Tribute
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Mbai: The tragic loss of an academic luminary, researcher, teacher and rights crusader
By DENNIS ONYANGO Click on image for full story
Dr Mbai: A great scholar
A faded circular signed by Dr Crispin Odhiambo Mbai, wishing political science students well, remains on the noticeboard at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the University of Nairobi.
The circular also tells the students which lecturers to see for registration in the various courses.
But the stark reality now is that Dr Odhiambo Mbai is no longer the head of the department, having been shot dead by gunmen at his Adams Arcade home, Nairobi, last Sunday.
The door to his Gandhi Wing 403-H office on the Main Campus remains shut. His pigeon hole at the department is empty. But the noticeboards remain littered with his name marked against courses he taught last semester, and those he was to teach this semester.
The May-August lecture schedule indicates that he teaches Monitoring and Evaluation of Development Programmes. Another schedule for the 2002/2003 Academic Year has his name against three courses: Introduction to Political Science, Administrative Theory and Public Policy Analysis.
Last Sunday, three men burst into his house and shot him dead as he read a newspaper. A neighbour, Kamukunji MP Norman Nyagah, took him to hospital. The verdict came soon. He was dead.
So began the agony of fellow lecturers and friends of Dr Mbai. And so ended an academic career.
He left unmarked term papers, seminar and research papers yet to be presented, a book yet to roll out of the press, an empty desk, colleagues who struggle to remember his last words and others, including students, fellow constitutional review delegates and government officials who wish they had known him better.
Above all else Dr Mbai left an impressive CV.
Born on October 25, 1954, he attended Ligisa Primary School in Rangwe, Homa Bay District, moved to Mirogi and Londiani secondary schools between 1970 and 1973, and Cardinal Otunga High School in Kisii District, between 1974 and 1975.
In July, 1976, he arrived at the University of Nairobi and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Government and Sociology. On graduation in 1979, he enrolled in the same university for an MA in political science, which he obtained in 1981.
His MA thesis was on the agro-business in the sugar industry in Kenya. He looked at the socio-economic and political outcome of an agro-business arrangement between small-scale cane growers and sugar millers in the Muhoroni Settlement Scheme, Nyanza. He then joined the Civil Service as a personnel officer at the the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri), where he rose to Principal Administrative Officer.
Projects management
It was while at Kemri that he won the Joint Japan World Bank Scholarship and a University of Toronto Open Fellowship for a PhD at the University of Toronto in 1987. He got his PhD in 1992, majoring in policy analysis.
With the PhD, he returned to the University of Nairobi as a lecturer in October 1992, rising to senior lecturer in 2000. At the university, Dr Mbai taught development administration, introduction to political science and projects management. Last year, he was appointed chairman of the department of political science and public administration, a position he held until his death.
In October 2001, the Dean's Committee gave Dr Mbai a grant to carry out research on regional integration and internal conflicts in Africa focusing on Eastern Africa. A year earlier, the UNDP had funded him to carry out research on public service ethics in Kenya. The study covered 10 sub-Saharan African countries.
The Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University, Prof Peter Wanyande, remembers that the UNDP called Dr Mbai to ask if he really wanted his findings made public. The UN agency feared that the findings were so radical that they could land him into problems with the Moi regime.
"Mbai said those were his findings and he did not intend to doctor them in any way and that he had no problems with them being made public. He wanted the findings given to the Government," Dr Wanyande recalls.
Dr Mbai did a lot of research on the management of elections. One of the things he left behind is a paper he was to present at a seminar that starts tomorrow in Zanzibar. The two-day seminar is organised by the University of Dar es Salaam's Department of Research and Education for Democracy.
Prof Wanyande hopes to present his fallen colleague's paper on Election Management and Democratisation Process in Kenya.
Late last year, Dr Mbai was researched on accountability in Kenya's public service, sponsored by the African Centre for Economic Growth. He concluded that public servants will not be accountable until the public puts pressure on them to do so.
"It is not enough to set rules. The public must understand that it needs to put pressure on public officers to be accountable. That is not the case in Kenya," he concluded in the study.
He had edited a book initially entitled, The Politics of Transition; From Moi to the Unknown, which would have come out of the press on Thursday. But Narc won the elections and the title was changed to Politics of Transition;
From Kanu to Narc.
Dr Mbai has a chapter in that book entitled The Rise and Fall of the Autocratic State in Kenya. He traces the rise of political dictatorship in Kenya from the colonial period, through the Kenyatta and Moi eras.
"It is ironical that Mbai would be the first person to die under strange circumstances in the Narc Government that was supposed to herald the death of the autocratic state," Prof Wanyande, the immediate former head of political science department says.
Comments\Views about this article
Mitayo Potosi
_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail
-------------------------------------------- This service is hosted on the Infocom network http://www.infocom.co.ug
