At the funeral service of former civil servant Jeremiah Kiereini in 2019, a story was told of how a former attorney-general, Charles Njonjo, who was in attendance at the service, made a surreptitious journey from Muthaiga to Kiereini’s Karen residence at the height of the Nyayo dictatorship. By then, Njonjo had fallen out of favour with Moi and he feared being trailed by the secret police. So he laid in the back seat of a car and covered himself with a blanket as his wife took the wheel.
It was an incredible revelation because the man lying fearfully under a blanket was the same who had, almost single handedly, created the police state that ruled through fear, harassment, imprisonment, systematic torture and murder. Perhaps, on hearing that story, some people might have smirked and mumbled, “poetic justice”. But it was more than that. It was a story about the illusions of power, for when Njonjo was creating a dictatorial Frankenstein — first under Jomo Kenyatta and then under Daniel arap Moi — he could never have imagined that he would one day feel the paralysing fear of being on the wrong side of his creation.
