The retired major general, at 67, was in his prime as a leader among his home ethnic Maasai people, and it is widely acknowledged it will be hard to fill the gap of his sudden departure, especially after precipitated deaths of other political elders of that community. What sort of political gap will be felt in his sudden absence?
Plenty of suspicions have surrounded the death of ole Nkaissery as he was a very fit 67 year old major general when he simply collapsed with a heart attack, without any take of illness behind him.
Few chroniclers have raised fears of wrongdoing on anyone’s part, an aspect of things that the Kenyan media scrupulously wishes to avoid, giving the details and letting readers make their own conclusions, or perceptions. Ole Nkaissery was a person who had enemies and not the least of them, especially as he counted at all the fronts when it comes to security, including the polls.
One area where there will be no mourners for the late Cabinet Secretary is in the ranks of allies of the Somali guerrilla movement that has hit Kenya repeatedly, lately beheading nine people at Lamu.
Kenya has been a pillar of taking the fight to Al Shabaab in the interior of Somalia, after they spread their wings and kidnapped an elderly and disabled French tourist lady and killed her, to the perceptible ire of most of the world.
Extremists the world over detest tourism foremost, and this has been one of the areas they privilege most when sabotaging a country, as in Egypt.
Criticism had been raised in past months or close to one year concerning extrajudicial killings on the coast, where apparently undercover security officials set out to eliminate the support network for Al Shabaab.
A motorcycle drives up and the passenger draws out a gun and fatally shoots a person, and there are few investigations conducted on the death, with fingers predictably pointed at security forces, but made no headway. This way much of the political steam that was being drawn in aid of extremism and implicitly Al Shabaab was eliminated; extremism was silenced.
The government explained those deaths from internal feuds among militants and extremists, and to be sure they don’t lack their own divisions and bloody settling of scores.
Any reading of how articulate British terrorist, commonly known as the White Widow - Samantha Lewthwaite was changing husbands in the ranks of Al-Shabaab would grasp this line of explanation on the part of the part of authorities in Nairobi. Still the link with Ole Nkaisseery was plausible, if one takes from just one eulogy, that ‘the general comes from long line of strongmen’ at Interior Ministry.
Getting to the bottom of the death of Ole Nkaissery becomes a bit problematic when one starts looking at his political profile on the basis of what eulogies have been saying.
One for instance says that he was a stickler for rules, a man that was feared in many quarters, and the third holder of that post since Kenya’s independence in 1963 to die in office.
The last one was ex-Vice President George Saitoti, widely believed to be the likely choice of the ruling party to succeed Mwai Kibaki, and he died in a plane crash. Ole Nkaissery on the contrary had a bad political star.
Two chroniclers on the flagship Sunday Nation jotted the thinking, elicited from Prof. Sironka ole Masharen, an insider of Maasai politics who has written what the two journalists say is a seminal book, having an intense impact on understanding that field of Kenyan politics, that his thorough, ruthless and incorruptible manner alienated many.
“Nkaissery was doing his job as he knew it, but his abrasive character might have antagonized many. He is one of the factors which make the Maasai to hate the government,” the don wrote in that study, while the Interior minister (cabinet secretary) was at the helm of things. If this lacuna was being felt now, there is a worry that he would need to be replaced so that the chances for the Jubilee group are improved in polls.
.jpeg?itok=vCj6bCRe)
