Millionaires with a creepy side: The two faces behind the land chaos in Embakasi

Embakasi Ranching Company chairman Muhuri Muchiri (left) is confronted by Ruai Councillor Dick Waweru during the firm’s shareholders meeting. Mr Muchiri and his aide Samuel Thuita are behind the land chaos in Embakasi. PHOTO | FILE | NATION

What you need to know:

  • After Mr Muchiri’s death, Mr Thuita took over the running of Embakasi with his Class Four literacy and hired goons to protect his hold on the leadership.

  • Anyone who attempted to dethrone him was either bribed with a piece of land or beaten.

  • Like the man he copied, he built a bar for himself in Ruai and lived in a single room at the back.

  • That is where he collapsed and died as the government started putting sense into the double allocations after President Kenyatta moved in.

Former Embakasi MP, the late Muhuri Muchiri, and his lead youth winger Samuel Mwangi Thuita died as millionaires but with a creepy side: one was a convicted thief and the other was a masquerade and a sycophant.

Both were founders of Ruai’s Embakasi Ranching Company; which is, by all standards, a reflection of their personalities.

If any two men have contributed immensely to land chaos in Nairobi, the gold and silver medals should go to these two — who apparently never stayed in their palatial homes but in obscure rooms in the separate bars they ran. Why? Nobody seems to know.

COLLAPSED

When Mr Thuita collapsed last month and died in his bar in Ruai, those who knew him and the way he adored Mr Muchiri — who lived a similar lifestyle — said he had followed the footsteps of his mentor.

Mr Thuita was a classic masquerade.

On January 3, 2011, when Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi sent a special jet to Nairobi to pick up a delegation led by Goldenberg scandal architect Kamlesh Pattni together with some of the traditional leaders in Kenya for a trip to Tripoli, Mr Thuita was there as the “King of Wakikuyu” —  a title he had bestowed on himself.

MONKEY SKIN

Wearing a beautiful hyrax and monkey skin cloak and aboard the Afriqiah Airlines jet, Mr “Wa Thuita” — as he was popularly known — believed that as the “king” of the most populous tribe in Kenya, Mr Gaddafi would grant him the leadership of all other tribes.

In Tripoli, the Kenyan delegation was booked at the sea-front Corinthia Hotel, a five-star luxury hotel, which is today regarded as the best safe haven in post-Gaddafi Libya.

Later, the team was taken to a desert tent to meet with Mr Gaddafi who was trying to establish his authority across Africa by courting tribal elders — both real and wannabe.

UNPRINTABLE WORDS

As Mr Pattni rose to install Mr Gaddafi as the kingpin of Africa’s elders, Mr Thuita — as he would later claim — shot from his seat and claimed he commanded Kenya’s largest community.

In a video footage, Mr Wa Thuita could be seen holding a microphone and paying homage to Gaddafi waving a flywhisk.

Mr Thuita was known for such ruckus, drama and clamour for attention.

Some time in February 1978, on the day that Justice Fidhussein Abdullah jailed the late Embakasi MP Godfrey Muhuri Muchiri for five years for stealing coffee, a youth-winger later identified as Mwangi Thuita, a lad with poorly contained fury, shot from his seat, called the judge a few unprintable words and took off, protesting.

NAKED BOY

Court orderlies and security caught up with him near the Hamilton fountain, known as statue of a naked boy, and worked on him.

“I was badly beaten,” Mr Thuita would later tell anyone who cared to listen.

Luckily, apart from the beating and bruises, Mr Thuita was never taken back to Justice Abdullah and he limped into the crowded streets of Nairobi; injured, broken and cowed. It was one of the few battles that he lost.

As the lead youth-winger for the rabble-rousing Muchiri, Mr Thuita was in a class of his own — and was always looking for trouble.

LAND CHAOS

In his youthful days, Mr Thuita — even when dressed in a suit — would still have a Somali sword and two knives; just in case he differed with somebody in the course of duty.

Those close to him say Mr Thuita adored Mr Muchiri and his whole life mimicked that of the former MP, the rich and feckless founder of the troubled Embakasi Ranching Company, now a citadel of land chaos and double allocations in Nairobi.

As the government continues with attempts to address the land chaos in Embakasi left by Mr Thuita and Mr Muchiri, the story of how two unschooled bar owners contributed to one of Nairobi’s most convoluted land allocation has yet to be told.

At the moment, thousands of real estate owners who bought land in Embakasi are waiting, with fingers crossed, for the outcome of an ongoing investigation into perhaps the biggest land-buying crisis in the country, thanks to Mr Thuita and Mr Muchiri.

WORTHLESS PAPERS

Part of the problem is that 14,000 acres of the Embakasi land which was sub-divided by Embakasi Ranching Company was government land and its mother title still reads Settlement Fund Trustee (SFT).

Another 16,000 quarter-acre plots in the same area have no chance of getting title deeds unless the firm repossesses public utility land it dished out to individuals irregularly. This was land that had been surrendered for public utility.

Besides that, the black book,  which had the original shareholders, is so convoluted that it makes no sense. And further, some plots have more than three owners — and thousands might be left holding worthless pieces of paper — which is a story for another day.

SELLING SHARES

Embakasi Ranching Company consisted of 22,000 acres and was the largest land-buying company in Nairobi. The land was outside Nairobi in the plains of Ruai and nobody was interested in it. By the time it was acquired it had a sisal processing factory and more than 5,000 cows.

Mr Muchiri, a chain-smoker then, was a bosom friend of Mr Njenga Karume, then the chairman of the powerful Gikuyu, Embu and Meru Association (Gema) and through Mr Karume, he had managed to convince President Jomo Kenyatta to approve the purchase of the land in Embakasi and start selling the shares.

For that, he made Mr Karume a director of Embakasi Ranch together with the likes of Mr Mathenge Nduhiu and Mr Thuita. It was through Gema’s influence that Mr Muchiri won the Embakasi seat from Mr Mwangi Karungaru in 1974.

STEALING COFFEE

Mr Muchiri was a suave businessman and in 1959 he used to run Capital Bar and Restaurant in Nairobi’s Victoria (now Tom Mboya) Street.

In order to run the Embakasi Ranching firm, the group of Mr Muchiri and Mr Karume had hired the Uniafric House-based audit firm of Arlene Priti Mascarenhas and his wife Laura Sriti, well known in Nairobi. (The couple later died in a car crash in Jinja, Uganda, on September 21, 1999).

The chaos in Embakasi is perhaps traced to the 1978 jailing of Mr Muchiri together with Makuyu MP Jesse Mwangi Gachago for stealing 485 bags of coffee in transit from Malaba to Mombasa belonging to Kenya National Transport Company (Kenatco).

REPRIMANDED

It was more of a political case which could be traced to the forced resignation of Mr Gachago from the directorship of Boskovic Air Charters Limited by then Attorney-General Charles Njonjo after he was named a shareholder and director of the company following a take-over by a Danish entrepreneur. Another shareholder was the Indonesian millionaire Yani Haryanto.

Perhaps that explains why after serving for only two years in jail, both Mr Muchiri and Mr Gachago were taken to Mr Njonjo’s Muthaiga home where he reprimanded them in front of their families, and Gema leader, Mr Njenga Karume. After they offered an apology, Mr Njonjo said he had them jailed for siding with Dr Njoroge Mungai — then a powerful Cabinet minister — and let them go.

Before he was jailed, Mr Muchiri used to run Gaylord Hotel, then near the Coptic Hospital, which he had acquired in 1971 from Mr John Herman Van Dijk and his wife Sheila.

GAYLORD VETERANS

During the coffee boom of the 70s, Gaylord Hotel became the abode of new millionaires with fat bank accounts, rich slackers with nothing else to do and problem drinkers.

It was at Gaylord that two Kenyatta-era security chiefs — Police Commissioner Bernard Hinga and Criminal Investigations boss Ignatius Nderi — almost killed each other before the General Service Unit commandant Ben Gethi and tycoon Chris Kahara intervened. It is a story well told by Gaylord veterans.

By then, Mr Muchiri was the chairman of the powerful African Transporters Association, which owned a 300-strong fleet of long-haul tankers and other hauliers.

Although he owned 100 acres and a palatial house in Riara, Kiambu —  near Kenneth Matiba’s home — Mr Muchiri never stayed at this house and opted to have a room at Gaylord Hotel. Even after he was jailed for stealing coffee, Mr Muchiri opened a new club in Athi River known as Congress or “Studio 45” which offered accommodation and disco.

IMMORTALISED

“At the back were some weather-beaten rooms and that is where he used to live,” an acquaintance told me recently. “That is where he died and I could never understand why such an immensely wealthy man could opt to live like a pauper at the back of a club.”

From here, he ran Embakasi Ranching Company and a secondary school in Embakasi immortalised him.

Both Mr Muchiri and Mr Thuita believed that Embakasi was their own land and that shareholders leases and plots could be switched and swapped at will. These two were the kings of double allocations and they played their shareholders like pawns.

HIRED GOONS

In order to appease President Moi, they had donated 5,000 acres of the land for the building of the modern-day Ruai Sewerage Treatment plant. But since it covers only 500 acres, the 4500 acres that remained were left to land grabbers including a senior member of Youth for Kanu 92, who was given 1,000 acres.

After Mr Muchiri’s death, Mr Thuita took over the running of Embakasi with his Class Four literacy and hired goons to protect his hold on the leadership. Anyone who attempted to dethrone him was either bribed with a piece of land or beaten.

“There were no two ways,” a personal friend to Mr Thuita told me. More so, all police administrators who served in Embakasi were compromised with plots — and that includes a former police boss. “That way, Mr Thuita ruled Embakasi Ranch until his death.”

DOUBLE ALLOCATIONS

I once called him and asked him about the double allocations and he retorted: “Mburoti icio ni cia nyukwa (Are they your mother’s plots?) …come I take you to Ruai and we talk.” I didn’t call him again.

But like the man he copied, he built a bar for himself in Ruai and lived in a single room at the back. That is where he collapsed and died as the government started putting sense into the double allocations after President Kenyatta moved in.

He also built Sagana’s Blue Resort — a magnificent hotel in Kirinyaga.

He died believing he was the King of Wakikuyu and that he had the right over all other Embakasi Ranching shareholders.

[email protected]; @johnkamau1