Tom Mboya: The untold story

It will be 40 years this July 5, since Tom Mboya was assassinated outside a pharmacy on Government Road (now Moi Avenue). Up to this day, neither the real assassin nor the sponsors of it are known.

The trial of the suspected assassin, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, a one-time KANU youthwinger who occasionally made money on the side by harassing businesspeople with threats of his connections with powerful politicians, was so tightly controlled there can be little doubt that it was stage-managed.

Those in the public gallery were vetted and monitored; journalists, especially foreign journalists were mostly refused entry. Njenga had pleaded guilty to murdering Tom Mboya; the trial was merely a passage to his execution.

This smoothly managed showcase was however, almost ruined by a remark made almost casually by Njenga.

“What about the big man?” he asked as he was being sentenced to hang.

With that remark, he posed a riddle that is, in many ways, at the heart of independent Kenya’s politics.

Historians, journalists and others have speculated for 40 years now over the identity of the Big Man.

Fingers have silently pointed at individuals within Kenyatta’s inner circle.

There has been a fair amount of speculation that foreign intelligence was involved – or at the very least, had sufficient motive to want Mboya dead, and in many ways gained from it.

Or maybe it was a lone gunman, driven by pent-up personal grievances with the young dashing politician. Nothing has ever been proved or established.

The questions linger. Using recently declassified information from various sources, including the US State Department and documents from archives in Kenya and the United Kingdom, we will try to answer the basic questions surrounding Mboya’s assassination: Who ordered the hit on Mboya? Was there a second gunman? Was there a link between Mboya’s killers and an assassination plot almost six years later on Vice President Daniel arap Moi? Did Mboya know about the plot to assassinate Pio Gama Pinto? Was there a link between President Kenyatta, Bruce Mackenzie, Charles Njonjo and the MI5? Did the MI5 want Mboya out of the way?

Other questions: did Nahashon Njenga use Mboya’s gun as later alleged (part of the somewhat absurd theory that Mboya planned to assassinate Kenyatta, Njenga knew about it and, in a fit of patriotism, killed Mboya instead – using Mboya’s gun)?

Of Mboya’s murder, then Vice President Daniel arap Moi would later say to Parliament that it was “monstrously conceived but brilliantly planned and carried out”.

It was a strange way to put it especially because, Mboya’s death had precipitated the most severe riots in post-independence Kenya’s history and had deepened existing ethnic and political divisions to the point that they threatened to break the country apart.

There are more practical questions surrounding that statement: Considering Mboya had virtually no security on the day, was in fact by himself at a pharmacy in downtown Nairobi on a Saturday and at a time when the city is virtually deserted, it appears odd that Mr Moi would describe the assassination as “brilliantly planned and carried out”. What does the former President know?

Also telling, was the brevity of the aftermath of assassination.

‘Biggest manhunt ever for Mboya’s killers’, the Daily Nation announced in its headline the following Monday and in somewhat triumphant fashion.

Three weeks later, on August 1, it was, however, Time Magazine that breached the unutterable: “A Kikuyu Suspect” announced its Mboya headline.