Babu Owino: Fame, Flame, Flamboyance

Babu Owino posing for a photo at a restaurant

 Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. Words can whip emotions of the electorate, rally congregations, and defame dogmas. Paul Ongili alias Babu Owino can testify.

The story of Babu Owino is one so familiar, that many, born in the epoch of millennialism would dare give a clearer and back to back account of Babu’s life history unsolicited and even contemptuously if bankrolled, but never come close to unraveling the person of Babu as I do.

This attempt is as I say, Character decoding – no offense to geek club.

Owino, the politician is famed for his serendipitously pithy and yet precise statements and slogans the like of which only him can conjure.

The father of two came up with the words; Tibim! And Tialala! And despite being termed ‘senseless’ in a tweet by Africa’s top artistes Sauti Sol, the words have burned through the minds of the Kenyan electorate, I’m talking varsity and national elections.

Take off your linguistic lenses and please tell it not to Willis the Word Master or Philip Ochieng’ (A columnist with Daily Nation; Mark My Words) that I intend to dishonor the Holy Oxford and Cambridge lexemes – again, no offense to geek fraternity.

Babu Owino Addressing the Media flanked by Hon. Peter Kaluma, Hon. Orengo James

Whenever Babu takes to the stage, he sells the idea that morphology is just but a doormat rag that you clean your shoes with on a muddy political weather – his audiences respond by demanding the idea be overpriced.

Babu is the kind of leader who wishes that every person should be clothed, because a naked man does not put his hand in his pocket – to what end, you ask? By ensuring that his representative constituents have enough money to hold whenever they pocket.

There is a faction of the media that, whenever interview him, overshadow or just ineptly diverge from the inspiration that is his life to insignificant queries about his wealth status, but if it satisfies you, he does own a fleet of vehicles including top of the range automobiles apart from running successful Kenyan companies.

The 29 year old (as at 10^th of October 2017) is a hunter who knows all too well what his prey likes and is never shy from serving it ungrammatically or otherwise.

That explains statements like ‘comrades must eat chicken and not like chicken’ ‘kantagaras’- a misspelling of cantankerous, ‘used, misused and abused’ ‘Kenya is worth dying for…my only regret is that if I die I will only die once, I would have wished that I can die twice thrice or even four times’

Words like ‘illogical’ are strangers in his vocabulary – Actually, the English-Luo language interplay gives little room to such terms. Ask around.

Having been born a Luo from the lakeside city of Kisumu and contrary to long-held marital reservations among the Gikuyu and Luo ethnicities, the outspoken leader prides himself in a marriage with a Gikuyu beauty, Muthoni Frida.

After completion of his secondary schooling and attaining an A- grade, Babu was matriculated in Moi University but as fate had it, he could not make it for enrollment and so opted to use part of his savings to find a chance at The University of Nairobi for an Actuarial course.

In a world where the PHD (Pull Him/Her Down) mentality is embraced, Babu has had his fair share of mud to shake off. Several attempts have been orchestrated to malign his public image. One would recoil with horror just wading through the muck of it all.

Babu Owino (Center) and President Uhuru Kenyatta (Right) shaking hands

Some of those allegations include bribery of voters, hiring of goons to disrupt and scare, ill gotten wealth among other claims that frankly have not amounted to any convictions in the Kenyan Courts of Justice.

The recent court case that he was embroiled in discharged him of his duty as the Embakasi East constituency MP when the judge termed his election as invalid despite the latter, prior to his pronouncements, ordering a vote recount in which Babu won.