Mwai wa WAMBUI: Why Deny Mke na Binti?

Shame on You President Kibaki for Denying Your Wife Wambui and Your Daughter Wangui!

president@statehousekenya.go.ke


President Mwai Kibaki wa Wambui, Babake Wangui:

My name is Onyango Oloo and I am writing from Montreal to DENOUNCE you for once again denying that a woman who has been part of your life since 1972,

Wi Mwega Wambui wa Mwai, Nyina wa Winnie!!

a woman who has given birth to a daughter she conceived with you is not your wife.

At a time when many Kenyan men are evading their parental responsibilities by simply denying that their spouses and their children exist, one would have expected a prominent father and husband such as yourself to show a better example.

How do you think your daughter,

Winnie Wangui Mwai is feeling right now after seeing front page headlines where her own biological father is brazenly denying her very existence?

President Mwai Kibaki wa Wambui:

Do you remember this story that was carried in the Sunday Standard of December 14, 2003:

She may not sit next to the President at public functions, and is not in the limelight much but within the Kibaki family and among friends and relations, Mary Wambui is no secret.

She is highly regarded as the President’s second wife, and is accorded all the privileges due to a presidential spouse. She has been photographed with First Lady Lucy Kibaki and daughter Judy in London, and with Kibaki’s sons Jimmy and David, as well as with the President’s father, Kibaki Githinji who died in 1983.

On every national holiday, the President’s second wife who prefers to be called Mrs Wambui Kibaki arrives dutifully on time in the company of her bodyguards and quietly takes her seat on the dais, a few rows behind the President and First Lady. She is well known to the Presidential security and State House protocol staff.

On Friday, during the 40th anniversary independence celebrations, it was no different. She arrived without pomp or ceremony, in the company of her three bodyguards, and went straight to her unmarked seat on the dais.

Ever since President Kibaki won last year’s election, Wambui’s Nyeri house on Ring Road, near Green Hills Hotel, has been guarded by administration police officers. She also has been assigned two bodyguards to escort her wherever she goes in her Peugeot 504 car.

The Sunday Standard has been compiling a profile of the President’s retiring and publicity-shy second wife, and can now reveal that in Nyeri and Othaya towns, she is a well known and respected figure. Nobody there holds it as a secret that she is the president’s second wife.

In constructing her profile, the Sunday Standard interviewed her, together with members of the President's family several months back.

Wambui took charge of Kibaki's election campaign in Othaya Constituency, and Nyeri District, last year as he campaigned for the presidency countrywide.

Not that President Kibaki needed to campaign in Othaya but she handled all official elections business as his chief campaign agent, she revealed in an exclusive interview.

On the day Candidate Kibaki cast his vote in Othaya, Wambui was by his side, assisting him to vote.

At one time during the campaigns, she escaped unhurt when the aircraft she was traveling in crash-landed at Nyaribu airstrip near Nanyuki town.

Although Wambui was not with Candidate Kibaki when his car crashed into a ditch while returning from a rally in Machakos last year, she drove straight to the hospital when she heard news of the crash, and was among the first family members to arrive.

Wambui granted the Sunday Standard the first interview at her house, a palatial maisonette which she said had been bought by her husband.

She lives in the house with her daughter, Winnie Wangui Mwai, a Masters degree student and the only child she has with the President.

Leafing through the family album, she regaled our writers with memories attached to the numerous pictures she had taken with the President’s family.
Why is so little known about her outside Nyeri?

Before Kibaki became President, says Wambui, even First Lady Lucy was not well known to Kenyans, as the President has never been one to involve his family in his political life.

She had assumed that on becoming President, she too, like Lucy, would be introduced openly, but it is an eventuality she is still waiting for. She thinks it might be that something to do with State protocol necessitated that there be seen to be only one First Lady.

Wambui says that at one time during the campaigns, before Kibaki’s accident, she asked him whether she should go public as his wife. The President, she claims, told her that she was not a secret, which she understood to mean that she would become part of his public life if he won the elections.

However, she says she is not bitter at not being introduced, and understands that maybe she should remain in the family and among Kibaki’s friends where she is known but not try to become part of his national image.

Wambui adds that she is consoled by the fact that even for President Jomo Kenyatta, Mama Ngina was the only First Lady even though his other two wives, Wahu and the late Edna, were officially recognised.

For a second interview we found her at Kibaki's expansive Naromoru ranch, which she manages on behalf of the family.

Despite her not being well known in public, she is part and parcel of the Kibaki family.

"I do not feel restricted, I have my time with him just as before he became President. I go to State House when I want and I can't complain. I am his wife and not being made public does not bother me," Wambui said in one of the interviews.

On the day President Kibaki officially opened the Ninth Parliament, Wambui was there but was kept company by the wife of State House Comptroller Matere Keriri, who is her long-time friend.

We had a short interview with her as we returned the pictures we had borrowed from her family album. She looked at ease as she mingled with dignitaries, several Cabinet ministers stopping to shake her hand as she joined the garden party at Parliament Buildings. But she did not go to sit under the official tent where the President sat with the First Lady to receive guests.

In the earlier interviews, Wambui said she had no problem at all with the First Lady. She has been increasingly operating from her Nyeri home while Lucy remains at the Muthaiga home.

Sources now indicate that Wambui has recently acquired a Nairobi home as she is in capital most of the time.

She said that in the earlier days, in the 1970s, she and Lucy often travelled together, even abroad, for shopping and other functions.

She says she is close to all the President's children, and makes it clear that she would not like to cause tension in the family or embarrass the President.

President Mwai Kibaki met Wambui in 1972 when she was a primary school teacher. Kibaki was at the time a Minister in the Kenyatta government. He was already married to Lucy, who had also been a primary school teacher in the early 1960s.

Wambui, who comes from Mahiga in President Kibaki's Othaya Constituency, says that she was introduced to her father-in-law, Githinji Kibaki, and to her brothers-in-law.
Some of Kibaki’s relatives have corroborated Wambui’s statements from the interviews, such as the fact that she came into Kibaki’s life in the early 1970s.
Early in the 1980s, Kibaki formalised the marriage in a customary arrangement by visiting her parents at Mahiga and paying dowry.

One of Kibaki’s first cousins, Michael Kibaki, who grew up with the President, remembers the occasion when Kibaki met the customary requirement to marry Wambui.
"She is officially his wife and the family knows that," said the President’s cousin.
In Othaya town, nearly everyone you would ask knows Wambui wa Kibaki as she is known in the President's village.

Soon after the General Election, she hosted a big party for all the Kibaki election agents while the President was still recuperating at State House.

Curiously, there are several media articles about her official functions in Nyeri, especially during the campaigns, but she is always only referred to by her maiden name, Mary Wambui.

She says that perhaps the media chose not to refer to her as Kibaki’s wife because it has never been stated officially.

"But take it from me, I am officially married to President Mwai Kibaki," said Wambui in another interview at Naromoru River Lodge.

Smart, tall, and articulate in English and Kiswahili, Wambui is of jovial mien even as she speaks of her life away from the limelight.

She talks extensively about Kibaki's private life and politics.

"I have known him for long, she says. Personally, he is a very humble man. The gentle manner you see him adopt while in public is the same manner he displays at home," she adds.

"He is a good husband and a good father to my daughter Winnie. He never quarrels even if you push him with words."

She says that when Kibaki left his former Bahati (now Makadara) constituency to vie in Othaya, she and Lucy worked with him in his first campaign there.

She says that she and Lucy took part in building Kibaki’s Othaya house in 1974 so that he could have a political base at home.

Later in the 1980s, Wambui became a Kanu official in Nyeri. She was often quoted in the media as a powerful Kanu official in the Nyeri office during the days when Kibaki was branch chairman.

She is a board member of several schools in Othaya and heads several women’s organisations there.

Wambui could not divulge details about how she meets with the President because of state security concerns.

Apart from the Naromoru ranch, she is the manager of several other farming enterprises owned by the Kibaki family.

Can you comment on the accuracy of the above account Mr. President?

Is it true that Mary Wambui has been your spouse since 1972?

Do you deny that Winnie Wangui Mwai is your biological daughter? If that is indeed the case are you prepared, Mr. President to submit to a DNA paternity test?

Why, Mr. President Babake Wangui, are you humiliating one of your wives so publicly yet she is the one who was your chief campaigner in Othaya in the last election?

As you know, she almost lost her life in a plane crash while working very hard to ensure that you got elected MP for Othaya and President of Kenya.

Is this how are you repaying her?

What made you do this Mr Presdent, husband of Lucy and Wambui?

People say that your first wife, First Lady Lucy, occasionally beats you up.

Did she slap you around before ordering you to go public denying your relationship with Wambui or did you do this entirely on your own sexist and misogynist self?

If, Mr President wa Wambui na Lucy, you have no ties to "that woman, Mary Wambui" how come she enjoys so much

state security and financial support?


Why does the GSU guard her residence in Lavington?

Why does she have all those official Kenya government body guards when she goes shopping at the Sarit Centre?

Why was she driven to the recent burial ceremony in a vehicle manned by 4 police officers?

Surely, Mr President, the spouse of Mary Wambui, you cannot imagine that Kenyans are so stupid as to believe your bare faced lies denying your relationship with Mary Wambui.

This is more than embarrassing Mr. President.

You are setting a very bad example to millions of Kenyan men like yourself who maintain MULTIPLE relationships with several women on their own terms.

President Kibaki wa Wambui you are aware that in Kenya both customary African laws and Islamic Sharia sanction polygamy all across the country. Many of the men in your government have more than two wives. And we are not counting the several nyumba ndogos(mistresses and concubines) and ndogo ndogos(teenagers and twentysomething young women that they keep for their sexual pleasure). Nor are we factoring in ex-wives and former girlfriends who have their children.

Your message to these Kenyan polygamists, serial monogamists, lechers and johns is that it is OK to play around with the lives of Kenyan women because after all, when push comes to shove, a man can simply deny that they have anything to do with said woman in question by simply producing the current “official” wife and that will be the end of the story.

This is simply despicable and unacceptable Mr. President Mwai wa Wambui.

President Mwai wa Wambui na Lucy:

Let me tell you a story that was first narrated to me by a certain Kenyan woman called Beatrice Lillian Ombiro. Beatrice is no longer alive. She died on October 1, 1999 in Kisumu from a series of brutal beatings dished out by her husband. Beatrice also just happens to be one of my sisters. About twenty years ago, when she and the rest of my family were still living in Mombasa, she heard a tale that chilled her to the bone. Mr. President you are very familiar with this coastal city- so you must know the tall building just in front of the General Post Office. Somewhere, on one of the higher floors of that building worked a certain thirty something Kenyan man-I believe from the Luo community. Well, one morning, so Beatrice was telling me, a young woman walked into this man's office carrying a brand new infant. She obviously surprised the man with her sudden entrance. Briefly she told the man that she had come to his office to show him their baby-the one they had conceived together, nine months previously. The man, impatient, irritated and angry, ordered her out, telling his colleagues that he did "not know this strange woman" and that the guards should throw her out. The woman was having none of that. From what Beatrice told me, she went to the window, threw her baby out and jumped out after the brand new infant. Their bloody, splattered lifeless human remains hit the ground below transfixing shocked onlookers. She had, in a very dramatic moment "solved" the man's problem rather PERMANENTLY, ama?

Now Mr President, I cannot exactly vouch for the veracity of this story and my late sister Beatrice Ombiro Oloo is not around anymore to verify my recollection.

But I am pretty sure that this is NOT the only instance where a Kenyan woman has been forced to take her life in the face of the humiliating denials and rejections of men who have sired their own children.

Is this what you want your WIFE Wambui wa Mwai and your DAUGHTER Wangui Mwai to do?

Would you and your“immediate family”consisting allegedly only of yourself, the First Lady, Ms Judy Wanjiku Kibaki, Mr Jimmy Kibaki, Mr David Kagai Kibaki and Mr Tony Githinji Kibaki be HAPPIER if Wambui wa Mwai and Wangui Mwai jumped to their deaths off the top of the Kenyatta International Conference Centre?

Would that erase the TRUTH that she has been your well known spouse for the last THIRTY THREE years?

Would that erase the fact that she carried your daughter Winnie in her womb for nine months?

President Mwai wa Wambui na Lucy:

I call upon you to act as a gentleman, go on national television and offer a PUBLIC APOLOGY to Mary Wambui and your daughter, Winnie Wangui Mwai. I further call upon you to PUBLICLY ACKNOWLEDGE your MARITAL relationship to Wambui wa Mwai and your PARENTAL relationship to Wangui Mwai. I know of Wambui’s home in Nyeri- you have a home very nearby, ama you think we do not know these things Mr President?

President Mwai wa Wambui:

Are you familiar with the concept of mwanaharamu?

We all know it is the Kiswahili word for "bastard".

If Wangui is not your daughter, is she therefore a mwanaharamu?

Let us take a closer look at this term, "mwanaharamu aka bastard".

What does it mean to be a "bastard"?

An online dictionary gives up the following meaning for "bastard":

A child born out of wedlock.
Something that is of irregular, inferior, or dubious origin.
Slang. A person, especially one who is held to be mean or disagreeable.

adj.
Born of unwed parents; illegitimate.
Not genuine; spurious: a bastard style of architecture.
Resembling a known kind or species but not truly such.

The Columbia Electronic Encylopedia further elaborates:

Bastard: person born out of wedlock whose legal status is illegitimacy. In civil law countries and in about half the states of the United States, the union of the parents in marriage after birth makes the child legitimate. It is presumed that any child born to a married woman, or within competent time after termination of the marriage, is the child of her husband. If, however, it can be proved that it was physically impossible for the husband to have been the father (e.g., because of nonaccess to the wife), he may bring action to establish the illegitimacy of the child. Unlike civil law, which granted bastards certain rights, English common law treated them almost as persons outside the law and left their care to poorhouses. At common law bastards have no right to inherit property from their mother or father except by specific designation (e.g., in a will). In the mid-20th cent. their condition has been much improved by statute. Discrimination against children born out of wedlock is now subject to constitutional limitation under the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. For the status of children born to annulled marriages, see nullity of marriage; husband and wife. See also legitimation.

Since you are a DEVOUT Christian Mr President, let me remind you of what the Bible says about “bastards”:

A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD, Deuteronomy 23:2

And here is an interesting poem on bastard children Mr President:

BASTARD CHILD
Well, here I am, your biggest fear . . .
The bastard child of yesteryear.
Once set aside like olden news,
I'm back again and you must choose
To face the past or turn away
But either way-I'm here to stay.
I will not run as you once did,
You hung your head, your face you hid.
And acting like I was your shame
You gave them leave to change my name.
But change my heart you can not do,
Erase the past and start anew.
For here I am . . . your biggest fear.
The bastard child of yesteryear.
By Angel Ann Reid

And by the way, Mr President I found out that among the gallery of famous bastards you find names like

Moses,

Superman,

Tarzan,

Luke Skywalker,

Worf from Star Trek,

Mowgli,

William the Conquerer,

Richard the Lionhearted

Oedipus,

King Arthur, and the two legendary founders of Rome,

the twins Romulus and Remus...

More seriously, what are the class underpinnings of this insulting, derogatory category called "mwanaharamu"?

It is DIRECTLY linked to inheritance of property. In other words, who will legally carry the family name is tied in with who will inherit the property. For instance, if you were to die this year for instance, as I predicted two years ago, according to your statement today only the First Lady, Ms Judy Wanjiku Kibaki, Mr Jimmy Kibaki, Mr David Kagai Kibaki and Mr Tony Githinji Kibaki would be in line to be considered when your estate was being divvied up among your heirs and inheritors. Wangui, according to your statement would be fukuzwad mbio mbio because, Mr President, your other daughter Winnie Wangui Mwai is a BASTARD in your eyes. I mean you stated this publicly Mr President.

I have not spoken to Wambui wa Mwai or Wangui Mwai, Dear Mr President Mwai wa Wambui, Babake Wangui. But I doubt very much, if they lust after your wealth.
I cannot speak for them, but I would imagine, that what would be more important for them is to be acknowledged as part of YOUR LEGITIMATE FAMILY. After all, Mr President, everyone KNOWS that you have been having REGULAR CONJUGAL RELATIONS with Mary Wambui because she is well known as YOUR WIFE Mr. President. Every Kenyan knows that Winnie Wangui Mwai is YOUR DAUGHTER.

Why deny these two Kenyan women their rightful role in YOUR life?

Let me share with you an anecdote one of my very close friends shared with me about fifteen years ago. My friend told me that her father, a very well known Kenyan businessman abandoned her mother even before she was born. When my friend was a boarder at a certain famous girl’s secondary school, she used to be so embarrassed that she was the only student in her class who did not have a father who visited her. So what did she do? She used to write letters to herself pretending that these were from her father and she made up many false stories of the fun she had whenever she was with her father.

I do not know why I am telling you all this.

In any case Mr President this is what I think:

Your government should and must enact legislation in a quick and expeditious manner outlawing this barbaric, outmoded concept of “mwanaharamu".

There is no child anywhere in the world, and especially in Kenya who should have to go through life with that awful label of uanaharamu. What do you think of this suggestion Mr President?

Maybe if this was done, Mr President, Winnie Wangui Mwai will not have to hide from her friends and colleagues in shame because her own father, who happens to be the President of Kenya has just publicly called her a bastard.

Onyango Oloo
Montreal