Wambui's Persona

The headline in today's issue of Nairobi Star, a newspaper whose motto is "Real Life Stories Every Day" is: "Wambui's Security Guards Removed." Yes, that same Mary Wambui who has on measured occasions been in our face since Mr. Mwai Kibaki became Kenya's third President (after Kenyatta and Moi) in 2003. That same Wambui who, as the story goes, makes Lucy Kibaki -- that's right, the President's one and only "dear wife", as the President himself, being in "a foul mood", felt compelled to remind Kenyans and all-and-sundry others on prime-time TV last Tuesday -- see really, really red when she, Wambui, puts on her activist act. It seems that she's been in Lucy's face, blatantly and through (in Lucy's mind) surrogates, so much more than she's been in ours. Yes, Ma'am, we have an idea who the surrogates are, and more's the pity.

Lucy shall have no peace, thusly; particularly when people like Paul Muite, she thinks, are having a laugh; and when loudmouths like Saitoti and Ongeri meddle in her own business when they visit Nyeri or Othaya, but will not mind their own (even when Kenyans mightily suffer); and when the local media, and foreign journalists, keep their ears cocked and their eyes and cameras wide-angled in order, seemingly, to savour and cheer all this nonesense about this "ka thing" that does not even exist!

So, Wambui has suffered a dip in her public persona, but will it last? Will she disappear into an oblivion to which Lucy, it seems, wants, with such loud body language, and against all odds, to consign her? Doesn't look likely, and Wambui, after a fashion, is letting us all know. "Hata siyo kuteleza!" she might add, in her familiar, and familial, NARC/PNU activist's tone, if anyone -- anyone, really -- wants to know. In which case one might counsel, "Wacha tuu, Mama!"

Now, Wambui's government-provided security guards from the dreaded GSU (General Service Unit), who have given her security cover befitting a First Lady since 2003, were withdrawn only last Wednesday -- the day after President Kibaki publicly denied having any other wife. He had issued a similar denial in 2005, which few Kenyans have had little reason to believe -- or take seriously. So you know what Kibaki and Lucy think that Kenyans are thinking now. It's like: "Kama huna, huna! Ukiwa nayo, usiseme huna -- usigutuke!" And that's at the heart of Lucy's obvious frustration.

Kibaki, the man, threatens to sue the likes of you know who -- for alluding to "the President and his wives" in their public utterances. He says on TV, "They will see me in court, or wherever they will see me." Lucy informs the media that she nearly visited KTN offices the other day (or night?) -- a sort of encore to her visit to Nation Group offices, in the middle of the night, a while back. And Muite, far from apologizing, writes (dares to write!) to His Excellency to say that he stands by the remarks to which His Excellency obviously takes great exception. Elsewhere, it is reported, he dares the President to sue him -- and of course nearly everyone thinks he's being a bit puerile because he knows that the Presidency is too lofty to allow M. Kibaki to sue him. But Lucy will, she says, if Kibaki won't. Yet why does Kibaki threaten to sue, if he knows (as he might) that he can't -- and not just for lofty reasons? That's the big question; but perhaps it will all drift away.

Only last night, however, Wambui (she of Kensington Holdings and the Artur saga) was at her needling self again, knowing what a thorn in the flesh she truly is. At a function in Kiambu (the heartland of the Kenyatta political machine), reported on KTN, she made a not-so-cryptic remark -- in the Presence of Mama Ngina, Kenya's first First Lady (Lucy is the second, though M. Kibaki is, as noted earlier, the third President), whose own son wanted to be the third President, but will now want to be the fourth, come 2012. She allowed as to how, now that her "husband will be retiring", there'll be need soon enough, as it were, to see what to do.

It was not just Uhuru she was talking about, if she is smart. You see, she could then go for the vacated Othaya seat herself -- if Saitoti splits it, as he's suggested he would, or not. Then she wouldn't have to go to Kiambu to talk about her now, at last, retired husband. Her presence alone in the august House would do it all for her, all the time. The Speaker wouldn't have to allow it, even. Talk about killing two, three, birds with one (soap?) stone! It is a true soap opera. As the Luo would tell it, with a wink (or tongue outside cheek), this is full-blast, all-too-familiar, nyiego. And Kenyans are loving it, as much as they love Lucy.

When Wambui talks of her husband, everybody understands that it is not her first husband she has in mind, but her daughter Winnie's father. And everyone believes they know who Winnie's father is -- and they say just look at the kind of nose she has, if you are in any doubt, and it's not a nose job but the kind of genes she has. And I think Winnie's father, who perhaps thinks that none of us suspects that he thinks that he's sufficiently under cover [though under cover of what, pray tell, for what, for/from whom, for how long?], sufficiently incognito, to ever be found by any of us and so told to his face "There you are!", loves Winnie dearly. And no one has ever disowned Winnie, is why I think so. No one period, not even during her engagement and aborted marriage (I don't think it happened in secret) to one of the Artur "Supermen". But you see, having a second wife is not un-African, but it is un-Catholic. It is what can banish you from holy communion and a Catholic burial (if the potentially complicated matter of disowning whoever is second is not concluded prior to the funeral), if the Pope and his bishops are strict enough.

And so, or be that as it may, Wambui has a hold on whoever her husband is that no one, not even Lucy, however riled -- and whom we love for shooting from the hip -- can shake. And this is why, I suspect, Muite (he of the toned down Rwandese looks) thinks he cannot lose a court case built on any and all of (all of) this. And this is why Lucy will not let this matter go, please.