From cosy London lawns and high office to dingy prison room

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Dr Achieng Ongong’a. Photo/FILE 

By JULIUS SIGEI jsigei@ke.nationmedia.com AND EMEKA-MAYAKA GEKARAgmayaka@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted  Friday, August 9  2013 at  22:00

We drive in the dark in a convoy of two cars down a dimly lit South Lake Road with the driver of the lead vehicle stopping intermittently to read signposts to our address.

“We ought to have been there by 7pm when they serve dinner. They are already impatient with us,” he tells us without the slightest hint on our would-be hosts. It is already a few minutes past 8pm.

He pulls by the roadside more than twice to seek direction as we obediently follow, taking cues from him every step of the way to a destination only he knows.

We ease to the right turning after Kimwa Ranch and at the end of a gravel driveway and come in front of an imposing colonial style farmhouse which on the outside looks desolate and marooned in the middle of nowhere.

After being shown our rooms, we come down to the dining hall, to find a team of 10 diners of various extractions at the table.

Dea’s Gardens is a home stay, an increasingly popular way of lodging where the owner opens up the house to visitors at a fee.

Dr Ongong’a Achieng, who has led us here, could have left the helm of the Kenya Tourist Board, but he remains a tour guide per excellence.

A chance sight of a smartly dressed Dr Achieng, his unmistakable long, black and grey mane dancing to the wind as he crossed Kenyatta Avenue, would start off a search for a man who had literally dined and wined with presidents only to be thrown into jail the next moment to consort with street boys and greasy, incorrigible criminals.

As a young man, Dr Ongong’a Achieng’ played on London’s Collingham Gardens with Thabo Mbeki, Oburu Oginga and children of Algerian revolutionary Ben Bella while staying at Kwame Nkrumah’s Africa Trinity House as his father, Achieng’ Oneko and other Kenyan liberation heroes negotiated the independence Constitution at Lancaster House.

How is it that a high-flying chief executive and one of the most sophisticated Kenyans came out of a 100-day confinement at the Industrial Area Prison with his head high and sanity intact?

After weeks of tracking him, we finally found Dr Achieng’ and he granted us an interview, on the condition that we conduct it in the resort town of Naivasha, some 80km west of Nairobi.

Dr Achieng’ loves life and he lives it to the fullest. Not even a prison term which followed a harrowing four years of numerous visits to the Integrity Centre, the headquarters of the anti-corruption body, could stop him.

Our conversations after dinner and over the next day are interrupted by telephone calls which Dr Achieng’ answers in Russian. He informs us that the calls were from his wife whom he married while studying at Friends University in Moscow from where he obtained a doctorate in economics in the 1970s.

He had landed with Oburu Oginga in the then bastion of the former USSR aged only 17.

Amid the singing of birds and the cold breeze from the verdant lake, the exotic brown turrets and cupolas dotting the neighbourhood beautiful beyond any singing of it, Achieng’ Oneko’s firstborn son regaled us with anecdote after anecdote from his prison diary which he had painstakingly kept to the minutest detail.

During colonial times Naivasha hosted the infamous and aristocratic ‘Happy Valley Set’, who lived and partied to excess in the huge mansions and ranch houses that dotted the lakeside.

The most notorious home to this debauchery was the imposing Djinn Palace whose original owner lost everything to Josslyn Hay, the handsome rogue with an aristocratic lineage seemingly intent on taking to bed every woman who crossed his path.

“I started coming to Naivasha most of the weekends in the 1980s to escape the stone jungle that I had been born into. I have generally liked travelling since the 1950s when I visited my father at Marsabit Detention Camp,” he told us, referring to Ramogi Achieng’ Oneko, Kenya’s known longest-serving detainee.

One of the Kapenguria Six, Mr Oneko served 10 years in various camps with founding President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, who would, in a strange twist of de javu, jail him after the Kisumu killings of 1969.

A banker, teacher and hospitality specialist, Dr Achieng’ was picked from a lecture hall to head the Kenya tourist Board in 2003.

After five eventful years at the helm of the tourism board he resigned due to what he calls pressure and months later he was charged with fraud.

Questions revolved around the organisation of a trip former President Mwai Kibaki made to the Maasai Mara in August 2008.

The then President joined thousands of tourists who had pitched tent in the game reserve to witness the breathtaking annual wildebeest migration, one of the seven wonders of the new world.

Coming barely four months after the 2007/8 post-election violence, the stated mission was to restore confidence in the ailing tourism which had been injured heavily by the national savagery. A company associated with Mr Duncan Muriuki, a member of the tourism board, was contracted to organise the trip and the anti-graft agency alleged that expenditure was exaggerated.

Dr Achieng’, Mr Muriuki and Tourism permanent secretary Rebeccah Nabutola were charged with defrauding the government of Sh8.9 million.

In the highly publicised case, he was found guilty and jailed for three years alongside Mrs Nabutola who was to serve four years while Mr Muriuki was sent to prison for seven years without the option of a fine.

The case dragged on for three years until September 10, last year, when Anti-Corruption Court magistrate Lucy Nyambura jailed them. This was the first time top public servants had been jailed for abuse of office.

“I had woken up normally and I didn’t expect her to jail us. Then as she read on, I realised things were not going our way. I steeled myself for the moment and it came like a thunderbolt,” he says, his face now full of furrows.

“It was a tense moment. The reality dawned on us that we were not going back to our homes and our Mercedes benzes,” he says.

“It was traumatising. Becky (Nabutola) was inconsolable and she cried out loudly. She had come with her children who joined us at the cells. The separation for her was painful. She cried ‘I have served this country for 30 years and this is what it comes to?’”

For some reason, he was calm. “It was my sister-in-law Joyce who told me: your father was jailed for 16 years and they have given you only three. Take heart. I had no choice but to defend the family name by taking it in my stride.”

Dr Achieng’ and Mr Muriuki were shaken when a sobbing Nabutola was soon whisked away to Lang’ata Women’s Prison.

They also knew that sooner or later they will be headed to the same environment.

“We were entering an unfamiliar territory and we started reflecting on our lives. We had been very active, leading high standard lives and now here we were being sent to confinement for between three and seven years, our freedoms curtailed.”

After a few minutes’ drive to the prison under heavy security, doors clanged open and closed swiftly. He was now a prison statistic, having been promptly assigned a number (NBA/6038/12) by which he would henceforth be known.

“Inmates were already aware of our coming, having watched the high-profile case. We started knowing people. The most memorable of all was a heavy-set man who slept to my right named Clinton.”

He had been thrown in for “selling” Uhuru Park to some foreigners. “On the day of the transaction, he had been chauffeured in a hired Range Rover with hawk-eyed, menacing security detail in tow and he had faked papers,” Dr Achieng’ said, nearly falling off his chair with laughter.

“Another guy came to my bed and told me: you have a big name and an even bigger family name. I can give you a building in town. You know from Tom Mboya all the way to River Road, the 99-year leases have elapsed...”

It is these stories which enabled him to sleep.

But lessons from his father’s experience as a detainee also came in handy.

“One day when we were driving in the countryside I asked him how he had survived 16 years of detention and he told me: when you are confined think of yourself first, be selfish. The moment you worry over your family, business and profession you kill yourself or lose your sanity.”

Teaching and reading also made life bearable.

“I went to the principal of Industrial Area remand Academy seeking a job as a teacher. He told me to go back and bring my CV. Even though he knew me, he acted professionally. He assigned me History, Geography and Business Management.”

From a senior lecturer at Maseno University and a CEO, he was now teaching hardcore criminals and street boys.

He also read a lot. “I read Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Detained, a prison memoir, Bethwel Allan Ogot’s autobiography and Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenya’s Politics.”

“Other inmates who didn’t have a way of intellectually engaging themselves suffered. I knew remandees who had been in for more than 10 years and had asked me to find a way of letting Chief Justice Willy Mutunga to know. Some committed suicide.”

He would seize an opportunity when he addressed the media from prison on December 15, 2012. “People were wondering how I could scandalise myself by appearing in the media, but I did it for reforms.”

And his attitude endeared him to other in mates. The former tourism board boss says that in prison, inmates could make phone calls to senior politicians and bragged about how they knew the “price” of every judge and magistrate.

“The other day I met one of my students who told me: I want us to talk one on one. Who is this that is disturbing you? I can kill him for you for Sh10,000 and there would be no trace to me. But even if I were to come back, I know how to defend myself. I know all judges and magistrates and their prices.

Okay the CJ is out. He is too intellectual.”

His 67-year-old face turning serious, he informs us why the “chokoras were very important people.”

“They would come from court and warn inmates who are set to appear there that certain magistrates or judges were not in good mood. They would advise the inmates to feign sickness in order to avoid court appearances that would send them in jail for many years.”

Dr Achieng’ says reforming the prison system should begin with the staff who he thinks are the most demoralised members of the disciplined forces and are the ones who help prisoners to escape.

“The next is decongestion. Industrial Area prison has about 4,500 in-mates squeezed into five godown-like sections.”