When Kenya embraced multiparty democracy in 1992, Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Muema could not have imagined that an event that gave freedom to millions of Kenyans, would alter his life forever.
The young man at that time was meteorically climbing through the army ranks having graduated top of his class at the famed Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the United Kingdom.
His dream of scaling further in the military hierarchy was cut short after his father went into a business partnership with former President now deceased, Mwai Kibaki.
At that time, Kibaki was in the opposition and had lost a hotly contested presidential election in December 1992.
Kibaki was popularising his Democratic Party across the country in readiness to contest again in 1997 and when he opened an office at Mwala Town in Machakos County, it spelt doom for Muema.
This is because the office space coincidentally belonged to Muema’s father who was Kibaki’s ardent supporter.
This led to Muema being seen as a mole in the army and was unceremoniously forced to resign and subsequently denied gratuity and pension benefits.
In a past interview with the Weekly Review, prior to being forced to resign, Muema was arrested where he was alleged to have stolen a car.
He was also accused of taking part in a robbery with violence on the night of January 7 and 8, 1993.
In what later became his saving grace, it was later revealed that on the said night, Muema was in Bangladesh on official duty.
This led to the case collapsing but Muema was not reinstated to the army as he had resigned according to army records.
When Muema sued the army for unfair dismissal, he was rearrested in 2000 for the same charge.
He won the case after the High Court ruled that the case was illegal. Armed with that ruling, he sued the army for unfair dismissal.
Twenty-seven years after his dreams were cut short, Muema was awarded Ksh6.4 million for the torture he went through during the arrests and forced resignation.
When he was arrested, Muema was a young man who had just graduated as a helicopter pilot from the United Kingdom.
For years he put his life on pause and knocked on courts trying to find justice, and 27 years later when he was past his prime, he was given Ksh6.4 million in compensation for close to three decades of life lost.
Three years after he was vindicated, he lost his life in a road accident on February 6. Before his demise, he was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Democratic Action Party of Kenya (DAP-K).
The rivalry between the second and third presidents of Kenya snuffed out the career of a young man who had taken an oath of allegiance to protect both.
