My brushes with the law, learned  people

You would assume that a 72-year-old man had stopped being all silly and starry-eyed about celebrities. Not so with this nutty one, especially when he got an invitation from African Heritage, early this month, to attend the launch of the biography of the late Joseph Murumbi, Kenya’s second Vice-President.

The invitation did not come with a return air ticket, as most of them mercifully do these days, but I did not mind that. I just dashed up to Ruth, my agent at the Uganda Travel Bureau, coughed up the dollars and asked her to put me on to the earliest EBB/NBO flight. I suppose that Donovan of African Heritage and his co-hosts had not even realised that I was not in Nairobi.

I was already airborne, and enjoying my favourite apple juice drink, when I started wondering what I had done to deserve the honour of this invitation.

“The Kenyan Chief Justice has summoned me,” I had boastingly told my Ugandan colleagues, because my invitation had stated that the function would be presided over by Chief Justice Willy Mutunga. I have never met His Lordship close up, but he is one of the people for whom I have the deepest respect in Kenya. I also remember his indefatigable struggles for our welfare when I was in the university system and he was our leader in UASU.

His Lordship could not attend in person, but he sent us one of his learned colleagues, Mr Justice Mohammed Ibrahim, to preside over the function, and he did so with impressive grace and eloquence.  I missed the chance of shaking hands with Ndugu Mutunga, but his association with the function ensured that I interacted with a lot of acquaintances of mine from the legal profession.

HOME-GROWN LAWYERS

The most endearing of them all was the “eminence grise” of the fraternity, Pheroze Nowrojee and his ever-sweetly smiling partner. He looked a bit under the weather at the function, but once he started chatting animatedly with me and my colleagues from Kenyatta University, Liz Mazrui-Orchardson and Waveney Olembo, he got to his element.

Most Kenyans know Pheroze Nowrojee only as the man who led the lawyers who crafted our current Constitution. But my friendship with him dates back to our youthful days at the University of Dar es Salaam, where we both studied and worked.

Dar es Salaam, indeed, was the factor that meant that I rubbed shoulders with practically all the leading first generation of home-trained legal professionals in the whole of East Africa. You see, apart from offering the liberal arts, social and general scientific studies, each of the three colleges of the University of East Africa specialised in one or two professions.

Thus Makerere was mainly medicine and agriculture, Nairobi (the former Royal Technical College) was mainly technology, architecture and veterinary medicine, and Dar es Salaam was law. Indeed, if a Ugandan bypassed Makerere, as I did and went to Dar es Salaam, it was assumed he had gone to do law. But I went there because they had the right combination of Literature, French and Linguistics, with Education, that I had set my mind on. Anyway, the upshot of it all was that I ended up living and studying in close proximity and intimacy with the law luminaries of the region.

When I first came to Nairobi in the late 1970s, I found that nearly all of the legal and administrative activities were run by my fellow alumni and Dar contemporaries, learned gentlemen like the late CJ Zaccheus Chesoni.

Of the humblest and most respectful of them all was Busia Senator Amos Wako, who was a year behind me at Dar, and who was eventually to become Kenya’s longest serving Attorney General to date. Once he was in the Presidential party coming to attend our KU Cultural Week show at the Regent Hotel. As Director of the Show, I was introduced to the President and his colleagues, and Amos Wako and all the others were shaking hands perfunctorily, as is usually done on these occasions. But then Amos Wako realised that it was me, he had casually shaken hands with. He raced back.

UNPAID DEBTS

Of the younger generation of lawyers, current Cabinet Secretary, Ms Raychelle Omamo, once gracefully handled a very delicate legal matter for me, sometime in the mid-1980s. This was at Hayanga and Company Advocates, a law firm started by my friend and Dar es Salaam contemporary, Andrew Hayanga, later a Justice of the Kenya High Court.

Ms Omamo struck me as a very composed and articulate communicator. Her accent was polished and “standard”, without any of those fancy (high cost) frills that we often associated with people of her class in those days. It was only later that I learnt she also speaks impeccable French! Ms Omamo, as you realise, is the daughter of the redoubtable Mr William Odongo Omamo “Kaliech”, a high profile Cabinet Minister in his days.

I have encountered most of my other lawyer acquaintances of Ms Omamo’s generation through social activities, mainly theatre and sport.

Also of the same party were our AG, Githu Muigai, Makueni Governor Kivutha Kibwana and, the King of them all, Steve Mwenesi. Steve once took me home to Shamakhoko in the Maragoliland and I was blessed to meet his mother, a marvellous grand lady, who gave me a special insight into how great men are born and bred.

My most memorable run-in was with my bosom “argument-mate” in Dar, Justice Richard Otieno Kwach, he of many remarkable legal battles, including the epic S. M. Otieno burial case. Once we invited him to give a talk during our Cultural Week at KU, but it looked like he might be too busy to honour the invitation.

VC George Eshiwani was livid, and he was blaming it all on me. Telling him not to worry, I drove my old jalopy to the Honourable Justice’s chambers and told him about the situation. Justice Kwach  postponed everything and came to deliver the talk.

The first thing he said when he stood up to speak was, “I could not let down my friend Austin Bukenya, one of the best speakers of English in East Africa.” I did not even look in Eshiwani’s direction. Incidentally, I still owe Hayanga and Company Sh1,500 for their sterling legal representation. I’ll call at their chambers and pay the debt one of these days, hoping that it has not accrued mind-boggling interest since the mid-1980s. Haki haizami (rights never fade away). Ergo (Latin for “therefore”), I beg to submit.