Today I break my own rule and ask for aid to help Odipo get on his feet

By KWENDO OPANGA

Folks, I need your help. The message from Dominic Odipo is as simple as that. Good people, Odipo needs your help. That’s the plea from family, friends and relatives. They have come together and launched a campaign to raise funds for bedridden Odipo’s health care.

Sometime in 2013, Odipo was writing his column for the Sunday Standard at a cyber cafe in Ongata Rongai when he slowly fell off his chair and could not rise up. He was saved from further damage by somebody who knew what was afflicting him.

This person next to him took one look at him and discerned the signs of a stroke. And he knew the next thing that must happen with utmost urgency was to get Odipo to hospital.

This knowledge and the speed with which Odipo was taken to hospital account for a huge part of his survival to date. But this was severely compromised when he suffered a second stroke last year.

STROKE

Stroke rendered a most active and versatile breadwinner a helpless, wholly dependent invalid. This second strike prompted the ongoing fund-raiser to take Odipo back to hospital and to ensure his care going forward.

For 30 years I have steadfastly refused to use my column for such a cause. My argument has been simple: If I did it for one friend, why or how, would I turn down another?

Today, I break my own rule. Why? Odipo has been missing in action in the fields in which Kenya needs him most because he is uniquely qualified for them and he was uniquely prepared for them.

Odipo is a versatile, well-read and informed teacher, journalist, political consultant, communications adviser, contributor to political discourse and a family man.

But this is special about the man: whenever his first cousin John Mulaa comes home from the US, he brings Odipo, not a pair of jeans or sneakers, but a truckload of books.

When I visited a stricken Odipo in Rongai in 2013, he was struggling to read a book on political philosophy and showed me another on political economy that he said, hauntingly and not his eloquent self, was next in line. Also waiting was a book on the world’s leading media corporations.

SECOND LIBERATION

But of immediate concern was that he was waiting for his son to come home so that he could dictate to him his column for the Sunday Standard. Odipo’s take in the heady days of Kenya’s second liberation and from which US gadfly ambassador Smith Hempstone quoted liberally in his book Rogue Ambassador, is no more. And much more is missed.

A tribute published in 2018 to mark Hilary Boniface Ng’weno’s 80th birthday, featured articles from some of the great and good of Kenya’s journalism who were mentored by the man they all refer to fondly by his initials HBN.

These included Wachira Waruru, CEO of Royal Media Services, Joseph Odindo, the Standard Group Editorial Director, Prof Peter Kareithi, Rose Kimotho, the founder of Kameme FM, Vitalis Musebe, proprietor of Webuye’s Maskan rendezvous, cartoonist Paul Kelemba aka Madd, columnist Macharia Gaitho, Dr Muiru Ngugi, a lecturer and publisher, and the stickler for excellence they worked under, Sarah Elderkin.

Missing from the parade of Kenya’s finest was Odipo. He is a soft-spoken gentleman, a quiet, thinking, reading and bespectacled fellow who would, hands in his pockets and head bowed, tread into and out of a meeting unnoticed.

BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Excelling in science and maths at Mang’u and Nakuru high schools in the ‘70s, he qualified and was enrolled to study architecture at the University of Nairobi. But a year into it, he quit to study business administration.

Straight out of university, Odipo was hired by a motor company as an accountant. He soon quit to go and teach at what was then called Government Training Institute in Mombasa.

From accountant to teacher?

He quit again and moved to the Weekly Review, the pioneering analytical journal of politics, finance and sport. Odipo settled down.

Journalism is the calling this wandering had been preparing him for. Hence the pages of the Weekly Review, Kenya Times, Dunia, all now defunct, and the Standard would be his blackboard and Kenya his classroom. And that’s when he was not lecturing at Tangaza, a constituent college of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, and others. Not anymore. But doctors say Odipo’s health can be improved.

Would you like to help? M-Pesa Paybill Number: 7202707; Account Number: 127-208-0730

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