My Old Schoolmate Davies Gachago And Others Walk To Freedom After One And Half Years In Custody Accused Of Drug Trafficking

Davies Gachago: Apart from the scar, his facial features have never changed since our school days.


The first time I met Davies Gachago (released this week for lack of evidence after being charged with others for drug trafficking) I was in primary school at Lavington Primary school in the upmarket Lavington Green area. Not that I belonged to the Lavington crowd, in fact we lived in a middle class neighborhood that neighbors Lavington. Most of the other kids at the school came from all sorts of different backgrounds including a fair number from the sprawling Kawangware.

But young Davies definitely hailed from that Lavington crowd. This was before his father was jailed for smuggling coffee. Many believed that the older Gachago was used as a scape goat because there were scores of important people making money at like-there-will-never-be-tomorrow pace doing the illegal coffee smuggling trade in those days. Some Kenyans are who they are today because of illegal coffee smuggled from Uganda in those days.

By the time Davies arrived in class (standard five I believe) he had already been expelled from dozens of other schools in the country. There is no way that one can remember everybody they went to primary school with, but Davies was the sort of character that you did not forget.

We were all fascinated by him and eager to get a glimpse at the sort of things he had done that had gotten him expelled from so many schools. We were disappointed, at least for the first week or so. He just sat there and didn't talk much. The only subject where he confidently answered questions and appeared to do well was in the English class. He even talked with an accent that reminded us of the Chuck Norris versus Bruce Lee movies that we were all so crazy about in those days. At break time he didn't play soccer with the rest of us. He just sat and watched, always with a generous supply of sweets from the school canteen that he didn't share with anybody.

Then once without any warning he dived to the ground and jerked up a girl's skirt to take a peek under it. We were shocked. Being young mischievous boys all of us, we marveled at his daring character and the whole originality of this mischief.

Davies got into a lot of trouble for this stunt but he remained at Lavington Primary for what we were told later was a record one term. He had never lasted that long in any another primary school. Inevitably he left. I'm still not sure whether he did so by his own violation or he was expelled once again.

The next time I met Davies, was many years later (roughly 27 tyears later) I was down and out in Nairobi going through a rather difficult time financially, he stopped his car, a Toyota Corolla to give me a lift for which I was very grateful for. The sun was very hot and I had been walking for quite sometime. There was a beautiful young lady seated next to him on the front whom he dropped off in a residence somewhere near Adams Arcade shopping centre. He then generously gave me a lift in the direction I was headed.

We talked about everything except our days in primary school (what was there to talk about that anyway?). Mostly we talked politics because we were in the run up to the historic 2002 general elections. We were many months away from Kibaki emerging as the main opposition candidate and we both agreed that it was rather sad that Ken Matiba's health did not allow him to run for president because he would have made the ideal candidate. There was nothing else we agreed on. I found his political views rather radical, even for a die-hard anti-Kanu opposition man like I was in those days.

We promised to stay in touch, but we never did and his mobile telephone number remained stored and unused in my phone for many years.

The next time I saw him, his cool collected face was staring at me from the front pages of the newspapers below screaming headlines about the largest ever drug haul in the history of East and Central Africa. I felt sadness deep in my heart and lingered over his photo for a long time. I thought to myself that this looked like the end of the road for Davies. A sad life, I thought to myself. I was wrong. This week the man with nine lives bounced back and was acquitted by a Nairobi court for lack of evidence. Co-accussed David Mugo wasn't so lucky and was found guilty, jailed for 30 years and fined 20 billion.

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