10/12/2025
Via khamadi murilaKIHIKA KIMANI — THE FEARLESS, FIERY, AND DEFIANT BARON OF RIFT VALLEY POLITICS
Dixon Kihika Kimani was not just a politician — he was a political weather event, a man whose presence changed the atmosphere long before he arrived. In the Rift Valley of the 1970s and 80s, where land, ethnicity, and power rubbed against each other like tectonic plates, Kihika stood as one of the loudest, most combustible figures of his era. He spoke like a man who believed fear was for others. He moved like a man who believed the Rift Valley soil owed him loyalty. And he played politics the way some men wage war — openly, recklessly, and with the confidence of someone who knew thousands stood behind him.
Kihika’s ascent was built on two things: land and people. After independence, he understood what many did not — that the real power in Kenya was not in Nairobi’s Parliament but in the resettlement frontier of the Rift Valley. There, entire communities were uprooting from Central Province and seeking new land. Whoever controlled that movement controlled the future. So Kihika built land-buying companies like Ngwataniro-Mutukanio, structures that were part genuine settlement effort, part political machine, and part personal empire.
With these schemes he settled tens of thousands of Kikuyu families in Nakuru, Molo, Njoro, and Laikipia and created an indebted political base that saw him as savior and protector. He accumulated his own acreage — vast, fertile, and politically strategic.
By the mid-1970s, Kihika was not simply an MP. He was a regional force, a land baron whose word could mobilize crowds faster than the provincial administration, and when he spoke, he used fire, not diplomacy.
Then came the fateful moment of 1976.
Inside KANU, a faction of Kikuyu politicians decided they would not allow Daniel arap Moi to inherit power if Kenyatta died. They launched the “Change the Constitution Movement,” a political coup wrapped in legal language.
And who became its loudest trumpet?
Kihika Kimani.
At rallies he mocked Moi, dismissed him as too soft, too pliable, too unfit to lead the country. He called the Rift Valley’s political future a Kikuyu affair, a reckless stance that made him a hero in some villages and a marked target in State House Nakuru.
MOI NEVER FORGOT...
When Kenyatta died in 1978 and Moi rose to power, the first political casualties were the men who had tried to block him. Some were quietly sidelined. Some were watched. But Kihika — the man who had shouted the loudest — was punished publicly at the ballot in 1979, swept out through state-backed operatives.
It was a cleansing. A settling of scores.
Kihika tried to maintain influence, but Moi’s system tightened around him. Administrators were instructed to choke his mobilization networks, land disputes involving his companies suddenly found themselves under scrutiny and his allies in the Rift Valley were quietly bought off, threatened, or broken
The very land schemes that had created his power became the MoI state's favorite tool for weakening him. Titles were frozen. Surveys were blocked. Cases were revived. The message was clear:
“You tried to stop me. I will unmake you slowly.”
Kihika went into the political wilderness for over a decade. Yet, ironically, the return of multi-party politics in 1992 — a system Moi hated — revived Kihika’s career. He roared back to Parliament in Laikipia West, then again in Molo.
It was a political resurrection so dramatic that even his enemies grudgingly admired it.
Away from politics, Kihika performed masculinity the same way he did politics — in excess. By his death in 2004 he had 8 wives and over 40 children, and an estate rumored to be worth over KSh 600 million. The eight were Nyambura Kihika, Lucy Wangari, Jane Wanjiru, Miriam Warau, Charity Nyambura, Margaret Wambui, Winnie Wanjeri and Alice Kihika who is Susan Kihika's mother.
He bragged about his wealth openly, famously claiming he had enough land and money to “marry a new wife every six months.” Crowds laughed. Critics cringed. But Kihika said it anyway — because he enjoyed the performance of power. His homestead was a political court. His land a demonstration of conquest. His family a clan, almost a small nation.
But power is transient, so the say, and when it comes loudly, it often crumbles just as loudly.
Upon his death, Kihika’s estate exploded into succession wars, with widows, children, and extended relatives fighting over titles, farms, companies, and rentals. Court revelations later showed that some properties lacked proper documentation. Some titles were contested and some land-buying ventures were never fully regularized. Debts and disputes had eroded the fortune and the once-mighty estate was declared “effectively bankrupt”
The land baron who built half his legend on wealth left behind a kingdom torn apart and half-vanished into legal fog.
Yet his legacy endures. In the Rift Valley, his name still stirs memories — of land, of speeches that split crowds, of the fiery era when politics was a raw, unvarnished contest of personalities. He belongs to a generation of politicians who shaped Kenya’s early years not through quiet negotiation but through sheer force of character.
And in that lineage, Kihika Kimani stands as one of the unforgettable ones — a man of immense flaws and immense influence, a storm that passed loudly through Kenya’s political landscape, leaving behind stories, scars, and a family that continues to carry his name into the nation’s future.
His daughter, Susan Kihika, inherited not just his political genes but his audacity. She carries the family name into a new political era — one less driven by land and fire, but still haunted by the shadows of the old Rift Valley wars.
