[SIZE=6]James Gichuru and the Bottle of Finance[/SIZE]
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James Gichuru is known in history for being the guy who warmed party seats for Jomo. To thank him, the old man appointed Kenya’s first Minister for Finance. You would think only the soberest minds would get such a sensitive job, but Gichuru wasn’t even close to that.
If you needed to find the man, you looked for him either at Munyu Bar on Luthuli Avenue, or at Karai Bar on Campos Ribeiro Road. He once left sensitive Treasury docs in a briefcase at Karai Bar and his office had to send a team to retrieve them.
Legend has it that Gichuru always had a crate of beer in the boot of his car. If true, then that must have been after 1969 when Parliament had to go on a break during the budget speech because he started shaking and fumbling. During the break, he was rushed to Karai Bar for an emergency top up, after which he came back and finished the speech. Just three years earlier, he had blacked out the morning before the official opening of Central Bank, and missed out on the entire thing!
Getting into a bar brawl with the man could be expensive as a journalist called Muhia Gitaulearnt one day at the Pan Africa Hotel. Pissed off with the minister for insulting him, he threw beer onto Gichuru’s face. The fight was stopped after a while, and Muhia thought that was that. Only to be fired from his job at the Standard and never be employed as a journalist in Nairobi again.
Although the man who succeeded Gichuru, Mwai Kibaki, was mostly sober on the job, it was when he clocked out that he went on the rave. He and Paul Ngei were nicknamed [I]fagia dunia[/I], because when they hit happy hour, there was no stopping them. They were polar opposites; Kibaki was a calm and frugal drunk while Ngei was a riot even when he was sober. But both were smooth with the ladies, which is what the fagia dunia title was mostly about.
Another Minister in the same docket, Francis Masakhalia (1999) always had a bottle of Johnnie Walker around him, even in his briefcase. During his only Budget Reading, while police dispersed protestors outside Parliament, he gobbled up 15 glasses of water, ostensibly trying to sober up. I wonder how many other Budget Speeches have been made by drunk men…