Impunity: Olive Mugenda’s Appointment As HF Group Board Chair Irks Senior Lawyers

Omatah further claimed that Mugenda was still an employee of Kenyatta University at the time of board’s appointment, therefore, she shouldn’t have  sat on the Kenyatta University Teaching, Referral and Research Hospital board where the Kenyatta University Council is represented, and the university’s Vice Chancellor is a member.

According to Omtatah this creates conflict of interest.

“She is a pensioner as a former Vice Chancellor of Kenyatta University but her appointment to the hospital’s Board (and, earlier, to the JSC) entitles her to multiple salaries contrary to Article 77(3) of the Constitution of Kenya 2010,” argued Omatah.

Mugenda is a widow to the late Prof Abel Mugenda whom she had divorced.

The HF Group’s Director Prof Olive was divorced by her husband, the late Prof Abel, because “she was moving with small boys and coming home late,” according to court documents.

Abel, a professor of statistics and research at USIU, died on January 5 after jumping from the sixth floor of the White Rhino Hotel in Nyeri County. He was 66.

In the affidavit filed at the Chief Magistrate’s court in Milimani, Nairobi in 2016, Abel claimed his wife was not only adulterous but a person of unpredictable moods, ungovernable temper and violent in nature, making him live in fear in their matrimonial home.

“In 1986, the petitioner, Abel Gitau Mugenda, then a bachelor, was lawfully married to Olive Mwihaki Mugenda, then a spinster under the Marriage Act, which was solemnised in Nairobi until sometime in 2013, when the respondent deserted the matrimonial home and started moving with young men and coming home at late hours,” the affidavit read in part.

Olive and Abel [Photo: Courtesy]

Prof Olive Mugenda, who in an earlier interview said the three words that describe her are, honest, hardworking and innovative, was accused of living in a place unknown to her husband and cohabiting with unknown person or persons.“Since the celebration of the said marriage, the respondent had on numerous occasions treated the petitioner with utmost cruelty, and to compound the said cruelty, the respondent deserted the matrimonial home and has been living in an adulterous life and committing adultery with various men and the marriage has irretrievably broken down,” stated the late Abel.

In his prayers to the court, Abel, asked that his 35-year old marriage be dissolved and his petition paid for by the wife.  He further stated that Olive, an alumnus of Alliance Girls High School, Nairobi Girls and Dry’s Farm Primary School in Timboroa, Baringo County, had generally been cruel, rebellious, unwilling to recognise him as her husband and shunned all efforts to persuade her to live a normal family life, besides refusing to take responsibilities of a wife and threatening him several times.