JM Kariuki and Tom Mboya’s links with NYS

The late JM Kariuki had a dream and that dream is today in the hands of a consigliore — the same way Tom Hagen was in the movie The Godfather.

Certainly, the National Youth Service, as he mooted it; or to put it correctly, the way the Israelis wanted it, is in the wrong hands.

For years, at least when it was under the Kitale-born Geoffrey Griffins, the NYS was a modestly-funded hand-to-mouth outfit. Mr Griffins had been asked by President Jomo Kenyatta to take up the directorship of NYS as its administrative face as Mr Kariuki, the Israeli-connected legislator, handled the political face. The other notable was the semi-illiterate Mau Mau fighter Waruhiu Itote, aka General China, who was Griffin’s deputy and a black-American Peace Corp volunteer Cynthia Perry, who later became the US Ambassador to Sierra Leone and Burundi. Ms Perry is credited with starting the NYS secretarial school.

BRIGHT ORPHANS

None of these disappointed — after all the modest goal was to salvage all the young adults affected by the state of emergency years, and give graft training to  the youths who did not have formal education. The other idea was to rehabilitate the Mau Mau child soldiers by taking them through a discipline regime. The bright orphans, and those from poor households, were usually taken to Starehe Boys’ Centre which had been founded in 1959 as a rescue centre for street children.

Thus, Mr Griffins was in charge of Starehe and NYS and he ran the two institutions with eclectic discipline with the later combining military drills borrowed from other uniformed services.

When it started, the NYS used to receive generous donations for foodstuff and equipment from Israel and the US. In between, the Chinese started funding an expansion of NYS in the 1980s but then pulled out as cartels milked dry the donations leaving tens of incomplete infrastructure in all the stations. It also had other teething scandals, even then, but mainly on the regional balance on recruitment.

NYS has grown from first budget of a paltry £250,000 (about Sh30 million) in 1964, Sh2.4 billion in 2003 and the wheeler-dealer alluring Sh25 billion from 2015. Such an amount of cash had never been seen at NYS —which had more allocation than the ministry of Tourism and Wildlife.

QUERIED PAYMENTS

Then the moneyed oligarchs lined up to ostensibly transform NYS as per the Jubilee manifesto and what followed was a queue of peckish business magnates who were muscling their way into its coffers.

When the first story broke that the Central Bank had queried payments of, at first, some Sh665 million to NYS suppliers and consultants, then Devolution Cabinet Secretary, Ms Anne Waiguru, was the first to control the message — and the damage.

Her media handlers gave her a whistle-blower working mask as deception, spins and damage control concealed facts.

Ms Waiguru, now the Kirinyaga governor, maintained her innocence even as she dragged in Deputy President William Ruto’s aide, Farouk Kibet into the saga. In the NYS I scandal, Josephine Kabura and Ben Gethi became the poster boys of all that was wrong in the procurement procedures at NYS. That case is in court.

MANIPULATE SYSTEM

Finally, Ms Waiguru was forced out; or rather, she told us that she was asked to step aside by her doctors. End of that story.

For the last two weeks, Kenyans have been treated to yet another circus on NYS over the possible loss of Sh9 billion.

Fast forward to Friday and the Principal Secretary, Lillian Omollo told a parliamentary committee that the organisation had received a clean bill of health from the auditor general and as such “there is no way that Sh9 billion could have been lost without catching my attention”, she said. 

Mrs Omollo told us all that was good at NYS: It is IFMIS compliant; it is currently saving Sh1.2 billion; it is easy to identify those who manipulate the system and other folk stories that should be spared to the courts.

How the dream of copying the Israeli Gadna Nahal movement turned to be a national scandal is an insult to the NYS pioneers: Tom Mboya, JM Kariuki, Jomo Kenyatta, Waruhiu Itote and Geoffrey Griffins. Gadna was an acronym meaning youth formations, while Nahal meant fighting pioneer youth. These were youth organisations controlled and financed by the Israeli government to instil a sense of “national purpose”, and to “conduct civic and social duties”.

NATION'S PRIDE

In Kenya, this was a dream first conceptualised by Mr Mboya in 1959 when he was invited to a six-week seminar by the International Union of the Socialist Youth. On his return he told a press conference how he had seen Israeli youths trained to become a source of pride to the nation, were readily available for all sorts of national work programmes.

Others who had been exposed to this system was JM, who was Kenyatta’s personal assistant, and General China — a man who had become Kenyatta’s friend as they served jail-terms in Lokitaung.

The Israeli had hoped to use the youth training as their entry point to Africa. And besides Kenya, they had such programmes in Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda. Ironically, the two champions of NYS were assassinated — Mboya was assassinated in July 1969 while Kariuki was assassinated in March 1975.

But Steven Carol, a scholar on the Nahal says that the east African experiment failed because most youth were illiterate and unlike the Israeli youth “they had no avowed enemy, or marauding terrorists across the border. As a result the voluntary, idealist elements, as well as willingness to sacrifice, were absent.”

MOCK TRAINING

From Tanzania, the Israelis had trained Joseph Nyerere, brother of Julius Nyerere to learn how to turn the Youth League of Tanu, which he led, into a mass movement. When Nyerere faced an attempted coup in 1964 (which succeded in Zanzibar) it is the Nahal-trained service units that remained loyal to the government.

This saw Nyerere invite the Israeli government to train 1,000 handpicked youth to form a new unit known as Tanzania People’s Defence Force that was unveiled in September 1964.

Kenyatta also had similar dreams of using the NYS as the first-level training for the military. The reason it was easier to sell the NYS concept to Kenya was because the Israeli Gadna movement was aimed at taking the youths from the streets and putting them in centres for training and rehabilitation.

The project was hurried from the very beginning and by 1965 an MP accused some politicians of using the youth — he told Parliament they were only doing mock training — in order to “get very big jobs in the government.”

BLANK CERTIFICATES

 “These youths have been trained in wood cutting, bush clearing, and so on. Of what use is that? These youths could be better taught by their mothers and fathers because their parents know how to cut wood and clear the bush,” said Elgon East MP, M. Barasa.

An earlier suggestion was that the youth should have been used in industries or train them in “soap, paper, cement making and many other industrial technical and trade skills.”

By then the government had opened training centres in Thika, Yatta, Gilgil and Mombasa. After one year, some of the youth graduated with what Parliament was told were “blank certificates”.

It had been hoped that the youth were to take professional training so that they can get jobs when through with the training.

MPs accused the government of having “no intention except to fool the country by telling people that the youth would be trained, and that after two years of training some would be taken into the police…medical services and prisons.”

MENIAL WORK

If you look at the Hansard, you will find Dr Gikonyo Kiano, then Minister for Commerce, telling the House that NYS was not founded as an employment bureau “whereby automatic jobs will be handed to men to save us a lot of money…I did not know that (MPs) considered menial work as a disgrace.”

When it started, MPs were asked to nominate youth from their constituencies to attend and it faced challenges in balancing the trainees from difference constituencies.

But the fear that the NYS could be turned into a paramilitary service, with hundreds of youth out there, saw the trainees take training using spades and shovels.

Henry Wariithi, then Mukurweini MP, was always opposed to this and he once lamented:  “It is of no use drilling with spades and shovels. We realise the shovels are important but if they are being called to join the army in case of trouble, they should know how to use machine guns.”

CASH COW

In February 1966, a Motion was brought to Parliament by Embu’s J.G. Mbogo seeking the disbandment of the Israeli-funded unit arguing that the youth were being trained “for somebody to stand up there and look very big”.

“I hear there is a very senior man there called Mr Griffins who is the director…and there is a very great man called Hon Kariuki who was given that job. (Griffins) is only there as a symbol,” Parliament was told.

More than 50 years later, there are calls to disband the NYS after it was turned into a cash cow.

Certainly, this is not what JM had in mind.

Mr Kamau is a Senior Writer with NMG. Email: [email protected]; @johnkamau1