Maina Wanjigi, Kamukunji’s five-term Member of Parliament (MP) and a long-serving Cabinet minister, died on Friday in Nairobi. He was 92.
He had been hospitalised in Nairobi Hospital and passed on while receiving treatment, according to his family. His death was announced by his son, billionaire businessman Jimmy Wanjigi.
Mr Wanjigi, who became Kamukunji MP after the then seating legislator Tom Mboya was assassinated in 1969, was once seen as a romantic hero and praised as a statesman until his political lustre and reputation began fading over time starting early in the 1990s when he was kicked out of the ruling party, KANU, for supporting multipartism.
But before then, under President Daniel arap Moi, who ruled from 1978 to 2002, he had been picked to chair Kenya Airways in 1979 and later as Minister of Tourism and Wildlife in 1983.
In 2003, Mr Wanjigi’s dream, which he had publicly proclaimed 30 years earlier, was fulfilled: free primary education for a Kenyan child after the third president, Mwai Kibaki, implemented the idea.
“Unless you have a good education to which every child has access and that can be harnessed to enable them to reach their full potential, you cannot build a sound population and a sound nation. It is about time somebody got the message that we want free primary education. Let every child in this country be entitled to at least eight years of free primary education,” he had told the parliament in 1973.
Maina Wanjigi, who, at one time, also served as Minister of Public Works and Housing, was born on October 7, 1931, in Wahudura village, Murang’a County.
After graduating from Alliance High School, he studied agriculture at Makerere University in Uganda in 1951. He then began working as an assistant agricultural extension officer in Nyeri District in pre-independence Kenya before moving to Stanford University in the United States, where he pursued a degree in agricultural economics, later obtaining a master’s in economics.
The younger Mr Wanjigi was the first Director of Settlement in independent Kenya and played a crucial role in redistributing land to landless Kenyans before he became the first CEO of the Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation (ICDC) in 1968.
> Class 3 Dropout Who Later Became a Billionaire Businessman
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