Coup haste that saw Lumumba Institute collapse

It was December 12, 1964, and the new African Republic of Kenya had been born. Hidden from the hustle and bustle of Nairobi’s new administration was a fenced compound where a sculpture of Congo’s assassinated Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba had been erected under a shroud of secrecy.

Two people knew about the project: Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Jomo Kenyatta. Both operated a secret joint bank account. So secret was the activity that most senior Kanu politicians got no wind of it.

The only reminder

Today, the 20-acre Pan African Christian University off Thika Road stands as the only reminder of this Communist project executed by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga to train party stalwarts in communism, a move that would later backfire and see the closure of the institution and jailing of the former deputy principal Wanguhu Ng’ang’a.

Interestingly, Mr Odinga had brought in his protégé Bildad Kagia as the chairman with other Kapenguria Six members as trustees. On the board were Pio Gama Pinto, Achieng Oneko, S. Othigo Othieno, Kung’u Karumba, Fred Kubai, F. Oluande, Paul Ngei, and Joseph Murumbi – a well-groomed set of communists and their sympathisers.

Mr Kagia, the chairman, had become a close confidante of Mr Odinga and both embraced socialist principles and leaned to the East from where they had sought funding for Lumumba Institute, according to official documents on the institute.

Although he was the only other trustee of the institute besides Mr Odinga, President Kenyatta didn’t initially know that Lumumba Institute was part of a communist plot to train radicals who would later stage a coup within the ruling party, Kanu, to replace the West-leaning politicians with a new cabal led by Odinga.

Although politically Kenya was masquerading as non-aligned, it was known that Tom Mboya, one of the CIA’s pointmen, and a bevy of US-trained politicians led by Dr Julius Gikonyo Kiano, who had just joined the government, were sympathetic to the capitalist West.

While diplomats in Nairobi had known about the institute, they knew it would take time before Mr Odinga trained enough party cadres to stage his party coup. But it was the haste of the first group of students that saw the Lumumba Institute collapse.

On July 16, 1965, some 16 days after the first batch of 84 students graduated from the institute, they staged a “coup” at the Kanu headquarters, then on Nairobi’s Mfang’ano Street, and ostensibly “removed” the entire Kanu leadership apart from Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga.

It was Mr Ng’ang’a, who had trained in Czechoslovakia as a journalist and was a founder of the Kenya Union of Journalists, who floated the idea of retaining the two, but in effect he had been elected as Secretary-General to replace Tom Mboya, the man Mr Odinga wanted out of the party politics.

Kanu coup

Shortly after the Kanu coup failed, the government deported a Chinese undercover agent, Wang Te Ming, who travelled on a diplomatic passport and masqueraded as a journalist in Nairobi. Ming was once a Chinese volunteer soldier during the Korean War and had risen to the rank of a major and his role in the institute is not clear.

Another plotter was a South African communist Hosea Jaffe, a Cape Town University-trained engineer who was teaching mathematics at the Duke of Gloucester School, now Nairobi School. Kenyatta, we now know, had been told that the institute would be used to “elaborate the spirit of harambee” or as Mr Kagia, the institute’s first chairman, had put it in a document.

Mr Odinga had also convinced President Kenyatta that the objective of the Lumumba Trust, which was to manage the institute, was to “establish and maintain a college, university or school” and to “grant scholarships and bursaries”.

The 20-acre plot on which the institute stood was purchased by Mr Odinga and the buildings erected in a record five months at a cost of 27,000 pounds (current rates Sh3.5 million) with funding from Communist countries.

President Kenyatta had left Mr Odinga to coordinate the building and running of the institute. Mr Odinga hand-picked the socialist-leaning Kagia as the chairman of the board of management.

The curriculum had been selected methodically – general principles of socialism, history of political organisation, African road to socialism, Kiswahili, accounts and the biography of Jomo Kenyatta.