Now that we are in assassination season, let’s take a walk down memory lane. Btw the grave of Pio Gama Pinto is at the City Park near the mausoleum of former VP Murumba. We as Kenya have had some amazing leaders unfortunately they were taken out for being a threat. It’s hard to get this caliber of leadership today.
You know that even Moi was a good man until he assumed the Presidency. Then he changed. Once he tasted corruption, he had to keep stealing to stay in power. With a poor understanding of financial basics or public government policy, there was little he could have done to keep the country afloat other than paying people off to buy time. It would have been nice to see someone like Pinto rise to the helm though. But other than 3 or 4 others, sadly there’s been no leaders worth a mention.
And Pinto was assassinated right in front of his daughter who was in nursery school at the time. That was tragic in itself. Whats even more tragic is that Jomo’s hit squad finished all the leaders who would have made excellent presidents. Yaani all the anti-corruption crusaders and instead cursed Kenya by appointing Daniel arap Moi as his successor.
Moi was not a good man. Never was. See the magazine clipping below. This is from an article written in the late 1960s. By then Moi was already a cynical schemer.
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I was watching a documentary on the life of Malcom X and Pio Gama Pinto was among the people the CIA killed for being advisors to X .We may never know the truth
Communists had to be eliminated. Julius Nyerere and Jaramogi Oginga and a few others somehow survived the purge.
We will never know if Pio Gama Pinto assassiation was direct hit from CIA or just Jomo Kenyatta eliminating local competition.
Wikileaks didn’t go back that far in history
Pio is the reason we are still borrowing from china
How could you elaborate further. We don’t entertain hearsay.
Oh my God. Thats terrible. Imagine if Tom Mboya, JM Kariuki, Pio Gama Pinto and Robert Ouko were around till now. How that kind of leadership would have affected our country.
Ive always wondered why Kenyatta choose Moi when he was surrounded by elites and intelligencia. Why a school teacher when he had many highly educated people he could have chosen but why MOI? Why?
Wacheni vacco bana. No one in Kenya was killed by the CIA. There were no communists in Kenya. The CIA were intelligent enough to know that even Oginga Odinga was not a communist.
Pio Gama Pinto was killed because he directly questioned Jomo Kenyatta on corruption. He had been warned several times but he said that Kenyatta was his friend and would never kill him
Mboya can’t have been a communist. In fact he was a favourite of the Americans
JM Kariuki’s assasination was directed by Mbiyu Koinange and was carried out by senior police officials like Ben Gethi.
So they killed all our good forward thinking anti corruption crusaders and left us with Moi.
You act like as if you have concrete proof which you don’t
Fitz De Souza’s book backs up what @hewa safi says in his post above.
You need to read widely. What I said has been widely reported from first hand accounts from people like Fitz De Souza. Below is an article from the Daily Nation
“Pio arrived back home in Nairobi in the morning (from hiding in Mombasa). That evening, J.D. Kali’s driver, a Kikuyu called Ndegwa, stopped by the house. Ndegwa was also with the Special Branch, and drove Kenyatta too.
"He asked if Pio had returned. Someone told him yes, and he drove off. Also in the house at the time was a very close friend of Pio, an African called Cheche, who had been with him in detention.
"Cheche acted as Pio’s bodyguard, and it was said would die for him. When Pio was told about the caller, he said he knew who Ndegwa was and that he was trying to organise to kill him.”
De Souza says that this visit was “perhaps … a warning”. But this did not deter Pinto from a project he was carrying out to embarrass all the land-grabbers.
PINTO CAUTIONED
The Kenyatta’s lawyer says that the “warning” did not “deter Pio, and he was soon busily compiling a list of farms and land which in his view had been stolen from the African people by the Government.
"The list would form a key part of his group’s opposition to Tom Mboya’s Sessional Paper 10. The expectation was (that) there was to be an explosive result: a vote of no confidence against Kenyatta.”
When he got to learn about Pinto’s new escapades, De Souza says he tried to warn him too: “I reminded Pio of Kenyatta’s strength, of the sacrifices and struggles he had made and his firm belief that the fruits of independence should be his.
I said, "Pio, I think you have a lot of good things to say, but however much you say them, Kenyatta is not going to give up power or go away. He is a very courageous man and would fight to death to stay leader if he had to. So, don’t try to attack him morally and not expect to get on his bad side; you are just wasting your time. It is not possible to remove him.”
The former deputy speaker now says that Pinto appeared not to have taken heed.
“It was on an afternoon in February, as I was taking a break for tea outside the Parliament building, that I heard someone calling my name. ‘Mr de Souza, come quickly please!’
"Turning around I saw that a few tables away an altercation had broken out between Pio and Kenyatta. Both men were gesticulating and swearing, and as their voices rose, everyone on the veranda could hear. Tom was standing nearby, now joined by several onlookers.
"Pio, his face contorted with anger, was shouting, ‘I’ll fix you!’ Kenyatta, equally incensed, was shouting back at him. I knew immediately what they were arguing about: The English farms, which Pio claimed Kenyatta was grabbing.
"Running up behind Pio, I put both my arms around him, trying to restrain him and calm him down. When Kenyatta had gone we sat down. I warned him not to shout at Kenyatta again, as Kikuyus rarely forgive someone who becomes their enemy.”
“In the eyes of most Africans,” I said, “you are just a Muhindi. You are perfectly dispensable, but he is not.”
I reminded him how at almost every meeting Kenyatta would ask the same rhetorical question: If a man plants a tree, who has the right to claim the fruit of that tree when it has grown?
Ask any African, I told him, and they will say that Kenyatta has been very little compensated for the sacrifices and hardship he has endured in the struggle for independence.
“If it comes to the push,” I said, “there’ll be two shots fired at you and no one will remember you in a year’s time.” Pio shook his head, “No, no, there would be a bloodbath.”
I said, “Pio, you are overestimating your position; maybe if you were a Kikuyu or a Luo, then yes, there would be a backlash, but you’ve nobody to support you; like me, you’ve no support in the Indian community and none outside it.”
In other accounts of the incident related to me by others, the word “bastard” was prominent.
Asked why he called the President “a bastard”, Pio is said to have replied: “Because he called me a bastard first.”
When I heard that I doubted anyone could have expected to remain in Kenya alive … not after calling President Jomo Kenyatta a “bastard”. Pio Gama Pinto was assassinated on February 25, 1965.
The one thing Moi had that the rest (Tom Mboya, Pio Gama Pinto, JM Kariuki) did not was tact and strategy.
and I get it, Kenya was young, freshly independent, everyone had been in that struggle for “Uhuru”. It’s only natural wengi wangemea pembe.
But how are Pio Gama Pinto’s choices relevant beyond that, 57 years later?
Perhaps to retrospectively cover up his ineptitude for future generations…