Former Butere MP Martin Shikuku while undergoing treatment in a Nairobi hospital in 2012 ( Photo Courtesy)
Luhyz elders were left scared when one of their most famous sons, Martin Shikuku decided to prepare his own grave and buy his own coffin while still alive.
This is considered a taboo in the community. According to them, doing that is tantamount to daring death. It took eight years before Shikuku died in 2012.
Having played a leading role in almost every chapter of Kenya’s politics, Shikuku who went by the moniker of the “People’s Watchman” rested peacefully on August 22, 2012. He had been in the game for over half a century.
In 1963, he was elected as Butere MP on a KADU party ticket. But before that, he was part of the Kenyan delegation to Lancaster House where the country’s constitution was written.
In 1969, he was appointed as assistant minister of home affairs by the then President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. But he would be fired from cabinet soon afterward after claiming that KANU, the ruling party, was dead.
It was until 1979 that he bounced back from jail to recapture his Butere MP seat. The new President Daniel Arap Moi appointed him as assistant minister of livestock development.
The son of Oyondi, the firebrand legislator, was at the forefront of the second liberation as political heavyweights put Moi on his toes to re-introduce multiparty democracy.
In 1992, after the split of Ford into Ford Kenya and Ford Asili, he sided with Kenneth Matibz who was leading the Ford Asili faction. He was re-elected for another term as Butere MP.
But in 1997, the aging and increasingly frail Shikuku was ousted as MP by Prof. Amukowa Anangwe. He would never recover until his death 15 years later.
For the man who had dedicated much of his life to the betterment of the country, in some sense, he died poor. But the decision to prepare his own grave shocked many.