'Professor' George Wajackoyah the originator of the Ouko 'Shot in State House story (Photo courtesy China Daily)

George Wajackoyah will be known to many younger Kenyans only as the, to put it mildly, eccentric leader of the Roots Party, who stood as a presidential candidate at Kenya’s elections in August 2022, campaigning on a platform that included the legalisation of marijuana and the expansion of commercial snake farming. He received 61,969 votes of the total votes cast (0.44 percent).

George Luchiri Wajackoyah first hit the headlines 30 years before however, when on 26th April 1992, a story was published in the British newspaper The Sunday Times, under the headline ‘Moi watched cabinet minister’s execution’. In it Wajackoyah claimed he had ‘pieced together his account’ of the murder over two years before, of Dr Robert Ouko, Kenya’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was shot dead near his farmhouse in Koru, Western Kenya, on February 13th, 1990.

The shot in State House theory

Wajackoyah claimed he was a former Special Branch Inspector and that his account of Ouko’s murder was derived from telephone interceptions and Special Branch files.

The basis of Wajackoyah’s story was that Dr Robert Ouko had been abducted from his Koru home by the then Permanent Secretary for Internal Affairs Internal Security, Hezekiah Oyugi, and the Minister of Energy Nicholas Biwott, and taken to State House in Nakuru where he was beaten and shot in front of President Daniel arap Moi before his body was dumped back to a spot near his Koru farm where a herdsboy subsequently found it.

Provably untrue though it was, George Wajackoyah’s story became the widely believed ‘Shot at state House’ theory which influenced the Parliamentary Select Committee into the murder of Dr Robert Ouko chaired by Gor Sungu MP (2004-05), and the trial of Jonah Anguka, the only person to date who has been tried for Ouko’s murder (he was acquitted).

Wajakoyah’s allegations understandably excited the press both in the UK and Kenya in April 1992.

If The Sunday Times ‘journalists’ had bothered to check the story against the known facts and the findings of the team of detectives from New Scotland Yard, who were invited to Kenya by President Moi to investigate Ouko’s murder, they surely would not have put pen to paper. The New Scotland Yard team was led by Detective Superintendent John Troon.

Dr Robert Ouko was shot where his body was found – NOT at State House

Troon found that based on the post-mortem findings of the distinguished British Home Forensic Pathologist Dr Iain West, and the analysis of crime scene expert Detective Sergeant David Sanderson who discovered a bullet mark on a tree near to where Ouko’s body was found, together with local eye witness testimony, that Dr Robert Ouko had been shot dead on the morning he disappeared, February 13th, 1990, and that the fatal shooting had taken place a few feet from where his body was subsequently found near his farmhouse in Koru.

Dr Robert Ouko could not have been, and was not, shot in Sate House in Nakuru, 115km and two hours twenty minutes driving time from where his body was found.

In his ‘Final Report’ (paragraph 290) Troon concluded, ‘There is no evidence to suggest that Dr Ouko had died at any other venue than the scene’ where his body was found.

Troon read out his Final Report in Kisumu Town Hall, during the hearings of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Ouko’s murder which was reported verbatim in the Kenya press, in October and November 1991, six months before Wajakoyah told his story to The Sunday Times.

Wajackoyah’s story “rumours, gossip and speculation”

Wajakoyah’s story soon began to unravel however, and his reliability as a witness increasingly became called into question.

A press report in Kenya on May 24th, 1992, said that there were ‘increasing doubts in official and media circles here [London] over the credibility of Mr George Luchiri Wajakoyah’ and that ‘skepticism has deepened since the initial London press reports’.

“He is very plausible and articulate”, one journalist was reported as saying, “The trouble is that he cannot substantiate his claims and accusations. It seems to me that he has stitched together a story based on rumour, gossip and speculation”.

On August 2, 1992, an article in The Daily Nation headed ‘Ouko Claims Man to Study law in UK’, a Paul Redfern reported that the Directorate of Intelligence at Police Headquarters, Nairobi, was claiming that Wajackoyah ‘has psychiatric problems’.

Parliamentary Select Committee report rejected

In late December 2010 the Parliamentary Select Committee report into Ouko’s murder, was rejected by Parliament on the grounds of a lack of unity and disagreements within the committee.

We now know that even the Select Committee’s chairman Gor Sungu MP agreed with the New Scotland Yard detective John Troon.

Gor Sungu, stated in a TV documentary aired in 2023, that: “He [Ouko] was not taken in Nakuru like the [PSC] report says that we had to do because of members insisting that we write what was given to us as evidence. But when I talked to Troon, Superintendent Troon of Scotland Yard, he specifically mentioned having seen damaged marks on guava leaves where Ouko had been found lying dead.”

It is not widely known that Wajackoyah also claimed that he knew who murdered British tourist and photographer Julie Ward in September 1998. It was alleged in the media that an intermediary on Wajackoyah’s behalf approached John Ward, Julie’s father, offering to sell him information for £2,500 but ‘the offer was firmly rejected’.

George Wajakoyah postscript – The Julie Ward murder

John Ward confirmed this story to me in conversation and in an email dated 25 February, 2021, in which he said he was amazed that The Sunday Times had fallen for Wajackoyah’s testimony, dismissed the ‘Shot in State House’ theory.

John Ward advised me, “George Wajackoyah… I would not waste any more time on him.”