• Ahenda was known for not giving up and seeing what he was doing to its conclusion. He championed women's rights.
• He didn't mind rubbing people, even the Office of the President, the wrong way and he ruffled not a few feathers.
Image: PSCU
Paddy Ahenda declared in his maiden speech in Parliament that as the majority of people who elected him were women, he considered himself a woman.
That raised the roof.
He had just won a hotly contested by-election in Kasipul Kabondo constituency on March 1, 2006. He ran on an LDP ticket when MP Peter Owidi died.
He made his controversial maiden speech on March 26.
"....I want to thank the women of Kasipul Kabondo, who braved rains on election day. Because of the overwhelming turnout of the women of Kasipul Kabondo, I am here on that gender parity," he said.
He went on,"Not all those who wear trousers are men. Women too wear trousers. On the same note, not all those who wear skirts are women. In Scotland, men too wear skirts [kilts]."
Oyugi Magwanga would defeat him in the 2007 polls and he failed twice to recapture the seat.
In 2018, President Uhuru Kenyatta appointed him ambassador to Qatar, based in Doha.
He died on Monday in the Gulf country, succumbing to the complications of a heat stroke. He was 70.
His widow Millie Ahenda said the politician-turned ambassador had spent two weeks in the ICU as his health deteriorated.
The rest of his family lives in the United States.
But as he was making his debut in Parliament, MP Adelina Mwau objected.
She protested that Ahenda was not a woman and could not be allowed to speak on women's behalf.
"... I would like to.... inform the Honourable Member ...that the women of this country will no longer be used to elect men to speak for them. We want women to speak for themselves. Moreover, gender is not about men. It is about the equal opportunities that men and women should access," she said.
Among his peers and friends, Ahenda was known for not giving up and seeing what he was doing to its conclusion.
One day in October 2007, during the questions session in Parliament, Ahenda challenged Joseph Kahindi Kingi, then assistant minister in the Office of the President.
He asked why the state was in the habit of forming commissions of enquiry and then dumping the resulting reports without acting on them.
He complained the reports were just put on shelves and not made public.
Kingi was responding to a hot-potato issue raised by then Amagoro MP Sospeter Ojaamong concerning boundaries between ethnic groups in the county.
Kingi declared the government had formed the commission to investigate the matter [of ethnic boundaries] and it had delivered its report.
He said, however,"the government did not and has no intention of implementing the recommendations of the Mwangovya Commission.”
Ahenda shot to his feet, asking why a government would gobble up the taxpayers money on such an initiative but then turn against its own report, refusing to see the matter to conclusion.
“Mr Speaker, Sir, this government has got the tendency of setting up commissions after commissions using public funds,” he said.
“You heard the minister say that he has no intention to either make the report public or to implement it. What was the rationale of the government spending millions of shillings on this commission and then keeping the report in its drawers?”
After over a decade in the political cold, President Uhuru Kenyatta appointed Ahenda ambassador to the Gulf nation of Qatar in 2018.
And as a diplomat, it was Ahenda's dream to automate passport issuance in Doha for Kenyans living in Qatar.
In May 2019 as he took up the diplomatic role, he told a group of Kenyans in the country that they would get better consular services under his charge.
They would get passports and other documents they needed faster while in the country, not having to contact Nairobi.
He said the country had more than 30,000 Kenyans and all they had to do was to register with the embassy.
With death cutting short his tour of duty, it is not clear whether he saw this ambition to the very end and whether his successor, when he or she is named, will provide better services.
(Edited by V. Graham)