Lawyer in Mboya murder case dies

Samuel Waruhiu. Photo/FILE

By JOHN KAMAU jkamau@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted  Wednesday, March 30 2011 at 22:20

When he appeared at the High Court in 1969 as the lawyer for Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge — the man accused of killing Tom Mboya — Samuel Waruhiu was at best a novice.

He said as much. Mr Mboya was the Minister for Economic Planning and Kanu secretary-general.

Two years earlier, Mr Waruhiu had arrived in the country bubbling with energy having graduated with a law degree from the University College of Wales.

But he was not prepared to handle a case that was to throw him into the centre of politics and law in Kenya.

Mr Waruhiu, who died on Wednesday in Nairobi, had been called to the bar in 1967 at Middle Temple and was returning to Kenya to join a small army of African lawyers and political elites, who were shaping the path of a new nation.

But the Mboya crisis and Cold War politics had torn the government of President Jomo Kenyatta and divided the nation further as the succession struggle took a nasty path.

In the political jumble, Mboya was assassinated and the young Waruhiu, who was not even a criminal lawyer, was approached by Njenga’s wife, Grace, to take up the case “otherwise you (Waruhiu) would not live”, he was warned.

That must have been threatening given that his father Chief Kung’u Waruhiu had been assassinated on October 7, 1952 triggering Governor Everlyn Baring’s declaration of a State of Emergency in Kenya.

Although he lost the Njenga case, Mr Waruhiu’s stature rose like a meteor. At the African Club, on modern day Monrovia Street in Nairobi, he would hobnob with other elite and beneficiaries of Mboya’s airlifts to US universities.

When free he would retreat to playing golf at the Sigona club. He became the first African chairman of Sigona Golf Club in 1974.

But it was his entry into the boardrooms of blue-chip companies — and at a young age — that catapulted him to riches.

He was by 1974 the chairman of Old Mutual and by 1990s he was chairman of Barclays Bank.

Mr Waruhiu had earned respect among powerful Kiambu politicians, and especially President Kenyatta, who had lots of respect for his late father.

It was at the elder Waruhiu’s funeral that Kenyatta attended one of his last public meetings before he was arrested.

That Mr Waruhiu would be headed for big, albeit controversial, tasks in the Kenyatta government emerged when he returned to Kenya in 1967.

That year he was picked to chair a board of inquiry that was to recommend on the composition of Teachers Service Commission and the place of Kenya National Union of Teachers.