From oppression to power, Prof Muga saw it all

For weeks, his picture, frail and bed-ridden at a hospital, had been doing the rounds on social media, evoking various responses.

When Prof Ouma Muga eventually died early this month, the story of the former Rangwe MP, one-time assistant minister and academic was of neglect.

For some, his state told of friends, family or self-neglect. Others wondered how Muga, an accomplished academic and politician, had fallen on hard times, especially at a time when a career in the academy or parliamentary politics nearly guarantees material aggrandisement.

Prof Muga aka 'Bend Aburu' (ash-coated or preserved millet grains) was an enigmatic politician. His political career was chequered and defied easy understanding.

He studied at Makerere University and obtained a PhD in geophysics from Sydney University.

TOM MBOYA ASSASSINATION

He was Kenya’s only Professor of environmental studies in the late 1980s, founder of Moi University’s School of Environmental Studies, a one-time Dean of Arts at Makerere University, and chairman of the Department of Geography in the University of Zambia.

As a celebrated don at Makerere Hill, he dabbled in Uganda’s politics, supporting Milton Obote’s complex proposition of a single member representing multiple constituencies, which Obote had hoped would deethnicise Uganda’s fluid politics.

However, profoundly affected by the murder of Tom Mboya in 1969, Prof Muga abandoned the ivory tower and plunged headlong into the murky waters of Kenya’s politics.

"Professor, you shouldn’t have left Makerere," Prof Yash Tandon exclaimed when he saw Prof Muga, after decades, at a public event in a Nairobi hotel in the early 2000s.

ENTRY INTO POLITICS

In 1970, Prof Muga left an illustrious academic career at Makerere University and, together with the other Mboya loyalists like Sylvanus Oduor and Bernardus Aoko, plotted to overthrow the Jomo Kenyatta government. They were arrested and jailed for 10 years.

In the late 1980s, he returned to Kanu politics. Prof Muga was one of the leaders from South Nyanza who the Weekly Review described as "well-educated bureaucrats", and would be champions of development.

Aided by Hezekiah Oyugi, the permanent secretary in the Office of the President, they took on some of the best Dholuo orators in South Nyanza politics whose development record had been dismal.

Phares Oluoch Kanindo exemplified this lot. Keen on shifting South Nyanza politics away from "personality classes and clan rivalries" to "issues and ideas of development", and redressing the intra-Nyanza health, education and infrastructure inequality, Oyugi’s 1988 elections team of Peter Nyakiamo and Dalmas Otieno signalled an intellectual-technocratic turn in South Nyanza’s politics.

"Yamo Oloko", to mean the political wind was blowing in a new direction, Prof Muga claimed.

His seat, Rangwe constituency, like Dalmas Otieno’s Rongo, was carved out of the wider Homa Bay Constituency in 1987.

MOI'S SPEECH WRITER

He was one of the prominent pro-Moi leaders from Nyanza, at a particularly very dark moment of authoritarianism in Kenya characterised by anti-intellectualism, torture, detention without trial, disappearance, and pervasive fear of the Special Branch.

But Prof Muga’s dalliance with Kanu was short-lived. He was soon ensnared in Kanu’s snake pit politics of envy, jealousy, rough elbowing, gate keeping, witch hunts and even murder.

In South Nyanza’s politics of the late 1980s, this played out as the rivalry between Hezekiah Oyugi and David Okiki Amayo, the national chairman of Kanu and the feared chairman of the disciplinary committee, for the ears and eyes of President Moi.

He was accused by the South Nyanza Kanu branch of "boasting publicly that he was indispensable because he drafted speeches, President Moi’s speech in Rio de Janeiro on the destruction of the ozone layer, a precursor to the world’s debate on global warming", as well as "issuing bouncing cheques, creating religious discord, making empty promises, and stopping people from conducting harambees in his constituency".

On that day, sitting on the slab of the gate of Homa Bay Farmers’ Training Centre reading a Jerusalem Bible (Jerome’s) at lunchtime, he was stoic but forlorn, meditating, far away from the South Nyanza County Council Hall, where the Kanu stalwarts deliberated his fate.

KICKED OUT OF KANU

A devout Roman Catholic, Prof Muga often prayed at lunchtime during kangaroo-court trial.

He was abandoned by adults who knew too well the dangers of associating with a political 'outcast', only those who were too young to know how dangerous Kanu’s politics of suspicion and back stabbings could come close to such a 'dissident'.

In the land of intellectual Lilliputians led by councillor Akech Chieng’, it seems Prof Muga had claimed more than his fair share of intellectual credit, where the norm is to claim nothing and credit the leader with every stroke of real or imagined brilliance. Prof Muga was kicked out of Kanu in 1989.

Politically homeless, he bounced back with gusto in the early 1990s as one of the Young Turks, a group of mostly well-educated, middle aged men, the activists of the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (Ford) - the political movement that had boldly broken Moi’s chokehold on Kenya’s politics.

Muga’s trademark beard was greying, eyes blood-shot and fierce as ever, his piercing gaze firmly fixed on the prize: "Ford …! Uhuru, Haki na Ukweli. Ford … Mayienga (earth shaker)," he thundered on the stump.

MULTIPARTY POLITICS

Through sweat and blood, the Young Turks, like the Wangari Maathai-led mothers of political prisoners’ nude protest at Uhuru Park’s Freedom Corner, shook the foundations of the authoritarian one-party state.

They freed us from the fears of Moi’s Special Branch police state. Prof Muga, true to his moniker 'Bend Aburu,' the ash-preserved millet grains, survived the Kanu political weevils, outlived the one-party dictatorship and planted the seeds of multiparty politics.

Prof Muga, it seems, did not live by bread alone, but by high religious and political ideals, though he had his flaws.

The writer is a PhD Fellow, Makerere Institute of Social Research