The Chaos That Was the 1982 Coup And The Terrible Purge That Followed

There were many horror stories on that day. Some half jokingly say that Senior Private Pancreas Ochuka, the junior airforce officer who is said to have been the leader (there was definitely a major personality behind him, but who was it?), went to his grave having ruled Kenya for at least 30 minutes. Ochuka was hanged at Kamiti Prison for his role in the coup attempt.




Details of the bloody attempted coup of 1982 are still classified information. The exact body count was never even given. What followed was a different Moi keen on crushing all opposition, real or imagined. In retrospect the attempted coup was definitely one of the events that helped drive the country more and more off track.

Then there were the Maasai moran looters who caused great laughter. While others went for valuables, like precious stones and jewelry, Some Maasais were spotted breaking into a butcher's shop and carrying away meat. Apparently this seemed to be the most valuable of assets they could identify.

Other slum dwellers looted TV sets only to find themselves stranded with them since they did not have any electricity in their tiny slum dwellings, something they momentarily forgot as they made off with the TV sets.

One the man (armed with a gun and probably believed to have been a member of either the air force or the army) went straight to the Hilton Hotel. His objective? To have sex with a white woman. Which he apparently fulfilled but on his way out died under a hail of bullets.

But there was nothing funny about the rapes, plunder and killings that went on in many parts of the city of Nairobi. Nor is there anything funny about the numerous bodies that people had to step over while walking the streets of Nairobi the next morning, which was a Monday. Everybody had to walk the streets with their national identity cards held high over their heads. There was also a dawn to dusk curfew that went on for at least a month after that.

The air force troops apparently took over the KBC TV and radio station and a few other strategic installations in the early hours of Sunday morning August 1st 1982, before the Kenya Army support battalion stormed into the city centre and recaptured the installations with heavy casualties, mainly from the air force side. Many air force soldiers fled, stripped their uniform and hid by mixing with ordinary civilians. The army hunted them down for days. It is said that a section of the air force that had taken control cheered when they saw the army arriving in town, since they had been made to believe that the entire armed forces were supporting the attempted coup. They were taken completely by surprise when their would-be accomplices opened fire instead, killing many of them.

It is said that Moi was at his Kabarak farm when the attempted coup happened and after it was defeated, was brought back into the city by a well armed army escort in an operation code named Operation Maji Machafu (swahili for dirty water). There is a story that did the rounds to the effect that he was brought back inside a military tank.

He appeared live on KBC TV (then called Voice of Kenya – VOK). He was visisbly shocked but thanked all the security forces. He was flanked by the then police commissioner Ben Gethi.

The paranoid Moi who emerged after the events of that August day, was a very different man from the Moi Kenyans had known in the past. From then on, all political opponents and enemies, real or imagined were dealt with ruthlessly. The dreaded Mwakenya purge where many innocent Kenyans suffered in torture chambers at Nyayo house on suspicion of being dissidents was to follow, peaking in 1985/86.

Many older Kenyans and families still have scars of ’82 and the consequences that followed. Prof. Anyang Nyongo, now an MP and formerly in the Kibaki cabinet, once admitted in parliament that his private parts were squeezed by special branch officers torturing him. This blogger was arrested and detained for one endless weekend where I was transferred from police station to police station in a mistaken identity mix-up. Security officers at one point stripped me naked and threatened to shoot me dead if I did not confess. Had I known what I was required to confess, I would have speedily obliged.

It is important to understand that everybody and anybody was picked up at the least excuse during the great Mwakenya purge of the mid 80s. The late humour columnist Mutahi Wahome (better know as Whispers) was jailed just because somebody mentioned that he happened to be around when others were reading a copy of a seditious document in his university days some years before.
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