NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 4 – Former Limuru Member of Parliament Kuria Kanyingi is dead.
Kanyingi passed away on Monday at a hospital in India where he was undergoing treatment.
Sources close to the former prominent said he had been ailing for some time.
Capital FM News learnt that the family was making arrangements to bring the body back home for burial.
Kanyingi served as an elected Member of Parliament for one term between 2002 and 2007.
In December 2012, he announced that he had quit politics after pressure from his family.
Kuria Kanyingi: The diminutive master of political chicanery
Diminutive Simon Kuria Kanyingi inspired political chicanery, at least when he reigned. To his enemies, the politicians he neutered and brought down, he was myopic for lack of a better word. And to his admirers, the men and women who survived on his handouts and alter ego, Kanyingi was the ultimate philanthropist.
A man who rose from a struggling mechanic to a power broker in Central Kenya, Kanyingi was one of the use-and-retrieve cogs in Kanu’s power machine which emerged shortly before the 1988 General Election as then President Daniel arap Moi prepared his last clean-up on the post-Jomo Kenyatta administration and hold to power.
Kanyingi had apparently earned Moi’s eye after he repaired the then vice-president’s vehicle which had broken down. That is how he ended up as a middle-grade mechanic at the Likoni Road based Motor Vehicle Inspection Unit, where he rose to become the inspector.
From this obscure office, and using the Kiambu Kanu machinery Kanyingi became a State House regular, combining his police job with politics. Not even his boss, Joseph arap Leting, could get the level of Press coverage assigned to Kanyingi.
At the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, a camera was always on standby for his rallies and in the pecking order of Kiambu politics, he rose to number one, though he held no political position.
While many thought he would go for the Limuru seat during the 1988 queue voting, he took a back seat and pulled strings from there. It is no wonder that when he was elevated to director of motor vehicle inspection in 1989, his local MP, Samuel Mwaura, threw a party for him attended by all Kiambu MPs.
Source-https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/
Ex-Limuru MP Kuria Kanyingi dies in India
