It was not all Cholmondeley’s fault he got away with murder

Tom Cholmondeley, the trigger-happy heir to the British aristocrat Delamere family, killed two ordinary Kenyans in two years on his Soysambu ranch in Naivasha.

For the first death of Samson ole Sisina in April 2005, the Kenya Wildlife Service ranger, who had gone to investigate reports of illegal processing of game meat on the ranch, Mr Cholmondeley was widely believed to have got away with murder after the court case was dropped at some stage “for lack of evidence”.

Then he would get off lightly with the May 2006 fatal shooting of stone mason Robert Njoya — a High Court judge handing him a light sentence three years later to allow the aristocrat to “reflect on his life and change to an appropriate direction”.

By that time, of course, the case had already taken a rather kind turn for Mr Cholmondeley after the murder charge was replaced with the lighter offence of manslaughter.

To cap his dramatic conquest of the Kenyan criminal justice system, he left prison three months early after a presidential pardon gifted him freedom.

Most Kenyans received news of the release of a repeat offender who had committed some of the worst crimes from Kamiti Maximum Prison with disbelief.

But if you had your ears on the ground and got some unfiltered information about Mr Cholmondeley’s prison adventure and his connections with the Kenyan power elite, you knew it would end up like this.

RELATIVE COMFORT

A journalist who went to interview the aristocrat during his early days in remand prison was struck by the relative comfort he was afforded in a facility notorious for its congestion and back-breaking routine for inmates.

It looked very much like business as usual as the VIP prisoner even carried some work to do on his laptop.

“I have just sealed three business deals this morning,” Mr Cholmondeley told the journalist as he typed away on the keyboard.

Around the same time, we got to learn that one of the most powerful political families in the country might have been his landlord in an upmarket Nairobi estate.

The death of the great-grandson of Lord Delamere, the influential British colonial settler, on Wednesday, August 17, 2016 at Nairobi’s MP Shah Hospital has revived public debate about the privileged gun-toting white rancher and the helpless African victims of his shooting habits.

Social media has been especially unforgiving, with Mr Cholmondeley’s soul on the receiving end of racial vitriol. But isn’t much of this hating misplaced?

Was it all his fault that he went about running rings around our criminal justice system the way he did?
Hell, no.

Kenya won independence from the British in 1963, meaning its government institutions had been in the hands of the local elite for 42 years in 2005 when Mr Cholmondeley pulled the trigger on his first victim — Samson ole Sisina.

[email protected]; @otienootieno