(Editors' note: This story was first published in August 2021)
Taxi overlord, Mike Sonko, who used the power and profits from his blinged-out transports to buy and batter his way to the governorship. His dramatic rise to power challenged the vested interests of the country’s ruling elite. So they fought back. And won.
In this series, we revisit his rise and fall.
Mike Sonko and Peter Kenneth both ran under the colours of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee Party, a product of a merger between Uhuru’s 2013 party and that of his deputy.
As their competition intensified, Sonko’s criminal past surfaced in the press. A disqualification looked likely. But then Sonko sought a late-night audience with Kenyatta. He reportedly broke down, asking Kenyatta why he was betraying him when Sonko had stood with the President during his trial at The Hague.
The police issued a Certificate of Good Conduct by 8am the next morning, and Sonko went ahead to win the party primaries. Kenneth cried foul. But the horse had bolted.
With the President’s actions showing that Sonko had his ear if not backing, the senior civil servants and their patrons had to back down, slightly. And so they inserted a condition: Sonko would have a running mate of their choice — governors and their deputies ran on a joint electoral ticket. This was meant to keep Sonko’s umatatu in check by pairing him with a sober mind, but more importantly, this was meant to secure certain commercial interests.
Politics mattered, but money mattered more.
Polycarp Igathe fit the bill, a loyal protégé who had cut his teeth in corporate Kenya.
The plan was simple. Sonko would win the votes. Igathe would govern, with the end goal being to push Sonko out of office and allow the chosen few men to run Nairobi, with Igathe as the potential governor (Igathe had a slip of the tongue and made this confession in public during the June 2021 funeral of Chris Kirubi, his benefactor, one of Kenya’s wealthiest businessmen and a Kenyatta insider).
Rather than fight right then, Sonko played realpolitik. He obliged to the demands of those arrayed against him, feigning a fragile bonhomie with Igathe throughout the campaign period. They would pull up for publicity photoshoots at Emmanuel Jambo’s artelier — Jambo is President Kenyatta’s official photographer — in an attempt to sell their newfound comradeship.
In their circus of campaign videos, Igathe was the tall caricature, Sonko the short one.
A video emerged of Igathe standing in a circle with a handful of middle-aged men.
With each of them wearing a matching Cheers Baba — a cynical alias given to sleeveless jackets worn by wannabes and midlife-crisis-approaching Nairobi males — an exuberant Igathe proposed a toast to his mates, most of whom were holding their black and yellow cans of Tusker, Kenya’s most popular beer. Igathe called it an Australian Toast, and it went something like this.
“Here is to you, here is to me; the best of friends, we will always be; and if by chance, we disagree; well, f**k you! Here's to you!”
FIRST VICTORY, THEN CONTROL
The unlikely combination worked. Mbuvi won with 871,974 votes — breaking his 2013 record for an individual politician not running for President. The bulk of those votes were from the Eastlands proletariat.
Igathe waltzed into City Hall, scolding workers when he encountered filth in the basement parking lot. City Hall’s Igathe-led corporate takeover was officially in high gear.
But Mbuvi was a step ahead.
He packed City Hall with loyal roughnecks from Eastlands. Most didn’t necessarily have job descriptions beyond being his eyes and ears. They meant that Mbuvi became omnipresent. No single piece of paper moved without his authorisation. He then surrounded himself with a barrage of bodyguards, PAs and hangers-on from his matatu kingpin days.
People started looking over their shoulders. Nairobi was now being governed by paranoia. To enhance the chaos, Sonko maintained a handful of mobile phones and only he knew which one was used for what purpose.
He chose when to be accessible and when to go missing.
Afraid that an administrative maelstrom was looming, Igathe frantically attempted to unclog the City Hall bureaucracy. It was too late. Six months later, the man meant to keep Sonko in check and then replace him tweeted his resignation.
ANOTHER CHALLENGER
Sonko ought to have appointed a deputy. He didn’t. When the pressure to do so ratcheted up, he’d forward wildcard candidates to the county assembly for approval. They were automatically rejected. But each step bought time.
He then ensured that every phone conversation was recorded; cruise missiles that he released online, depending on the amount of damage he wished to cause to who, where and when.
When Igathe resigned, Sonko leaked their conversations, painting Igathe in an unsavoury light. When he got into an altercation with the Nairobi Woman Representative Esther Passaris, Mbuvi leaked screenshots of Passaris asking him to finance her campaigns.
The same Machiavellianism was practised in Sonko’s management of Nairobi. His cabinet walked on eggshells because he shuffled its membership every other week. In the same spirit of keeping everyone at City Hall on toes, Sonko ensured the majority of senior officials served in an acting capacity so that their firing, transfers and demotions wouldn’t be complicated.
It was governance by fear and blackmail on one hand; chaos and confusion on the other.
Everything seemed to be going his way.
But the civil servants and businessmen had a new plan; a second apparatchik in Peter Kariuki, a lawyer and former civil society operative-turned-presidential adviser. After a five-year stint at the President’s office, Kariuki was considered both an asset and an arsenal in curtailing Sonko and was seconded to City Hall as county secretary, the equivalent of a company secretary. Knowing Kariuki and his masters were up to no good, Sonko resisted the appointment. When he was forced to give way, Mbuvi employed the same antics he had used against Igathe to frustrate Kariuki.
Knowing he was the last man standing in the fight to curtail Sonko, Kariuki brawled on until he couldn’t.
Sonko seemed to have won again.
With control seemingly total, Sonko and his umatatu did whatever they wanted.
On a Saturday morning in April 2018, they went too far.
A gang of heavily built enforcers stormed into Hotel Boulevard in downtown Nairobi and violently disrupted a presser being addressed by the demure Timothy Muriuki, a former boss of the Nairobi Central Business District Association. Considered an inconsequential Mbuvi critic who needed to be taught a lesson, the men roughed up Muriuki as journalists scampered.
Grabbing Muriuki by the waistline, one attacker in a grey hoodie attempted to throw the suited-up Muriuki into the hotel’s swimming pool. Desperately kicking and pushing, Muriuki eventually freed himself from the man’s grip as journalists begged the attackers to not drown him.
“Please read my statement,” Muriuki pleaded. “I wasn’t attacking the governor.”
Focused on the sole mission of gagging Muriuki and dispersing the press, the goons frogmarched Muriuki out of the compound. They shoved him into a puddle of mud where he fell. Muriuki managed to get back on his feet and attempt a sprint, only for the assaulters to snatch his blazer and resume their kicks and blows.
Muriuki escaped when the journalists convinced guards at a nearby building to grant him refuge.
The Boulevard episode was one of the most embarrassing forms of public humiliation Kenyans had ever witnessed. And it was done in Sonko’s name. One of the attackers had invoked his name. More were subsequently seen in Mbuvi’s entourage.
ESTABLISHMENT STRIKES BACK
In that moment of shame, anger and hopelessness as they watched Muriuki’s assault live-streamed on social media, many Nairobians would have agreed that electing Sonko with his umatatu was a blunder.
The civil servants and businessmen who had failed to dislodge him decided to try again.
Their next attempt used Mbuvi’s paranoia. Fearing that City Hall was bugged, Sonko oscillated the running of Nairobi’s affairs between a nondescript pied-à-terre in the city’s Upper Hill area — which he converted into a personal office — and his gigantic hilltop Mua Hills mansion filled with in-your-face gold furnishings, located in the outskirts of Nairobi.
Sonko summoned his cabinet for meetings in these private dwellings.
Using the press as pawns, Sonko’s detractors sponsored one unflattering headline after another, to a point where Mbuvi declared he was a target of Kenya’s deep state domiciled at the Office of the President, once again naming Permanent Secretary Karanja Kobicho as the puppet master.
Before the ink could dry on these damaging stories — that he drank at work, ran City Hall like a mafia boss, never listened to his cabinet, and was going broke — the country’s anti-corruption agency struck.
Various transactions in Sonko’s bank accounts were flagged as suspicious, more so in instances where Sonko had previously received payments from companies that later traded with City Hall. To curtail his operations, Sonko’s Upper Hill base was placed under investigation on account that it had been acquired irregularly.
Determined to fight back, in May 2019 a fired-up Sonko pulled up at a TV station carrying over 1,000 title deeds and 150 logbooks, intent on proving he was already a wealthy man before going into politics. A teary-eyed Mbuvi attributed his troubles to the Kenyan aristocracy, which he said was displeased that a poor man’s son had risen to become Nairobi governor and was willing to share his meagre earnings with the people of Eastlands.
That being said, Sonko made it crystal clear that much as he came from poverty, he was no pauper. He gloated: “If I liquidate my title deeds, I am worth more than Nairobi’s annual budget.”
Nairobi’s budget for the financial year 2019-20 was Sh3.2 billion.
THE ARREST
Playing to the gallery did little to divert the attention of the authorities. An arrest was planned at the end of 2019. Hearing that he would be facing charges ranging from money laundering to corruption, Sonko went on the run, intent on laying low at one of his coastal hideaways.
His convoy was intercepted at Voi, between Nairobi and Mombasa, and Sonko was bundled into a helicopter and flown back to the capital.
The show of power made it clear to everyone that the former matatu king was up against President Kenyatta himself.
That escalation might have had something to do with Mbuvi committing the cardinal sin of forging an alliance with Deputy President William Ruto, who had since fallen out with President Kenyatta. Like Sonko, Ruto fashioned himself like a Robin Hood of sorts, traversing the country dishing out millions of shillings as he preached the pro-poor gospel.
Calling himself a hustler, Ruto, who is campaigning to become President in 2022, peddled a catchy us-versus-them narrative, where he and others like Sonko presented themselves as case studies of the ashes-to-riches trajectory, while castigating President Kenyatta and his allies for being offsprings and beneficiaries of dynasties.
By becoming Ruto’s ally, Mbuvi chose to become Kenyatta’s foe.
On being arraigned in court following his Voi arrest, Mbuvi was slapped with a staggering Sh15 million bail, getting barred by the court from accessing City Hall until the matter ran its course. In that moment of Sonko’s weakness, President Kenyatta decided to go for the jugular.
On the night of February 24, 2020, Sonko received communication summoning him to State House, the President’s official residence. He arrived two hours late for their 6am meeting. Kenyatta had left.
When Kenyatta returned that afternoon, the President instructed Sonko to surrender a number of Nairobi county functions to the national government, including but not limited to planning, health, transport, public works, ancillary services and revenue collection.
As a consolation, Sonko would remain the governor, albeit a lame-duck one.
At 4pm, a visibly subdued Sonko appeared at a press conference with the President, eating humble pie as he sheepishly signed away his electoral mandate. The aspirant had been put in his place by people used to wielding power on a national scale.
In under a month, Kenyatta created the opaque Nairobi Metropolitan Services, declared an extra-constitutional entity by the courts, which now effectively runs Nairobi. Sending a signal that he meant business, Kenyatta appointed Major General Mohammed Badi to lead the new entity. Tellingly, Peter Kariuki, the man who had been previously appointed to City Hall to rein in Mbuvi, was seconded to the entity.
And just like that, Kenya’s largest city and capital had lost its elected governor and was now being run by a tough-talking military general.
Despite his earlier acquiescence, Sonko rebelled. As governor, Mbuvi was the official signatory for the Nairobi county bank accounts, so he refused to sign funds to the Nairobi Metropolitan Services.
Kenyatta struck back, engineering Sonko’s impeachment by the Nairobi county assembly. Resorting to umatatu, Sonko airlifted a sizable group of Members of the County Assembly to the Coast to make it impossible for the city’s legislature to get the requisite votes to impeach him. Videos surfaced of tens of assembly men and women showing off bundles of dollar currency notes as they frolicked with Sonko on one of his many beachfront properties.
The county assembly, though, decided that due to Covid-19 protocols, not all the assembly women and men could vote physically. So those at the Coast could vote electronically.
Sonko was impeached just before Christmas last year.
Out of work and disgraced, a bitter and disbelieving Sonko went on the offensive. He leaked a phone recording where the President’s younger sister, Christina Pratt, is alleged to be lobbying Mbuvi to appoint her friend as deputy governor. Mbuvi then joined Deputy President William Ruto on his rallies across the country, standing on podiums and attributing major corruption scandals to the President’s family.
The attack pushed Kenyatta and his mask slipped.
At a meeting with leaders near Mount Kenya, he owned up to having orchestrated Sonko’s ouster. “I tried to help my friend the other day… he eventually declined my offer for assistance because he wanted to keep wearing goggles and boasting, and keep stealing… So I told him if that’s the case, then goodbye. Nowadays he is busy insulting me. I have no problem with him but I know Nairobi is in better hands.”
Agitated, Sonko countered the President’s remarks within an hour, disregarding the Kiswahili idiom usishindane na ndovu kunya, utapasuka msamba — a warning that you shouldn’t get into a shitting contest with an elephant because you’ll split your bowels.
Sonko mistook Kenyatta for an equal.
Speaking at a roadside rally in Machakos in February, he played Kenyatta’s speech on loudspeaker, before calling the President a drunkard with whom he used to smoke marijauna.
“I won’t mention his name because if I do he will either get me arrested or killed, that is his problem,” Mbuvi said, “but what my friend is not saying is that he is the one who introduced me to goggles back when we used to smoke marijuana together. He taught me to put on goggles to hide my bloodshot eyes after smoking… He taught me about goggles, drinking and marijuana.”
Sonko’s umatatu had finally crossed the President’s red line.
He was arrested 48 hours later and put in custody for over a month, charged with terrorism. The state alleges that Sonko runs a private militia, which poses a threat to national security.
Umatatu had worked for Mbuvi until it didn’t. And those that he sought to defeat — the businessmen and hereditary politicians — had outmanoeuvred him.
The matatu king has fallen.
This story was first published in The Continent, the award-winning pan-African newspaper designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Message +27 738056068
Edited by T Jalio