Why was Mboya’s assassination so significant? Simply because the two bullets that were fired that Saturday lunch time July 5th 1969 changed the course of Kenya forever. Today we are suffering the consequences of that new course that was clearly charted out that day. Impunity won that day. Years later the rhetorical questions were to be asked over and over again by those who own Kenya; Mboya was killed and nothing happened, who is so and so? We survived the Mboya assassination what crisis can we not survive?
Tribal politics won that day. In killing Mboya the assassins killed nationalism. To date we are yet to see another Kenyan attracting national popularity in their own right enough to win a presidential poll with votes from every corner of the republic. Every single prominent politician now has their political base in their ancestral village and those who don’t have imported their fellow tribesmates in large numbers into the constituency they represent away from their village. Mboya's political base was Eastlands Nairobi and the non-tribal culture that rules the place today owes much of it's foundation to TJ, as his friends called him. Tom Mboya was a Luo (Suba) who was time and again voted in by mostly Kikuyus even when other prominent Kikuyus from very prominent families stood against him. To a young Kenyan who understands Kenyan politics today, this statement may sound like pure fiction.
Again Ben Gethi was deeply involved in that assassination that shook the world.
http://kumekucha.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-was-mboyas-assassination-so.html?m=0
