The making of a people's king: Reflections from Emurua Dikirr

Last week, I considered pursuing the subject of why the Luhya nation must find a “tribal” king. But on the evening of February 28, something profound intervened — a force too potent to ignore.

And so today we must still argue, as candidly as only a people starved of political identity can, with the humility that befits our limited knowing yet with the honesty that compels us to speak. Many homelands that have sought to rise from the peripheries of neglect — as the Luhya of Western Kenya must — have walked this taxing and often controversial path.

Seneca the Younger reminds us: “It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man, and the security of a god.” So it is with communities: we must own our frailty even as we stretch towards the security that only unity can bestow. 

The profoundly tragic event to which I alluded at the start is the same sad occurrence that has occasioned a slight twist to the title, though the subject of this reflection remains unchanged. On the evening of Saturday, 28 February 2026, the day ended as badly as any could. On social media — and soon after in mainstream media — news began trickling in of a helicopter crash in Nandi County.

Worse still, reports suggested that all the occupants of the helicopter were feared dead. When details of the aircraft and its manifest emerged, it was not difficult for the public to piece together that among the fallen was a national figure: the Member of Parliament for Emurua Dikirr, Johanna Ng’eno.

What followed was a torrent of grief that washed across the nation. But like all floods, it had its source, its epicentre. Geographically, that epicentre was Emurua Dikirr Constituency, a place whose name has now entered the national consciousness alongside the memory of its fallen son.

Spiritually, the epicentre lay among the Kipsigis people. In mourning the departed, his community made a statement that transcended the routine condolences of political protocol. The people of Emurua Dikirr — the Kipsigis nation — were declaring that even though he was a national leader, they owned him first; that the bond between them and him was more spiritual than political.

It was the kind of ownership that precedes elections and outlasts terms, the kind that cannot be legislated or debated in Parliament, but is felt in the marrow of a people’s collective bone. In the days that followed, I watched with the keen eye of a student of power as the Kipsigis community gathered itself around this loss. They did not scatter in confusion or retreat into individual grief. They consolidated. They spoke with one voice. They reminded the nation that Johanna Ng’eno was theirs, and in claiming him in death, they were also claiming the space he had occupied in their lives.

Owning a leader

There is a profound lesson here for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Aristotle once observed that man is by nature a political animal, but he might also have added that man is by nature a tribal animal — not in the negative sense that the word “tribe” has come to carry in modern discourse, but in the sense that we belong first to those who belong to us.

Most strikingly, it was clear that the late Ng’eno had died with a part of the Kipsigis people. In this life, some things you choose, while others choose you; some people you choose, while others choose you. For Ngeno and the Kipsigis, the relationship was different. Both the man and his people had chosen each other. It was a marriage of destiny rather than convenience. And in that mutual choosing lies a power that no constitution can confer and no election can mandate. 

Even in such times of adversity, the Luhya nation — a people who have struggled, and still struggle, to rally around a definitive leader since the days of Masinde Muliro and later Wamalwa Kijana — must surely draw lessons. Across the world, there comes a moment in the history of societies when people realise that, although they may have several leaders and opinion-shapers, they stand to benefit by gravitating towards and consolidating their support behind one of them.

For the Luhya, such efforts have often been thwarted either by naysayers or by those who posture as nationalists, especially when they acquire a morbid appetite for self-gain. We have become masters of fragmentation, experts in division, virtuosos at pulling down our own before they can rise high enough to lift us.

Believing in the charity that begins at home does not prevent a community from pursuing a national agenda. On the contrary, by galvanising the potential of someone from our own backyard, we give them the best chance of reaching the summit, and help to challenge the ever-strengthening perception that some communities exist merely to provide voters while others enjoy the birthright of leadership.

This perception has evolved into a kind of political theology in our nation — that some are born to lead and others born to follow; some are born to rule and others born to vote. And we, the Luhya, have too often submitted to this theology, nodding along as though our marginalisation were divinely ordained rather than politically constructed. 

Ownership of a leader means something deeper than turning out to vote every five years and then retreating into political hibernation. It means holding that leader accountable not only to the nation but also to the community that birthed them.

The bond 

It means creating the kind of spiritual bond that the Kipsigis had with Ng’eno — the kind that survives helicopter crashes and outlasts mortal existence. It means understanding that when we send one of our own to the national stage, we are not diminishing our community but extending it, projecting our collective voice into chambers where it might otherwise never be heard.

While it is politically correct for leaders from any community to project a nationalist image, it is incumbent upon the communities that give these leaders gravitas to claim them — and, if necessary, to project a positive form of ethnic pride by affirming them as their own.

People from other communities will not fully accept our leaders unless they see that we ourselves harbour no doubts about their greatness. There is a paradox here that we must grasp: the more confidently we claim our own, the more readily others will accept them. National acceptance flows from communal confidence, not communal erasure. One cannot be a gift to the nation without first being a treasure to one’s own people. 

The late Ng’eno appeared to understand this instinctively, just as his people did. In his rise, they saw their own rise. In his voice, they heard their own concerns articulated. In his presence in Parliament, they felt themselves present. And now, even in his death, they are not diminished but somehow enlarged, because they have demonstrated to the nation what it means to be a community that knows how to own its own.

The Kipsigis have reminded us that political power is not merely about numbers at the ballot box, but about presence in the national consciousness — and such presence is achieved not by concealing identity but by projecting it with confidence and pride.

Perhaps one day we, the Luhya, shall look back and say that through clear thought and deliberate strategy, we were finally able to solidify our power and make meaningful use of the numerical advantage we so often brandish to no good effect.

For we are not a small people — nearly seven million strong, a nation within a nation, a sleeping giant that has slumbered too long while others have danced. The time to awaken is now. The lessons are before us, written not in books but in the memory of a fallen leader from a community that knew how to claim him. Let us learn, at last, how to make our king.