Luther12
Elder Lister
Part IV: Infamy, they’ve all got it in for me
With control seemingly total, Mbuvi and his umatatu did whatever they wanted.
On a Saturday morning in April 2018 they went too far.
A gang of heavily built enforcers stormed into Hotel Boulevard in downtown Nairobi and violently disrupted a presser being addressed by the demure Timothy Muriuki, a former boss of the Nairobi Central Business District Association. Considered an inconsequential Mbuvi critic who needed to be taught a lesson, the men roughed up Muriuki as journalists scarpered.
Grabbing Muriuki by the waistline, one attacker in a grey hoodie attempted to throw the suited-up Muriuki into the hotel’s swimming pool. Desperately kicking and pushing, Muriuki eventually freed himself from the man’s grip as journalists begged the attackers to not drown him.
‘‘Please read my statement,’’ Muriuki pleaded. ‘‘I wasn’t attacking the governor.’’
Focused on the sole mission of gagging Muriuki and dispersing the press, the goons frogmarched Muriuki out of the compound. They shoved him into a puddle of mud and he fell. Muriuki managed to get back on his feet and attempt a sprint, only for the assaulters to snatch his blazer and resume their kicks and blows.
Muriuki escaped when the journalists convinced guards at a nearby building to grant him refuge.
The Boulevard episode was one of the most embarrassing forms of public humiliation Kenyans had ever witnessed. And it was done in Mbuvi’s name. One of the attackers had invoked his name; more of them were subsequently seen in Mbuvi’s entourage.
The establishment strikes back
In that moment of shame, anger and hopelessness as they watched Muriuki’s assault live streamed on social media, many Nairobians would have agreed that electing Mbuvi with his umatatu was a blunder.
The civil servants and businessmen who had failed to dislodge him decided to try again.
Their next attempt used Mbuvi’s paranoia. Fearing that City Hall was bugged, Mbuvi oscillated the running of Nairobi’s affairs between a nondescript pied-à-terre in the city’s Upper Hill area — which he converted into a personal office — and his gigantic hilltop Mua Hills mansion filled with in-your-face gold furnishings, located in the outskirts of Nairobi.
Mbuvi summoned his cabinet for meetings in these private dwellings.
Using the press as pawns, Mbuvi’s detractors sponsored one unflattering headline after another, to a point at which Mbuvi declared he was a target of Kenya’s deep state domiciled at the office of the president, once again naming Permanent Secretary Karanja Kibicho as the puppet master.
Before the ink could dry on these damaging stories — that he drank at work, ran City Hall like a mafia boss, never listened to his cabinet, and was going broke — the country’s anti-corruption agency struck.
Various transactions in Mbuvi’s bank accounts were flagged as suspicious, particularly in instances in which Mbuvi had previously received payments from companies that later on traded with City Hall. To curtail his operations, Mbuvi’s Upper Hill base was placed under investigation, on account that it had been acquired irregularly.
Determined to fight back, in May 2019 a fired-up Mbuvi pulled up at a TV station carrying more than 1 000 title deeds and 150 logbooks, intent on proving he was already a wealthy man before going into politics. A teary-eyed Mbuvi attributed his troubles to the Kenyan aristocracy, which he said was displeased that a poor man’s son had risen to become Nairobi governor and was willing to share his meagre earnings with people of Eastlands.
That being said, Mbuvi made it crystal clear that much as he came from poverty, he was no pauper. He gloated: ‘‘If I liquidate my title deeds, I am worth more than Nairobi’s annual budget.’’
Nairobi’s budget for the financial year 2019-2020 was $320-million.
The arrest
Playing to the gallery did little to divert the attention of the authorities. An arrest was planned at the end of 2019. Hearing that he would be facing charges ranging from money-laundering to corruption, Mbuvi went on the run, intent on laying low at one of his coastal hideaways.
His convoy was intercepted at Voi, between Nairobi and Mombasa, and Mbuvi was bundled into a helicopter and flown back to the capital.
The show of power made it clear to everyone that the former matatu king was up against Kenyatta himself.
That escalation might have had something to do with Mbuvi committing the cardinal sin of forging an alliance with Ruto, who had since fallen out with Kenyatta. Like Mbuvi, Ruto fashioned himself like a Robin Hood of sorts, traversing the country dishing out millions of shillings as he preached the pro-poor gospel.
Calling himself a hustler, Ruto, who is campaigning to become president in 2022, peddled a catchy us-versus-them narrative through which he and others like Mbuvi presented themselves as case studies of the ashes-to-riches trajectory, while castigating Kenyatta and his allies for being the offspring and beneficiaries of dynasties.
By becoming Ruto’s ally, Mbuvi chose to become Kenyatta’s foe.
On being arraigned in court after his Voi arrest, Mbuvi was slapped with a staggering $150 000 bail, and barred by the court from accessing City Hall until the matter ran its full course. In that moment of Mbuvi’s weakness, Kenyatta decided to go for the jugular.
The fall
On the night of 24 February 2020, Mbuvi received communication summoning him to State House, the president’s official residence. He arrived two hours late for their 6am meeting. Kenyatta had left.
When Kenyatta returned that afternoon, the president instructed Mbuvi to surrender a number of Nairobi County functions to the national government, including but not limited to planning, health, transport, public works, ancillary services and revenue collection.
As consolation, Mbuvi would remain the governor, albeit a lameduck one.
At 4pm, a visibly subdued Mbuvi appeared at a press conference with the president, eating humble pie as he sheepishly signed away his electoral mandate. The aspirant had been put in his place by people used to wielding power on a national scale.
In less than a month, Kenyatta created the opaque Nairobi Metropolitan Services, declared an extra-constitutional entity by the courts, which now effectively runs Nairobi. Sending a signal that he meant business, Kenyatta appointed Major General Mohamed Badi to lead the new entity. Tellingly, Peter Kariuki, the man who had been previously appointed to City Hall to reign in Mbuvi, was seconded to the entity.
And, just like that, Kenya’s largest city and capital had lost its elected governor and was now being run by a tough talking military general.
Despite his earlier acquiescence, Mbuvi rebelled. As governor, Mbuvi was the official signatory for the Nairobi County bank accounts, so he refused to sign funds to the Nairobi Metropolitan Services.
Kenyatta struck back, engineering Mbuvi’s impeachment by the Nairobi County parliament. Resorting to umatatu, Mbuvi airlifted a sizable group of members of the County Assembly to the coast, to make it impossible for the city’s legislature to obtain the requisite votes to impeach him. Videos surfaced of tens of assembly men and women showing off bundles of dollar notes as they frolicked with Mbuvi on one of his many beachfront properties.
The parliament, though, decided that because of Covid-19 protocols not all the assembly women and men could vote physically. So those at the coast could vote electronically.
Mbuvi was impeached just before Christmas last year.
Out of work and disgraced, a bitter and disbelieving Mbuvi went on the offensive. He leaked a phone recording in which the president’s younger sister, Christina Pratt, is alleged to be lobbying Mbuvi to appoint her friend as deputy governor. Mbuvi then joined Ruto on his rallies across the country, standing on podiums and attributing major corruption scandals to the president’s family.
The attack pushed Kenyatta and his mask slipped.
At a meeting with leaders near Mount Kenya, he owned up to having orchestrated Mbuvi’s ouster. ‘‘I tried to help my friend the other day … he eventually declined my offer for assistance because he wanted to keep wearing goggles and boasting, and keep stealing … so I told him if that’s the case then goodbye. Nowadays he is busy insulting me. I have no problem with him, but I know Naiorbi is in better hands.’’
Agitated, Mbuvi countered the president’s remarks within an hour, disregarding the Kiswahili idiom usishandane na ndovu kunya, utapasuka msamba — a warning that you shouldn’t get into a shitting contest with an elephant because you’ll split your bowels.
Mbuvi mistook Kenyatta for an equal.
Speaking at a roadside rally in Machakos in February, he played Kenyatta’s speech on loudspeaker, before calling the president a drunkard with whom he used to smoke marijuana.
‘‘I won’t mention his name because if I do he will either get me arrested or killed, that is his problem,’’ Mbuvi said, ‘‘but what my friend is not saying is that he is the one who introduced me to goggles back when we used to smoke marijuana together. He taught me to put on goggles to hide my bloodshot eyes after smoking … he taught me about goggles, drinking and marijuana.’’
Mbuvi’s umatatu had finally crossed the president’s red line.
Mbuvi was arrested 48 hours later and held in custody for over a month, charged with terrorism. The state alleges that Mbuvi runs a private militia that poses a threat to national security.
Umatatu had worked for Mbuvi until it didn’t. And those that he sought to defeat — the businessmen and hereditary politicians — had outmanoeuvred him.
The matatu king has fallen.
mg.co.za
With control seemingly total, Mbuvi and his umatatu did whatever they wanted.
On a Saturday morning in April 2018 they went too far.
A gang of heavily built enforcers stormed into Hotel Boulevard in downtown Nairobi and violently disrupted a presser being addressed by the demure Timothy Muriuki, a former boss of the Nairobi Central Business District Association. Considered an inconsequential Mbuvi critic who needed to be taught a lesson, the men roughed up Muriuki as journalists scarpered.
Grabbing Muriuki by the waistline, one attacker in a grey hoodie attempted to throw the suited-up Muriuki into the hotel’s swimming pool. Desperately kicking and pushing, Muriuki eventually freed himself from the man’s grip as journalists begged the attackers to not drown him.
‘‘Please read my statement,’’ Muriuki pleaded. ‘‘I wasn’t attacking the governor.’’
Focused on the sole mission of gagging Muriuki and dispersing the press, the goons frogmarched Muriuki out of the compound. They shoved him into a puddle of mud and he fell. Muriuki managed to get back on his feet and attempt a sprint, only for the assaulters to snatch his blazer and resume their kicks and blows.
Muriuki escaped when the journalists convinced guards at a nearby building to grant him refuge.
The Boulevard episode was one of the most embarrassing forms of public humiliation Kenyans had ever witnessed. And it was done in Mbuvi’s name. One of the attackers had invoked his name; more of them were subsequently seen in Mbuvi’s entourage.
The establishment strikes back
In that moment of shame, anger and hopelessness as they watched Muriuki’s assault live streamed on social media, many Nairobians would have agreed that electing Mbuvi with his umatatu was a blunder.
The civil servants and businessmen who had failed to dislodge him decided to try again.
Their next attempt used Mbuvi’s paranoia. Fearing that City Hall was bugged, Mbuvi oscillated the running of Nairobi’s affairs between a nondescript pied-à-terre in the city’s Upper Hill area — which he converted into a personal office — and his gigantic hilltop Mua Hills mansion filled with in-your-face gold furnishings, located in the outskirts of Nairobi.
Mbuvi summoned his cabinet for meetings in these private dwellings.
Using the press as pawns, Mbuvi’s detractors sponsored one unflattering headline after another, to a point at which Mbuvi declared he was a target of Kenya’s deep state domiciled at the office of the president, once again naming Permanent Secretary Karanja Kibicho as the puppet master.
Before the ink could dry on these damaging stories — that he drank at work, ran City Hall like a mafia boss, never listened to his cabinet, and was going broke — the country’s anti-corruption agency struck.
Various transactions in Mbuvi’s bank accounts were flagged as suspicious, particularly in instances in which Mbuvi had previously received payments from companies that later on traded with City Hall. To curtail his operations, Mbuvi’s Upper Hill base was placed under investigation, on account that it had been acquired irregularly.
Determined to fight back, in May 2019 a fired-up Mbuvi pulled up at a TV station carrying more than 1 000 title deeds and 150 logbooks, intent on proving he was already a wealthy man before going into politics. A teary-eyed Mbuvi attributed his troubles to the Kenyan aristocracy, which he said was displeased that a poor man’s son had risen to become Nairobi governor and was willing to share his meagre earnings with people of Eastlands.
That being said, Mbuvi made it crystal clear that much as he came from poverty, he was no pauper. He gloated: ‘‘If I liquidate my title deeds, I am worth more than Nairobi’s annual budget.’’
Nairobi’s budget for the financial year 2019-2020 was $320-million.
The arrest
Playing to the gallery did little to divert the attention of the authorities. An arrest was planned at the end of 2019. Hearing that he would be facing charges ranging from money-laundering to corruption, Mbuvi went on the run, intent on laying low at one of his coastal hideaways.
His convoy was intercepted at Voi, between Nairobi and Mombasa, and Mbuvi was bundled into a helicopter and flown back to the capital.
The show of power made it clear to everyone that the former matatu king was up against Kenyatta himself.
That escalation might have had something to do with Mbuvi committing the cardinal sin of forging an alliance with Ruto, who had since fallen out with Kenyatta. Like Mbuvi, Ruto fashioned himself like a Robin Hood of sorts, traversing the country dishing out millions of shillings as he preached the pro-poor gospel.
Calling himself a hustler, Ruto, who is campaigning to become president in 2022, peddled a catchy us-versus-them narrative through which he and others like Mbuvi presented themselves as case studies of the ashes-to-riches trajectory, while castigating Kenyatta and his allies for being the offspring and beneficiaries of dynasties.
By becoming Ruto’s ally, Mbuvi chose to become Kenyatta’s foe.
On being arraigned in court after his Voi arrest, Mbuvi was slapped with a staggering $150 000 bail, and barred by the court from accessing City Hall until the matter ran its full course. In that moment of Mbuvi’s weakness, Kenyatta decided to go for the jugular.
The fall
On the night of 24 February 2020, Mbuvi received communication summoning him to State House, the president’s official residence. He arrived two hours late for their 6am meeting. Kenyatta had left.
When Kenyatta returned that afternoon, the president instructed Mbuvi to surrender a number of Nairobi County functions to the national government, including but not limited to planning, health, transport, public works, ancillary services and revenue collection.
As consolation, Mbuvi would remain the governor, albeit a lameduck one.
At 4pm, a visibly subdued Mbuvi appeared at a press conference with the president, eating humble pie as he sheepishly signed away his electoral mandate. The aspirant had been put in his place by people used to wielding power on a national scale.
In less than a month, Kenyatta created the opaque Nairobi Metropolitan Services, declared an extra-constitutional entity by the courts, which now effectively runs Nairobi. Sending a signal that he meant business, Kenyatta appointed Major General Mohamed Badi to lead the new entity. Tellingly, Peter Kariuki, the man who had been previously appointed to City Hall to reign in Mbuvi, was seconded to the entity.
And, just like that, Kenya’s largest city and capital had lost its elected governor and was now being run by a tough talking military general.
Despite his earlier acquiescence, Mbuvi rebelled. As governor, Mbuvi was the official signatory for the Nairobi County bank accounts, so he refused to sign funds to the Nairobi Metropolitan Services.
Kenyatta struck back, engineering Mbuvi’s impeachment by the Nairobi County parliament. Resorting to umatatu, Mbuvi airlifted a sizable group of members of the County Assembly to the coast, to make it impossible for the city’s legislature to obtain the requisite votes to impeach him. Videos surfaced of tens of assembly men and women showing off bundles of dollar notes as they frolicked with Mbuvi on one of his many beachfront properties.
The parliament, though, decided that because of Covid-19 protocols not all the assembly women and men could vote physically. So those at the coast could vote electronically.
Mbuvi was impeached just before Christmas last year.
Out of work and disgraced, a bitter and disbelieving Mbuvi went on the offensive. He leaked a phone recording in which the president’s younger sister, Christina Pratt, is alleged to be lobbying Mbuvi to appoint her friend as deputy governor. Mbuvi then joined Ruto on his rallies across the country, standing on podiums and attributing major corruption scandals to the president’s family.
The attack pushed Kenyatta and his mask slipped.
At a meeting with leaders near Mount Kenya, he owned up to having orchestrated Mbuvi’s ouster. ‘‘I tried to help my friend the other day … he eventually declined my offer for assistance because he wanted to keep wearing goggles and boasting, and keep stealing … so I told him if that’s the case then goodbye. Nowadays he is busy insulting me. I have no problem with him, but I know Naiorbi is in better hands.’’
Agitated, Mbuvi countered the president’s remarks within an hour, disregarding the Kiswahili idiom usishandane na ndovu kunya, utapasuka msamba — a warning that you shouldn’t get into a shitting contest with an elephant because you’ll split your bowels.
Mbuvi mistook Kenyatta for an equal.
Speaking at a roadside rally in Machakos in February, he played Kenyatta’s speech on loudspeaker, before calling the president a drunkard with whom he used to smoke marijuana.
‘‘I won’t mention his name because if I do he will either get me arrested or killed, that is his problem,’’ Mbuvi said, ‘‘but what my friend is not saying is that he is the one who introduced me to goggles back when we used to smoke marijuana together. He taught me to put on goggles to hide my bloodshot eyes after smoking … he taught me about goggles, drinking and marijuana.’’
Mbuvi’s umatatu had finally crossed the president’s red line.
Mbuvi was arrested 48 hours later and held in custody for over a month, charged with terrorism. The state alleges that Mbuvi runs a private militia that poses a threat to national security.
Umatatu had worked for Mbuvi until it didn’t. And those that he sought to defeat — the businessmen and hereditary politicians — had outmanoeuvred him.
The matatu king has fallen.
The rise and fall of Mike Sonko — Nairobi’s Matatu King
Mike Sonko first rose to fame (and infamy) as a taxi overlord. He used his power to become the governor of Nairobi, before being outfoxed by the political elite
mg.co.za
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