What Minister Heard Cleaners Saying About Him at JKIA That Left Him Shaken

Kenyan ministers have been warned against becoming too much full of themselves once picked by Presidents to serve in the ministerial capacities.

This is according to veteran journalist Caleb Atemi, who recalls one incident during Daniel Moi’s regime, that left a minister both traumatized and shocked.

The minister, he writes in The Standard, was Peter Oloo Aringo, who was just coming back from a trip abroad, when he heard two cleaners at the JKIA criticizing him and wishing that he died instead of then Foreign Affairs minister Robert Ouko.

Atemi notes that the two cleaners, from Aringo’s Luo community, made the remarks aware that he was around, to register their dislike for his arrogant behaviour and ensured that he heard them.

Kenyan ministers have been warned against becoming too much full of themselves once picked by Presidents to serve in the ministerial capacities.

This is according to veteran journalist Caleb Atemi, who recalls one incident during Daniel Moi’s regime, that left a minister both traumatized and shocked.

The minister, he writes in The Standard, was Peter Oloo Aringo, who was just coming back from a trip abroad, when he heard two cleaners at the JKIA criticizing him and wishing that he died instead of then Foreign Affairs minister Robert Ouko.

Atemi notes that the two cleaners, from Aringo’s Luo community, made the remarks aware that he was around, to register their dislike for his arrogant behaviour and ensured that he heard them.

View pictures in App save up to 80% data.“God is very unfair” said one cleaner in Dholuo, throwing a glance towards the rotund leader from Luo Nyanza. “Why didn’t he take this one. It was unfair for such a good man like Ouko to die when an idiot like this one is roaming around,” he writes.

Atemi, then a Nation journalist, notes that the minister later talked to him about the matter and admitted that it left him shaken.

“That encounter haunted me for months. I was traumatised by the fact that ordinary people could think of me in such a demeaning way and even dare say it to my face. I have never felt so small and useless,”he quotes Aringo as having told him in 1992.

He notes that Aringo made the remarks shortly before leaving Moi to join the opposition, while warning proud ministers of the time that they too should not think that being close to the President assures them of their positions forever.

.“God is very unfair” said one cleaner in Dholuo, throwing a glance towards the rotund leader from Luo Nyanza. “Why didn’t he take this one. It was unfair for such a good man like Ouko to die when an idiot like this one is roaming around,” he writes.

Atemi, then a Nation journalist, notes that the minister later talked to him about the matter and admitted that it left him shaken.

“That encounter haunted me for months. I was traumatised by the fact that ordinary people could think of me in such a demeaning way and even dare say it to my face. I have never felt so small and useless,”he quotes Aringo as having told him in 1992.

He notes that Aringo made the remarks shortly before leaving Moi to join the opposition, while warning proud ministers of the time that they too should not think that being close to the President assures them of their positions forever.