanyottu comes in hand.
Obviously someone in a very senior position in the government of the day might have been the one who ordered the phone line between Addis and Nairobi line severed of for a specific pupose.
These are some of the area which were so fertile for the TJRC team to visit an make thorough inquiries because all the records in those institutions are said to be still intact for probe.
In the case of Dr. Robert John Ouko, reports were made I courts tat his phone lines at his Koru Farm in Kisumu had also gone off during the fateful night of his mysterious disappearance and death. Obviously the head of the security intelligence cannot be exonerated for having been totally ignorance of these events.
The same could be said of the deaths by faked road accidents of Ronald Gideon Ngala and CMG Argwings-Kodhek. Like Mboya both died while serving in the cabinet as Minster for Foreign Affair and minister for Power and Communications respectively. All the four Mboya, Ngala, Argwings-Kodhek and Ouko were the possible future presidential materials during the reign of the late Jomo Kenyatta. And as such Kenyans were expecting Kiplagat’s TJRC to caste its net much more wider and come out with some truth about thee past politically motivated killings in Kenyatta instead of writing rubbish and perhaps copying some old reports from other regions.
Leo Odera Omolo