What won’t some Kenyans do to perpetuate their otherwise parochial lifestyles, like constructing bogus shopping malls and flats that will struggle to get tenants, drink inordinately expensive liquor daily, enroll at exclusive clubs to mingle with similarly misguided people, get sloppy blowjobs and weak orgasms from airhead slay queens or take their kids to a-million-a-term schools, where these brats just sit with vacant expressions in front of class, barely grasping anything?
Some Kenyans will use such lifestyles to justify the stealing, killing, maiming, and bribery to get money.
On Sundays, they congregate at their places of worship to twerk in the name of praise-and-worship and to show God the middle finger.
And no single institution in this country has remained untouched and pure from this Satanism, with land matters now the centre-stage for this long-running phase of lunacy.
We have narrated this type of story here so many times, that it is possible for you to own and occupy a piece of property for decades without a tussle until the day it catches the eye of a rabid grabber, who will use the deeply entrenched land cartels to manufacture fake ownership documents, and lay claim to it in the courts.
No one in Kenya, except only the Kenyatta’s, is immune to this phenomenon. You only need to have been cursed with the foresight to have acquired a property, and which over the years, through a confluence of factors, increased exponentially in value.
That is precisely what happened to the iconic City Cabanas property on Mombasa Road, a club that run for more than 2 decades, until it closed due to the disruptions occasioned by the construction of the Airport Road – Eastern bypass.
From the early 90s when the club operated, and was a key fixture in Nairobi’s entertainment scene, no one had ever laid claim to it, until the issue of compensation for the land to allow for the expansion of Mombasa Road and the construction of the expressway was mooted.
Then the interesting things began to happen.
The owner of the property, Roseline Njeri Macharia, a widowed entrepreneur was shocked to discover that a random, little-known individual by the name SIMON NYAMANYA ONDIBA had managed to procure a parallel set of ownership documents and had lodged a claim for her property to the National Land Commission (NLC) precisely for the compensation.
Those who know Ondiba say that he masquerades as a Land Fraud expert, who worked closely with the former NLC Chairman Mohammed Swazuri as an investigator.
Obviously many sane Kenyans are now asking themselves and each other how someone acquired ownership documents for a piece of land, without having ever held possession of it, and why this squabble has just come about recently.
During the Moi era, guys within the KANU system used to get title deeds hand-delivered to their offices for land whose location they had no clue. Anecdotally, it was also the time that driving licenses were hand delivered to idiots at bus parks and matatu stages who had never attended driving school, and which saw a spike in the number of road deaths in the country to date.
This shadowy individual (Ondiba) had managed to acquire documents that showed him to have sub-divided the property, again, this is strange because he had absolutely no access to it, and even from the Eastern bypass overpass, you can see that the entire property is intact and guarded.
The Chief Registrar of Lands also confirmed that their records show no sub-division and that the documents tabled by Ondiba were not part of the official records and had somehow been inserted into the Land management system as being situated in Machakos.
How did Ondiba acquire such firepower and political cover as to insert himself in such a well-known, high-profile property and brazenly apply to the NLC to be the one who gets compensation during its compulsory acquisition?
More importantly, before the expressway and its compensation was mooted, there was absolutely zero interest in the parcel, mainly because of the extensive construction on it, and the inordinate cost that would be incurred to convert it into anything else, let alone the cost of the land and buildings.
But the word COMPENSATION, seems to trigger all manner of crazy hormones in people because it is associated with others terms like FREE MONEY, GOVERNMENT DEALS, and INFLATED PAYOUTS etc.
The National Land Commission has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. Murder and death have been its byword.
Barely a month ago, NLC Communications boss Jennifer Itumbi Wambua was found strangled in Ngong forest, in mysterious circumstances. Several reports have tried to insinuate that she was randomly murdered while on a solo prayer retreat, but are unable to explain the disappearance of Ksh. 2 million from her bank account a day earlier, in official funds from the NLC.
If official funds were placed in an individual’s bank account, does NLC really have a Governance structure, all these years after it was formed?
Just last week, the most famous forensic document examiner in Kenyan history Antipas Nyanjwa, who was working for the NLC collapsed and died in a Nairobi hotel. As former deputy boss at CID forensic documents unit and chief trainer at CID training institute, it was odd that he had been demoted from Nairobi to work at the Siaya NLC office.
He had been deputy head of investigations at NLC.
The former NLC Chairman Mohammed Swazuri is always in the news, constantly being arrested and hauled before court over issues pertaining to his tenure at the helm of the NLC and especially regarding compensations surrounding the SGR, and which has crippled Kenya with Chinese debt.
The current NLC Chairman Gershon Otachi, a beneficiary of the political reward system to members of the Kisii community, and which includes Super-CS Fred Matiang’i and Solicitor-General Ken Ogeto, has himself managed to cobble together a small cabal of members of the Kisii community with whom to work with at NLC.
This is not new, as these tribal cabals have existed and continue to operate on the basis of trust alone.
Because such compensations come only once in a life-time and Otachi, having learnt from the Swazuri brain-less modus operandi, chose not to get caught up in blatant illegalities, and chose rather to do it within the confines of the laid down law and court procedures.
The names in this mix are quite telling, Otachi, Ondiba, Mary Nyamanya, Mwanyambori investments ltd, the Chairperson of the National Assembly committee of Land, Rachel Nyamai and even Environment & Lands Court (ELC) boss Justice Samson Okongo…coincidence?
To quote master Shifu, “there are no coincidences”…
In order to shape public and Government opinion and to sell a warped narrative on the issue, we see the poorly researched and lopsided newspaper articles by another member of this Kisii cabal, the journalist Nyambega Gisesa of the Nation Media Group, a news outlet whose share price is in nose dive, occasioned by negative perception to its editorial policy.
The arrogance with which the widow Roseline Njeri Macharia has been accosted by this cabal, reeks of ingrained Patriarchy, normally associated with members of certain Kenyan communities, chief among them, the Kisii.
It comes across as a “huyu mama hawezani na sisi” complex because all her other neighbors, many of them male Indian businessmen, will get or have received their compensation without a word.
At the back of the minds of these people, a woman cannot have managed to hold onto this property unless she is connected to the power elite in Kenya and therefore, she cannot be the legitimate owner of the property on one hand and there is justification to take it away from her, on the other hand.
This is the common thread taken by journalist Nyambega Gisesa towards Roseline Macharia, whom he refers to as “connected trader” in a bid to pre-emptively paint her in bad light to the readers before he goes ahead to turn facts on their head and embellish known truths.
Worse, in a show of utter disdain for a longtime successful entrepreneur, Nyambega in his secondary headline refuses to acknowledge the humanity of Roseline Njeri, and instead dismisses her as “the woman”…
Sociologists tell us that before the World’s worst genocides, the perpetrators would de-humanize the person they wanted to kill, therefore making it possible rationalize their murders. Nazis called Jews “untermensch” or sub-humans while the Tutsi called the Hutu “Inyenze” or cockroaches.
The Kisii cabal simply refers to Roseline Macharia as “that woman” as though she is a despicable, sub-human whose removal (both from the property and this life probably) should have no 2nd thought.
Should the widow Roseline Macharia be scared for her life?
Yes, she should and ought to be scared shitless after the 2 unexplained deaths at NLC and many other unresolved murders over property tussles in Kenya.
On March 4th, Environment & Land Court (ELC) head Justice Samson Okongo allowed the NLC to pay Roseline Macharia 50% of the compensation value for the property, which implies that he considered the suit filed by Ondiba to be meritless.
We will explore the reasons for this in the next article.
