Ex-Kamiti prisoner returns to the university after a decade

When Bernard Omondi Onyango returned to his old hostel at the University of Nairobi for the first time in about a decade, the first thing he noticed was the enhanced security. Besides the guard at the door, there were others patrolling the university grounds.

Mr Onyango, popularly known as Bena, did not know right away that this state of affairs had something to do with him.

It started one evening, nine years ago, when police raided his room and recovered eight guns.

How times change! On the day he returned to the university, none of the students recognised him. He had been away for nine years, six of which he spent locked up at the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison.

And, after battling for readmission and succeeding, when he resumes studies in his engineering class, he will stick out like a sore thumb. At 34, he is virtually the old man of the class.

Most of his classmates were KCPE candidates when the police took him away in 2003. Then, he was a fourth-year agricultural engineering student, readying for the second semester examinations.

He says that one of his greatest challenges will be to catch up with studies and to cope with his collegemates.

Besides, the course has changed significantly and he will have to work extra hard after so many years outside college.

“I will have to start fourth year afresh because I did not do my end-year examinations before I was arrested. I have also been told the syllabus has changed and this will require me to do new additional units,” he says with a tinge of regret in his eyes. “When I look back at my life, I realise that crime might pay but criminals will always pay dearly.”

Ten years ago Bena was on the police list of the most wanted criminals. Before news of his criminal links broke, he had been the envy of many of his peers at the university.

He lived large, wearing expensive clothes and shoes, including an imported pair that cost Sh15,000. He owned an expensive mobile phone and an imposing music system that woke up the whole hostel at half-blast.

Found guns

When the police raided his room, they found guns and tens of rounds of ammunition besides jewellery, including a 4kg gold chain worth about Sh4m at the time.

Things had been going well for him until that day when police knocked at his door and asked for him. He did not tell them who he was and slipped right through their net.

He recalls the events of that day.

“I misdirected them to the wardrobe of my roommate. They searched and did not find the guns,” he says. “I took a cigarette, requested for a lighter from one of the policemen, and walked out to freedom. I walked out like someone who did not want the smoke to affect the officers and a crowd of students who had gathered outside the door of my room.”

Bena came back at 3 am, stole a towel from a clothes line, undressed and wrapped the towel around his body before sneaking into the room while the janitor had his guard down.

He retrieved his arms, put them in a bucket and moved them into a vacant room above his. The room had been allocated to a fifth-year agricultural engineering student, who had moved to the Upper Kabete campus.

He says the weapons were discovered later that day. By this time, he was on his way to Lokichoggio, Turkana.

But the law finally caught up with him. He was charged with various crimes, including robbery with violence, rape and possession of firearms.

On the day he was convicted of possession of weapons, two of his accomplices were sentenced to death for violent robbery.

Bena, alongside his accomplices, had been charged with violently robbing an army officer, Mr Hudson Wafula, of Sh3,000 on May 13, 2003. The gang shot dead the officer attached to the Department of Defence during a robbery at Lang’ata’s Akiba estate.

In another case, the Registrar of the High Court, Mr William Ouko, narrated how the gang abducted him from his Nairobi home on the night of March 21 and 22, 2003 and robbed him of a pistol with 15 rounds of ammunition, a safe, two ATM cards, mobile phones and household goods, all worth Sh350,000. The gang was also accused of robbing an administration police officer of a rifle with 20 rounds of ammunition.

Bena was also being investigated for being part of a four-member gang that attacked a taxi driver and his female passenger.

In yet another case, the police linked Bena and other people to the murder of six people and various robberies in Nairobi. They claimed the stolen things would be hidden in Bena’s room in Mamlaka hostel. The police impounded one of the cars.

Bena says he was not born a criminal.

“I was introduced to crime by a former classmate who told me that it was the easier and faster way to get rich,” he told Lifestyle.

It all started a few days before the 2002 World Cup when he bumped into an old classmate on Koinange Street on his way to the university. His classmate had been discontinued from studying at the university for failing examinations.

Share the loot

“I have a business deal that will give you a lot of money,” the man told Bena. “You will only keep guns for me and you will get your share of the loot every time they are used and brought back.”

He says the promise of money was attractive but the mention of guns evoked fear.

Bena came from a poor background. His parents were tailors. His father, who died while he was in prison, was a polygamous man who could not afford good care for his family.

Born in Nakuru in 1978, Bena is the first-born of his mother’s four children. He lived with his step-mother who was raising her own nine children.

“The uniform that my father bought for me when I enrolled in Form One were the last clothes that I received from my parents,” he recalls. “So, when I received an offer of making at least Sh10,000 in a week, I thought it was a joke.”

Two days later, just after he arrived in his room from the library, someone knocked at his door in Mamlaka. It was his former classmate, smartly dressed in a black suit whose jacket was collarless, and carrying a black briefcase. He looked nervous.

“I am here for that business,” the man announced as he wiped sweat off his face.

He locked the door behind him and opened his briefcase and removed two revolvers.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Bena says. “It was the first time I was seeing a pistol at close range. He gave me Sh10,000.”

The meeting lasted 30 minutes during which Bena was taught how to pack and store the pistols. The “business”, he says, lasted several months.

In January 2003, the cache increased to an AK-47 rifle, a G3 and six pistols. But, unknown to them, the police had been monitoring the activities of the six-man gang.

Although Bena says he was never directly involved in the crimes other than storing the guns, the police said the whole group was responsible for violent robberies, bank robberies, house raids, rapes and carjacking.

One week to his second semester examinations, Bena’s accomplices were arrested.

“I had finished revising for my exams and was on my way to pick up my date for the evening to attend the university’s Miss Parklands Campus event when I heard a knock,” he recalls. When he opened the door, five bulky men walked in and identified themselves as police officers.

And he gave them the slip. He went to Lokichoggio, where he lived in a lodging with one of his friends for a week before renting a manyatta.

Meanwhile, the police had launched a countrywide search for him and the media were awash with news of his escape and alleged crimes.

Then his landlady read a story about him in the Daily Nation of June 2, 2003.

“She called me and asked whether I had seen the article. When I told her that I had not, she plucked out the page and gave it to me to read,” he says.

He escaped from Lokichoggio but police officers stopped the Nairobi-bound bus in which he was travelling, arrested him and took him to Lodwar.

“The chief magistrate and OCPD came to see me in the cell. They did not believe that I had been arrested,” he says.

He remembers how he was sent to Nairobi in a style he had only seen in the movies. About 20 police officers escorted him to the helicopter that flew him to Nairobi. “It was like a scene from the Commando,” he recalls.

A week later, he was produced in the Kibera law courts and charged with 24 counts of robbery, rape and murder.

The following week, he was again charged at the Nairobi law courts with 10 counts that included rape and robbery with violence. He was also charged with three counts of robbery with violence at the Makadara law courts.

He was to remain in remand at Kamiti Maximum Prison while the cases went on. On September 27, 2005, he was convicted of possession of weapons and jailed for five years. He launched an appeal in October that year and won the case during a full hearing held in 2007.

He recalls his time in prison.

“While in prison, I used to sit alone and think about how I had wasted my life. I decided to change,” he says.

“Being away from the people I loved gave me a chance to reflect on my past. I discovered that I had wasted so many years in crime. When you commit a crime, you get so happy when it pays but when arrested, those you leave behind suffer a lot.”

In 2007, together with another prisoner known as Peter Ouko, who was serving a life sentence for murder, the late Edwin Shimoli “The Jackal” and other convicts serving life sentences, they formed an initiative known as Crime Si Poa.

“We used to come together and talk about our past with the aim of changing our lives,” he says.

While in prison, he also taught Kiswahili, mathematics and physics to prisoners.

Back to prison cell

After winning the appeal, he still had a murder charge pending before court. On the morning of March 19, 2009, he left Kamiti for the Nairobi High Court expecting to go back to his prison cell.

He entered the court at 2 pm before Justice Muga Apondi who, half an hour later, declared him a free man.

“When I walked out of court into the streets, Nairobi looked like a new place. So many things had changed. It was my first time to walk without chains and police escort in years,” he says.

Three months after his release, the bullet-riddled body of the friend who introduced him to crime was found on Landhies Road. He left Nairobi for Kisumu where he kept a low profile. He says that saved his life.

He later returned to the city and started organising events in prisons as part of the Crime Si Poa initiative.

In March 2009, Omondi sent an appeal to the University of Nairobi for readmission. It was not easy.

“When he came into the room, the senate members seemed not to care. There was even a break in between the hearings as almost the entire team never wanted him to return to the university. He got his readmission against all odds,” recalls former Sonu chairman Babu Owino.

A reformed man, Bena is determined to right the wrongs he did by acquiring his degree although he says paying fees is still a challenge.

He says there is a need for an education fund to help reformed convicts to achieve their goals and avoid a life of crime.