Makokha's Memo

A shocking admission in the report is that there are 150,000 people displaced after the elections who are in transit camps close to their homes but cannot return or farm. This number receives food rations from the UN World Food Programme’s Emergency Operation.

Officially, the government claims that it has moved 255,000 people out of camps for the displaced. With 150,000 depending on donor dole, the resettlement effort has only benefited 105,000 people.

This number constitutes 16 per cent of the revised total of 663,000 displaced people, which is the official figure from the Ministry of Special Programmes.

Obviously, truth is something that makes the Coalition Government extremely uncomfortable that it spends most of the time sugar-coating it.

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You can’t kill the memory of a good man

Leadership, or lack of it, is beginning to pepper conversations everywhere in Kenya. It may be an honest expression of disillusionment or the duplicitous criticism expressed to dilute anger.

Om Sunday, the starkest reminder of the leadership Kenya could have had will be brought to the fore when the long-awaited Murumbi Peace Memorial is unveiled at City Park in Nairobi.

The memorial park honours Joseph Zuzarte Murumbi and his wife Sheila nearly 20 years after they died — and it is not by dint of official effort.

It is by the people who still remember the Murumbis for their patronage of the arts, their love for culture and their common decency.

Besides Alan Donovan, Hilary Ng’weno and Pheroze Nowrojee, world renowned art professor and sculptor Francis Nnagenda will be there. Elkana Ong’esa, John Odochameny and Expedito Mwembe, too, will be there.

And so, too, will their sculptures.

Yet, Murumbi was no ordinary man. He joined the Kenya African Union, and after Jomo Kenyatta’s detention, found himself thrust at the head of the party.

He, too, had to flee into exile to India and then to England where he created numerous links with pan-Africanists. He would become independent Kenya’s first foreign minister, outlining policy as well as setting up consuls, high commissions and embassies.

Appointed vice-president after the resignation of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, he became disillusioned by politics after the assassination of his friend and mentor Pio Gama Pinto and resigned. The only public position he would hold would be as chairman of the Kenya National Archives.