Intensify efforts to find missing State House adviser

The killing of city lawyer Willie Kimani, his client Josephat Mwenda and taxi driver Joseph Muiruri was meant to be a routine job in a disturbing pattern of extra judicial killings by rogue police. This was until the disappearance captured and saturated the media landscape.

Prior to this, the Kenyan public had adopted selective silence in cases of enforced disappearances and extra judicial killings. Although such incidences should ordinarily alarm any functional society, for close to five years now, several Kenyans have simply disappeared without trace. In actual fact, some of the people reported missing are individuals whose disappearance should trigger utmost concern from the highest offices in the land. One particular case stands out.

Albert Mutea Muriuki was formally booked as a missing person on January 10, 2014. This was eleven days after his family’s desperate search for him. Whilst reports of missing persons are not uncommon, Muriuki’s case had a curious oddity.

He was the State House's deputy director in charge of constitutional and legislative sffairs. For those of us who grew up with him in Eldoret, his disappearance is also something personal. Muriu, as we called him, would be 35 this year.

He was a precocious child. Their house, directly opposite ours, meant that we spent many spare times together. With others, we did those things little boys growing up in do; swimming in swamps, hunting rabbits, playing soccer and generally making mischief.

Even as a child, he stood out as an opinion former; a jovial go-getter and possibly the loudest among us. He often combined his exuberant personality with persistence childhood notoriety.

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He was an avid reader, a good speaker and a talented actor. He would later take this talent further, playing a significant role in Kakamega High School’s 1996 winning play "metamorphosis", where he completed his high school education. After qualifying as a lawyer, he found passion both in journalism and law, working as a writer with the Business Daily and pursuing interests in international law. This won him an internship at the ICC and later a master’s degree from the Columbia Law School.

Given his brilliance, his appointment to the apex of power as the adviser to the deputy president on constitutional matters was unsurprising. But what might have surprised those close to him was the perception that his previously held political affiliations were probably incongruent with those held by his employers. In an article penned for the high-impact Foreign Affairs journal, Muriuki argued that the ICC was an important intervention insofar as it checked the excesses of the "power elite" in Kenya, and to the extent that it did not overstep its judicial roles.

Two months after landing his plum job, 31-year-old Muriuki disappeared on 30th December 2013 and has never been seen again. He held a brief chat with his mother on Christmas Eve that year and visited an uncle’s premises along Loita Street on December 30. On January 8, 2014 he failed to report for duty. A formal report of his disappearance was recorded two days later at the Central Police station. Since then, the Law Society of Kenya, the DPP’s office and the CID have all appeared to make attempts at locating Muriu but nothing has come off so far. It is now the third year since he disappeared.

To add to the agony that Muriu’s mother goes through every day, there is a deep yet unsettling feeling that State organs are not doing enough to unravel the mystery of his disappearance.

Muriu is not only the highest-ranking public official in post-independent Kenya to disappear without a trace, but also one whose case has attracted the least concern from the public. We are, as John Githongo would say, in danger of normalising the absurd.

Dr Duncan Omanga is the head of the department of publishing and media studies at Moi University's school of information sciences; [email protected].