Corruption kills a dream: a tribute to Joshua Orina

Throughout my life in the United States, news of the death of a family member or a friend back home has lost some of its power over me. In the last 13 years I have lost a father, two grandparents, an aunt, four uncles, and five cousins.

Then there are the countless friends I grew up with who are no longer alive. One committed suicide because an accident had left him blind, another killed himself because his parents would not approve of the girl he was courting, and the third one hanged himself for as yet undiscovered reasons.

A joyous return home in September was interrupted by an encounter with Joshua's mother, which brought back his memory. Photo/Dismas Nabiswa.

On two separate occasions, two friends were killed by speeding cars. A childhood buddy drank himself to death, while several others have fallen victim to that villain whose name my kinfolk are still too ashamed to utter, AIDS.

After the tragic loss of so many young lives, of people who as children had shown so much potential both for themselves and for their community, I became numb to the pain – so numb that I could no longer summon tears upon learning that a friend had died. But the news from home last week sent me bawling once again. In fact, as I write this I have a box of tissue next to me.

If there was one young man angels needed to protect from death, it should have been Joshua Orina, the Saboti Constituency Development Fund manager who was found brutally murdered and dumped in a sugarcane plantation in Bungoma. Joshua was seven years younger than me, but I called him Grandpa for he was my grandfather’s first cousin; this even though he was young enough to be his grandson.

The last time I saw Joshua was in 1994, shortly before I left Kenya. But I remember him vividly: a dark complexioned, slender 12-year-old boy, destined to be taller than everyone in his immediate family. He was humble and shy – more of a thinker than a speaker.

Joshua was the last born in his family. In the Gusii highlands where I come from, the lastborn get the unrestrained love and affection of their families. We used to joke that parents stopped having children after the lastborn because they had finally found a child they could love. Although all sons were entitled to equal shares of the land and wealth where available, parents often secretly stashed money away for the lastborn.

But Joshua’s parents had no money to spoil him with. His father, who was very old when the boy was born, could not do much to provide for the family, and had died before Joshua was 10. That left Joshua’s mother as the sole breadwinner of the family of six boys and one girl. The land they owned was too small to feed the children, let alone produce a surplus to cover their education. Even though I also grew up in the same poor village of Makairo, I used to wonder how the Orinas got by.

To feed and clothe her children, Joshua’s mother worked on people’s tea fields plucking leaves. Still that wasn’t enough, so she walked barefoot to marketplaces several kilometers away from Makairo to buy mangoes, omena fish and other petty products to sell for a tiny profit. I remember kids, myself included, making jokes about how her hands – scarred by hours of manual labor – were rougher than her feet.

Joshua’s older siblings did not go beyond high school, not because they were incapable, but because their mother had no money to send them to good schools. His mother’s plight is without a doubt what motivated Joshua to work so hard and graduate at the top of his primary school class to join Gekano High School – one of the best in Gusii.

I did not know how well Joshua had done in school until 2004, when I called my brother, a student at Moi University, Eldoret, to inform him that I was going to be two weeks late sending his tuition.

“That’s OK,” my brother said. “I can stay with Mura until then.”

Tears of joy trickled down my cheeks when I learned that Mura, as Joshua’s boyhood friends called him, had continued to excel at Gekano and had been accepted to Moi University to study Business. Finally, I thought, the decades of the hard work Joshua’s mother had endured were going to pay. Finally, there was a glimmer of hope that her lastborn would rescue her from the rusty tin shack she had lived in for so long.

Joshua graduated in 2005 and took a job at a small auditing firm in Nairobi. But Joshua’s dreams were mightier than what the small company could provide. So last year, he applied for a job to head one of the Constituency Development Funds (CDF). Whoever interviewed Joshua must have been so impressed to hire a 26-year-old for a job that was formerly the responsibility of a Member of Parliament. Joshua moved to Kitale in October to take his new job. He went to work immediately and discovered that millions of shillings allocated to programs in Saboti had been misused by corrupt officials. He wrote a report that sent the officials screaming for his blood.

As I do every time a relative dies, I keep waiting for someone to call and tell me that there had been a mistake, that Joshua is still alive – that his mother’s toil had not been in vain. Every day I see an e-mail or phone call from my brother, I wish he could say that the man they found dead in a sugarcane plantation had been misidentified as Joshua because they had beaten him beyond recognition before shooting him six times.

But instead my brother keeps feeding me with new information on how they killed Joshua. One of the corrupt CDF officials he had been investigating lured him into a double-cabin pick-up truck and began to drive away as Joshua sat in the backseat sandwiched by two men he had hired to abduct him.

Joshua began to fight for his life, but the two guys overpowered him. They tightened his necktie. As he gasped for air, they shoved something in his mouth to pacify him. They then tied his legs and hands before laying him across the vehicle’s floor.

I can only imagine what was going through Joshua’s mind as the corrupt official drove slowly, waiting for the cover of dark so they could kill him. He thought about his two young boys – aged five and 10 months old – whose future had seemed so bright just a few hours before. He thought about their young mother, his wife, who he had promised to join at the supermarket after running the short errand that was now likely to lead to his death. Would she end up struggling, just like his poor mother did, to raise the children?

Those thoughts must have made Joshua desperately want to do everything to go home alive that night. He must have offered his would-be killers everything he owned – all the KShs.75,000 he had stored in his ATM card.

They took his ATM card and verified the PIN by withdrawing KShs.20,000. They drove deep into the sugarcane plantation, and when the sun set, they killed a dream.

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Tags: Edwin Okong'o, Joshua Orina, Kenyan corruption, Saboti CDF manager