The death almost 11 years ago of the then Tourism and Wildlife Minister Karisa Maitha robbed the Coast and Kenya of a phenomenal politician.
Maitha, aged only 50, succumbed to a massive heart attack on August 27, 2004, while on an official visit to Germany.
As others before me have astutely noted, Maitha died on the job, marketing Kenya as a preferred tourist destination.
Tourism and Wildlife was his second docket, the first being Local Government, where he cut his ministerial teeth and stamped his authority as an abrasive, no-nonsense workaholic. There has never been a minister for Local Government like Maitha in Kenyan history.
Popularly known as “The Hurricane”, Maitha was a burly, gregarious and aggressive personality. Like his stormy nickname, he was a force of nature, a force to reckon with.
Humble beginnings, a vaulting vision
Many of those who came to know Maitha only when he joined the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) Cabinet of the first post-Kanu President, Mwai Kibaki, in 2003, had no idea that Maitha was born into very humble circumstances. He was born in Mwakirunge, to a Chonyi mother and a Giriama father.
He trained and qualified as a clinical officer based in the Kisauni area, where his politics, which would one day take the Cost by storm, begun.
In those days, government clinics actually worked. Maitha attended to many ordinary people and their families as a clinical officer and he made such a lasting impression among the majority of them, that they remembered him well when he finally made his move into elective politics.
In 1979, he entered politics as an elected councilor.
Nowadays it is common to hear our people talk of political setbacks and even sneer at what they call political deadwood. This is the language and attitude of the fainthearted and the defeatist. In his early days Maitha suffered his share of being dismissed by defeatists. But some of the most spectacular sagas of Kenya politics involve failing first and then rising later. Look at Uhuru Kenyatta, defeated in his own Dad’s constituency on his first outing in elective politics in the 1990s. Look at Mwai Kibaki, trying for President thrice and third time lucky.
When Maitha floundered early in his career, all the money and strategic support went to Said Hemed.
Maitha’s story is not unusual. Unlike Uhuru, Raila Amolo Odinga and Wycliffe Musalia Mudavadi – sons respectively of Kenya’s Founding President and Vice President and a Daniel Moi era Cabinet minister – all other leading Kenyan politicians grew up in poverty.
Despite never wanting for anything, President Kenyatta and former Prime Minister Raila have a seemingly inborn common touch that endears them to their political grassroots and are hugely popular in their ethnic bases and beyond.
Maitha rose in poverty and the populist touch appeared to be innate in him too.
It was my privilege to work with Maitha for over 10 years and I met very many of his supporters and came to know him very well.
There is one thing I will never forget about Maitha – he consistently demanded a place for the Coast at the national high table. While other leaders both at the Coast and elsewhere were very content to play a supporting role not a frontline role just because they were not from the Mountain or the Valley, playing Second Fiddle was an anathema to Maitha.
For instance, Maitha boasted openly and confidently about his epic face-off with Raila over a Kisauni by-election. As a Kibaki minister, he spoke his mind bluntly, particularly when he sensed that he was being frustrated by the Nairobi Agenda. At one point, Maitha declared that the Coast region had been so let-down and taken for granted that it would never again vote for a Central Kenyan Presidential candidate as the Mount Kenyans of the time clearly did not take the Coast Agenda at all seriously.
As minister first for Local Government and latterly for Tourism and Wildlife, Maitha helped a number of coastals, including me, to secure jobs in the parastatal sector and elsewhere in government. I became deputy Managing Director at the Kenya Airports Authority, understudying George Muhoho.
With Maitha’s passing an Open Season on coastals and others perceived to have been his supporters and the beneficiaries of his power and influence was quietly declared and we were picked off, one-by-one, as if by sharpshooters.
Defining the Coast Agenda
One measure of Maitha’s outstanding qualities as a regional leader operating at the national level long before Devolution (originally a Coast idea as Majimbo) was installed is the sad fact that a decade after his demise, the Coast has not produced anyone to step into his oversize shoes.
The Coast Agenda remains much as he left it – it still has to do with education, land and the regional economy. The next Karisa Maitha must address these issues and take them to the next level on the road to 2017.
No child of the Coast should be left behind. The same educational opportunities and quality-of-education dynamics enjoyed by the children of Central, Rift Valley, Western and Nyanza must come to be enjoyed by the young of the Coast within the life of the latest schooling generation.
The smallholder farmers of the Coast need the same extension and marketing services extended, as a matter of right, to the coffee farmers of the Mt Kenya region, the maize and tea farmers of the Rift Valley and the sugarcane farmers of Western.
If Maitha had lived another decade, I have little doubt that the state of abeyance, of suspended animation, that we have suffered at the Coast would not have happened.
But the greater point is that this state of affairs need not and must not enter a second decade.
The next Karisa Maitha must stand up in the course of 2015, a year whose first quarter has already passed, and the region must rise as one with him and make up for time and opportunities lost.
Summoning the next ‘Mugogo’
This Man of the People of the Coast must actually activate Maitha’s legacy. We demonstrated at the 2013 General Election that we can vote as a bloc. For 2017, we must vote as a bloc whose stake is not only acknowledged but also commensurately rewarded with jobs for the Coast’s political and corporate elites in the Cabinet, throughout the bureaucracy of the Civil Service, the State corporations sector and the Diplomatic Corps.
This was one of Maitha’s most vital visions – that the sons and daughters of the Coast be treated as frontline players when it came to the legitimate carving up of the national cake, not as substitutes or expendables and disposables. I bear firsthand eyewitness that in the short time he was in the Cabinet, Maitha had begun this process and was aiming at great things in the period 2004-2007 before he left us in 2004.
An immense responsibility and a vast reservoir of goodwill, great expectations and determination await the next Karisa Maitha, the next Mugogo of the Coast region.
Let that man stand up in the very near future and take the mantle of the Maitha legacy, going forward.
