Prof Ouma Muga, the towering academic who riled Moi and Raila

Few Kenyan intellectuals have earned themselves the description of 'impossibly intelligent,' 'towering academic,' and 'genius,' among their peers.

One such was the late Prof David Osare Wasawo. The other is Prof Joseph Ouma Muga, who passed away a few days ago. It was indeed a gloomy day for the Kenyan intelligentsia and for progressive leadership of Kenya.

This is a man whom none other than Dr Joseph Odero Jowi — the diplomat who rallied for the successful location of UNEP head offices in Nairobi — said had the most impactful influence on environmental conservation and global warming. He would proceed to establish the School of Environmental Studies at Moi University and later become the Vice-Chancellor.

OUTSTANDING ACADEMICIAN

In his heydays, he worked in the universities as a don and later in government — positions he used to advance his passion. Credible sources intimate that the global warming speech he wrote for President Moi earned the Nyayo philosophy founder a 10-minute standing ovation at the Ozone Layer Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1989.

We first met through a mutual friend who was a close associate of the man who kept his beard and died with it. Mzee Muga had intended to sell me a parcel of land in Twala, Kajiado County.

Having just come from a gruelling, though unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, I was damn broke and didn't manage to buy the piece of land.

This was a controversial former KPU revolutionary who spoke his mind openly on sensitive matters without scruples or fear. During the tussle over the leadership of Ford Kenya, Muga chose to be in the Kijana Wamalwa faction. That decision would cost him his political career.

At a certain point, he got jailed for a while on suspicions of clandestine activities bordering on attempted coup on the nascent President Jomo Kenyatta regime.

Political reprisals would later dump this most outstanding scholar to the trenches in a manner that hopefully shall become clearer in the days ahead. In old age, he struggled for the basics of life, endured the pangs of chronic diseases and even had challenges with transport. However, he loved knowledge and impressed upon his friends and acquaintances to help young people acquire education.

Being an outstanding academician, even when in Parliament, Prof. Ouma would champion the advancement of marine science and economic exploitation of the sea through the creation of a university centred on oceanographic research on the Indian Ocean shoreline. He did bring intellectual rigour and enlightenment to parliamentary debates.

"We do not need to make a big university for it to be of great consequence. What we need is a specialised university dealing with specialised things. The minerals in the sea are incalculable in quantities and it's time we started doing things intelligently by championing protection of the physical oceanography. We seem to go for what's known and we fear to venture into the unknown," he remarked ostensibly borrowing from the precedents set in the University of New South Wales in Australia and Wind-Flow University in the Western USA.

'WALKING ENCYCLOPAEDIA'

Hailed as a 'walking encyclopaedia', the former Ford Kenya luminary was summarily sacked by Moi as the Assistant Minister of Environment and Natural Resources for "boasting" of having written the Rio speech.

History has it that President Moi was invited to give the opening address at the Saving the Ozone Layer Conference in Rio and insisted that the professor of fluvial geomorphology writes him a presentation.

The two-time top student nationally — in both Kenya African Secondary Schools Examination (KASE) and in Cambridge Overseas School Certificate — would later help the NARC government in setting up the Ministry of State and Special Programmes in addition to developing its policies on disaster management.

At the global level, he was among the seven world elite scientists whom the United Nations engaged to engineer the Australian Revolution. As a refresher, Australia lies on the leeward side of the Blue Alps Mountain. This naturally destines it to be a pure desert.

The 1964 turnaround made Australia a bustling economic powerhouse. Terminologies like global warming explaining the long-term effect of the depletion of the Ozone Layer are ascribed to the man from Kochia, who severally posited that he had undergone the university of sorrows, faculty of weeping in the department of torture.

The Luo community and the country at large has, as a fact, lost one of their topmost geniuses who dreamt of a day sugar millers would export Kenyan grown sugar to European markets just like Mauritius. During the '80s and '70s, fish exports earned the country in excess of Sh300 billion.

It frustrated the Makerere alumnus that this kept dwindling and eventually halted due to sustained pollution and neglect of Lake Victoria water conservation.

Muga wrote a book on the Luo history and an English encyclopaedic dictionary of Dholuo language — a feat that placed him at the level of Tom Mboya before him and Prof Bethwel Ogot afterwards — as the senior brains who put pen to paper on Luo history.

The world will miss the man with a photographic memory and a gold touch that left all areas of his endeavours sparkling in his trail. May his Soul Rest in Eternal Peace!

The writer is the MP for Uriri