Magazine
Goldenburg: Story of a whistleblower
Chairman of the Goldenberg Commission Justice Samuel Bosire hands over the findings to President Mwai Kibaki in March. Photo/FILE
Posted Monday, August 3 2009 at 00:00
They told me the bank no longer had confidence in me. After about a year I fled to Mombasa.”
David's brother, Daniel, also gives his and the Munyakei family’s impressions of the trying time of David’s arrest.
Daniel is a master of understatement and though he describes his relationship with his late brother as cordial, he is the ideal bigger brother, someone who felt obligated enough to relieve their mother of paying David’s school fees once he, Daniel, started working.
This is in spite of the fact that their mother could still afford it and Daniel had only left school two years earlier.
It is characteristic for Daniel to simply say: “I would treat him as a younger brother.” Sturdy, serious and organised, Daniel Munyakei’s only frivolity is being an avid Manchester United fan.
This belies the logistical and emotional support he has provided David with over the years.
All the more amazing when you learn that Daniel only got to know the real truth of his brother’s involvement in the Goldenberg issue a few weeks before David testified in 2003. A weaker human being would have been swept away by insidious doubts and speculation.
Another important cog in David’s CBK years is the friend he had in the institution.
In December 2004 David Munyakei met this friend, mentor and confidante. Meshack Onyango Jamasai for lunch at the Nairobi Club. Mr Jamasai, then a Deputy Director at the Central Bank, resembles a kindly uncle.
At the lunch, David Munyakei was very deferential towards Jamasai whose reaction to seeing his old friend was encapsulated in a question he posed to David: “Munyakei, my friend let me ask you: How did you manage to do the thing that you managed to do?”
That query shows the esteem in which both men hold each other even after all these years.
Munyakei blinked several times and after trying to utter a few words was silent, almost shy. Nothing more needed to be said.
Back in the 1990s, when a banker was thrown in jail it could only meant one thing — fraud.
But even with that as a possibility after David’s arrest, his brother Daniel fully supported him.
“Basically, my brother had pointed out that there was something fishy that was going on. I told him to be careful and try and find out what was going on,” Daniel says.
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