Just last week, the American justice system sentenced Duane "Keffe D" Davis to 40 years in prison for orchestrating the 1996 murder of rap icon Tupac Shakur, underscoring the principle of imprescriptibility for criminal conduct.
The 63-year-old former gang leader was convicted after decades of treating his involvement like a badge of honour, bragging about it in a 2019 memoir and in podcasts.
As a millennial who has grieved Tupac for ages, I watched the Netflix documentary; “Unsolved: the Tupac and Biggie Murders” five years ago and saw Keff D confess on camera of having been inside the car from where the rapper was shot.
Together with other thugs, they had been hunting after Tupac, he said, and they pulled beside him and fired towards him. Asked who fired the shots from the back of the car he was in, Keffe D answered, with unmistakable pride:
“Going to keep it for the code of the streets. It just came from the backseat.”
I remember cringing on the edge of my seat and murmuring to myself; there you have an accomplice, the motive and the means to it.
Luckily, the American justice system is swift and brutal. A few years after this Netflix documentary and after publishing his own memoirs on the same, he was nabbed. His own loose lips swapped him from Compton streets to a cold prison cell.
For us in Kenya, the Keffe D saga is not just a piece of hip-hop trivia; it is a mirrors-up moment.
If a drive-by shooting on the Las Vegas Strip can be resolved 30 years later, what excuse does the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) have for the mountain of high-profile, dust-gathering cold cases in our own backyard?
It is time to make a serious case for tracking down and locking up every individual involved in Kenya’s unresolved assassinations.
Let us start with Tom Mboya, gunned down in broad daylight on a Nairobi street in 1969. We were told a lone gunman named Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge did it, but his famous courtroom question — "Why don't you go for the big man?" — remains unanswered.
The "big men" might be elderly now, or perhaps they have transcended to the next world, but their accomplices, financiers, and the system that shielded them have paper trails. If Keffe D can be dragged to court as a grandfather, our remaining post-independence puppet masters belong in a striped uniform, not enjoying peaceful retirement on grabbed land.
Then there is JM Kariuki, who went missing in 1975 only for his mutilated body to be found in Ngong Forest. The parliamentary probe pointed fingers at senior security officials, yet no one faced the music.
Robert Ouko’s assassination too. Same script with Odhiambo Mbai, shot in 2003 during the constitutional review process, and the bizarre 2013 passing of Mutula Kilonzo, whose sudden death left a trail of unanswered questions.
Our local investigative style usually involves declaring that "no stone will be left unturned." Meanwhile, the stones remain firmly in place, and the suspects continue to blossom in politics.
If the American authorities can use a suspect’s own boastful book tour to secure a conviction, our local agencies should easily find leads for the many unresolved assassinations.
In Kenya, perpetrators of political crimes do not even hide in the shadows; they often sit on television panels, lecture us on national unity, and drop heavy hints in their memoirs about what happened over "the golden days."
If our police spent half as much energy investigating these historic injustices as they do tracking down citizens who tweet unflattering truths about politicians, our prisons would be full of corrupt tycoons and retired executioners.
The lesson from Las Vegas is beautifully simple: time does not wash the blood off a murderer's hands. We must reject the convenient national amnesia that tells us to "move on" for the sake of peace.
True peace is built on accountability, not on graves covered up by state bureaucracy. Let the DCI dust off the files of our unresolved deaths. Let us round up the "top shooters" who thought they got away with it.
After all, if Keffe D can face the music at 63, our local untouchables are well overdue for their final, mandatory dance with justice
Musau, an Advocate of the High Court, is a Senior Project Manager with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The views expressed here are his own
