Despite our differences, Michuki taught me the need for consensus

Last month, an ambassador concerned about the imminent danger to a wildlife species sought my assistance in seeking urgent help from Prime Minister Raila Odinga.

I proposed going directly to Environment minister John Michuki instead, as that would get the quickest results.

The ambassador was delighted with my suggestion and praised Mr Michuki’s superlative effectiveness.     

My instinctive recourse to Mr Michuki reflected the long distance I had travelled in my views of one of the most powerful Cabinet ministers from Central Kenya – and of my views on how to bring about change in our country.

As a young adult slowly discovering the colonial history that our schools never taught, Mr Michuki had emerged as one of those Kenyans I wanted nothing to do with.

That opinion was further cemented when I learned more about Mau Mau’s struggles and Murang’a politics from close friends Maina wa Kinyatti and the late Wang’ondu wa Kariuki, who supported J.J. Kamotho’s insurgent challenge against Mr Michuki and the repressive order they thought he represented.

Children were playmates

So later, when my children and Mr Michuki’s became friends at St Mary’s School and I would sometimes drop them at the minister’s well-guarded Ridgeways home, and even after the minister’s lovely daughter Ann married my close media colleague Mutahi Kagwe, I still did not try getting to know Mr Michuki.

His subsequent outstanding achievements as a minister could not negate from me his hardline role in the Standard raid, the Artur brothers saga and the extrajudicial killings of Mungiki suspects.

There was also his astonishing but very candid proclamation in 2003 that the push for reforms had been meant to derail former president Moi, but with President Mwai Kibaki in power, there was no need to pursue change.

My view of Mr Michuki changed dramatically in 2009, when we were both part of Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s delegation to the UN General Assembly in New York.

I had pleasant exchanges with the minister once I became Mr Odinga’s spokesman in 2007, but in New York we were grouped together and ended up having a number of interesting conversations. It was an eye-opener.  

He was aware of my own history of fighting the system he represented so effectively, and I was very much a junior colleague to boot, but there was not a hint of disdain or lack of interest in hearing my opinions.

But what amazed me was that I agreed with him on a number of crucial things, the most important of which was the need to talk honestly about what one believed in if we were to progress as a nation.

I actually became very fond of him, and sought him out at any event we attended. I realised that despite his ideology, Mr Michuki was a Grand Old Man with his own dignity.

He also possessed invaluable knowledge of a period of our liberation struggle that few on his side of the colonial divide have articulated.

I once told him that his memoirs, along with Mr Charles Njonjo’s, would be eagerly sought in Kenya as both had kept their silence as witnesses and commanding actors  in the making of our history.

He responded with his inimitable mischievous glint which was totally non-committal, hovering between cynicism, disdain and approval!  Is it possible he did have a manuscript in the works?