Year back, John Allan Namu was the face the Kenyan media investigative journalism.
He loved it, Kenyans too loved it but it would cost him dearly.
He recently recalled that his wife Sheena Makena was unceremoniously forced to take a sabbatical from her job a few weeks after he did an expose about the now captured Rwandan fugitive Felicien Kabuga.
Kabuga had been living in Kenya as per Namu’s expose which powerful source in the government dismissed at the time.
However, he was vindicated last year after Kabuga who was the mastermind of the 1994 Rwandan genocide was arrested in his hideout in France where he ran off to after leaving Kenya.
Independent investigations by Interpol and foreign media indicate that Kabuga invested in Kenya heavily and lived in one of the suburbs of Nairobi.
Namu in a narration to NTV’s Singleton Stories said that the expose made her wife a target and she was left with no choice than take a three-month leave from work due to threats on her life.
“For two months while I was doing a story here, my wife and my two children were in the safe house with me. I had to pull them out of kindergarten but my wife had to leave work to take care of them which was a big deal,” he recalled.
“She went on leave for the first month, then unpaid leave for the second month. Just as we were releasing the story, we took off to another country (him and his family). While we were in hiding, she lost her job,” he remarked.
At least 800,000 people were slaughtered in the Hutu-Tutsi tribes massacre which Kabuga is said to have fueled and financed.
