Dr Alfred Mutua lost his scholarship when he left Yellowstone College - which was his first home when he landed in America - and moved to Wentworth University to study for a BA in Journalism.
And so in his pursuit to find an alternate scholarship, Mutua auditioned for and was enlisted as a participant in forensic speech contests, where he practised and participated in public speaking and debate.
Through forensics, Mutua earned a new $14,000 scholarship, which sustained him during his undergraduate studies.
But beyond just earning him the scholarship, Mutua credits forensics for paving the way for him to become Government Spokesman.
It was predestination, he believes.
‘‘My wife told me that now that you’re in government, you can do all those things you’ve always wanted to do,’’ Mutua says. I ask Mutua what those things are. ‘‘I always wondered why we were so poor, why our infrastructure was so bad, why we had water problems,’’ Mutua says.
‘‘I kept on asking, these ministers had always come to the US, why can’t they fix things and change Kenya? I had a burning desire to fix Kenya the way I had seen it done in the US, Australia and other countries I visited.’’
After being Government Spokesman for almost a decade, Mutua sought real power.
‘‘We were having a meeting in Mombasa to discuss the draft constitution in 2010, and to my right was National Security Intelligence Service (NSIS) Director-General Michael Gichangi, and to my left was Attorney General Amos Wako,’’ Mutua says.
‘‘When I read the section on devolution, I asked Gichangi, the governor is going to be the next most powerful person after the president, right? Gichangi said yes. I asked Wako the same question. Wako too said yes. It is in that sitting in Mombasa that I decided I was going to be the governor for Machakos so that I can have the power to do the things I had always wanted to do; bring water, build roads and stadia and bring Dubai to Machakos.’’
And so in September 2012, Mutua tendered his resignation. As a show of appreciation, President Mwai Kibaki asked Mutua to go and see him the following morning.
‘‘Kibaki gave me a briefcase and told me that that was his contribution and that of Lucy Kibaki,’’ Mutua says. Kibaki became Mutua’s first campaign donor. Mutua won’t say how much Kibaki gave him but says it was in the millions. Then as the campaigns drew to a close, Mutua says he called on yet another president, Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete, who also gave him a briefcase which Mutua says he used for the final push, like paying agents.
‘‘I had learnt how to run a political campaign during Kibaki’s reelection bid in 2007,’’ Mutua says when I ask him how he navigated the terrain of the electoral politics as a first-timer. ‘‘I got a call from Amb. Muthaura one Sunday morning, asked me to go to his office, where I found Raphael Tuju. It was in that meeting that the idea of a Party of National Unity was hatched by Tuju, and we then proceeded to send choppers to pick up party leaders who were out of town. By 4 pm, we had all assembled at the KICC where I wrote Kibaki’s speech, inserting ‘Kazi Iendelee’ after every paragraph. We didn’t have branding material in any other colour save for blue, and that became the party colour. We thereafter set up the secretariat, and that’s where I learnt the ropes.’’
Mutua was elected governor at 43.
‘‘I came in with a concept of building a new city,’’ Mutua says of his early day masterplan for Machakos.
‘‘I took it to President Uhuru Kenyatta, who really liked it. I then did an investment conference and got commitments of up to 2.1 trillion shillings, which was going to finance the project. Unfortunately, my political competitors feared that were the city to become a reality then I’d outshine them, and so they went to court and it took six years before the matter was thrown out. By this time investors had bolted. They are just starting to come back now, at the tail end of my term. Machakos missed out big time.’’
At the centre of that city was the Machakos White House, the county’s seat of power which Mutua says cost Sh300 million and took an average of six months to build.
Surrounded by huge tracts of land, the all-white office block is humongous, sitting on an acreage Mutua’s doesn’t recall off his head but one can visually estimate it to be about ten soccer fields if not more.
When my colleague goes all the way to the property’s entrance, the optics make him appear not as small as an ant but give you the effect that you could be looking at a human version of an ant - so tiny that you have a general idea that there’s a human there but you have nothing to work with in term of specifics.
Mutua occupies the entire building - it is the governor’s office, everyone else has their offices elsewhere, including his ministers - and takes the West Wing as the base of his personal operations.
Here, there’s his huge ensuite office, there’s the open-plan reception area, there’s an executive dining room, a kitchen,
Mutua’s chief of staff’s office, and at least three huge lounges and a second dining room for guests. Mutua’s media team also sits on this side of the building. The other half of the building seems unoccupied.
‘‘When I became governor I refused to take up the office of the former mayor because a governor is not an elevated mayor,’’ Mutua says. ‘‘If you go to America, this is how a governor’s office looks. In building this office, I am entrenching devolution in Machakos.’’
Mutua gives me a tour of the building, its eight executive toilets, its huge corridors, its executive boardrooms, and every time we meet a staffer they almost freeze as they give way.
The one thing that’s clear is that aside from all the reasons Mutua gives about the necessity of such a seat of power, it is also power play, a power arrangement so that when one walks in they instantly start seeing him in a different light. Big man’s big office.
But beyond just size, Mutua has fetishes.
‘‘I am very clear about what I want and what I don’t want. I don’t like something called mathogothanio. I like things done well,’’ Mutua says when I tell him I have a sense he’s the one who picked the building’s curtains, going by how specific he is about everything. ‘‘I don’t like hanging wires, because wires hanging is a sign of a third world mentality. I like clean toilets, flowing water because they bring efficiency. I learnt this from the Japanese. They recovered from being nuclear-bombed and became a world power by doing things properly, even if they are minimalists. I want good things for my people.’’
I notice something else. Mutua still keeps the staff he had as Government Spokesman.
‘‘I believe that you don’t leave your people behind,’’ Mutua says. ‘‘I believe that if you have trained your people you move up with them. My chief of staff, my drivers, my media liaison, my security detail and so on are the same ones I had as Government Spokesman. They understand my systems. I trust them. I know them. They are family.’’
When Mutua was growing up in Makina, Kibera, neighbours nicknamed him Jogoo for just how active he was.
And when his father took him to report to Dagoretti High School in 1984 aged 13, fellow students wondered why a child had been brought in their midst. Mutua was super tiny.
And yet when bullies attempted to make a go at him, Mutua exploded.
Then one day while in form five at Jamhuri High School in 1988, a sister to a childhood friend told Mutua, ‘‘Please take care of your friend in future.’’
Mutua was confused. The friend’s sister told him he’d go places in life and shouldn’t forget her brother.
And when Mutua was playing basketball at Yellowstone College in America, a teammate told Mutua he had a fire burning in his chest, and that Mutua needed to be careful where he channelled that fire lest he burnt himself. And on and on.
Mutua shares these anecdotes in saying it is all foreordained.
That this is how he will become president, because people have always seen it in him and told him as much, and when anyone has tried to overlook him for his size or such, he has always proved them wrong.
This, tied to his fast and glittering ideology - Dubai, done at super speed.
‘‘If we move at the speed of America or Singapore, we can never catch up with them because they are already way ahead of us,’’ Mutua says.
‘‘The problem is that as it is, we are not even moving at the speed at which these countries are moving. We are much slower. And so to catch up with them we need to move at double their speed so that if they take a day to process a passport, ours has to be done in six hours or less.’’
And how has he performed as a governor?
The achievements are too many to list off the cuff, but Mutua takes pride in how he’s improved infrastructure, how he’s rolled back the threat of hunger, and how he’s transformed the health sector.
‘‘Machakos is no longer a recipient of food aid,’’ Mutua says, ‘‘but when you look around everyone else is still on the relief food wagon.’’
The governor says he copy-pasted a Malawian model where farms get ploughed for free and farmers are given free planting seeds, this and the fact the county bought borehole drilling equipment and has dug dozens of boreholes across Machakos.
But the apple of Mutua’s eye is Machakos Level 5 Hospital, which he says is easily one of the cleanest if not the cleanest public health facility in the country. And now to bring these to Kenya.
‘‘I want to make it easy for people to exist in Kenya,’’ Mutua pitches. ‘‘I will remove all this bureaucracy and make it easy for people to do business. Today, there are 34 steps one has to undergo before a payment is made. All these steps breed corruption. I will remove these and other bureaucracies which are bribe collecting stations.’’
But why does Mutua think he’s the man for the job?
‘‘I went to see President Moi once and he told me why he chose Uhuru Kenyatta for a successor,’’ Mutua says.
‘‘Moi told me he chose Uhuru because of African anthropology and might have said very tribal things about what he thought of certain people and their inability to lead, but I listened to his reasoning. He told me his choice for a successor was Mwai Kibaki, but Kibaki refused to join KANU and that was the dealbreaker. Uhuru came in as Moi’s second choice, much as he too has it in him. One time I was watching Uhuru give a speech and Amb. Muthaura told me, ‘‘One day this guy will be president.’’
Mutua too believes he has the thing, that thing that makes people presidents.
