Mau Mau war veterans have been forgotten and neglected by all regimes since Jomo Kenyatta came to power despite their contribution to the fight for independence.
The men and women who paid the ultimate price so that we may live in freedom only had the nasty reward of being called bandits and terrorists when the war was over.
They returned from the forests and found even the little land they had, taken by home guards. They left the forests and found their wives taken by collaborators and sellouts.
They returned from the war and found their children deep in illiteracy while the children of collaborators were in best schools and universities locally and abroad.
And they came out only to find the home guards were the new rulers to whom they had to bow and salute and take orders from. The bitterness lives on.
They were detained and tortured at the end of British Colonial rule in Kenya: beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted; even castrated.
The veterans have asked the government to compensate them for the suffering they underwent when fighting for freedom.
They also want the government to recognise them legally through an Act of Parliament as the people who fought for Kenya’s independence.
On June 6, 2013, the British government announced that it would make payments totalling £19.9m, representing a ‘full and final settlement’.
Over 5000 elderly Kenyans who suffered torture and abuse at the hands of colonial-era authorities will benefit from the pay-out.
Kenyans have blasted the government for not caring for their Heroes and Heroines who live in the slums and and others in shanty camps while some few people grabbed all the land they fought for.
They are now calling for the Mau Mau fighters to be accorded more love, care, respect and above all a modern decent living.
And so unfolded the greatest irony of Kenya’s independence struggle: those who fought for it emerged from the bush to find their land gone; or were too poor to raise money to buy even an inch of the land they fought to regain from the white man.
This honour for Mau Mau fighters must therefore mark the beginning of the search for our heroes from other communities. The struggle for Kenya’s freedom was a collective effort of patriots from virtually all parts of Kenya.
Have we let down our freedom fighters? Let’s hear your thoughts