He left more than 22 years ago for Mombasa with a promise to return with goodies

In 1993, Geoffrey Madiga Oleve, then popularly known as Offins in his village of Ikumba, Maragoli, bid his family goodbye as he left for Mombasa where he had landed a lucrative job. He left with the promise that he would be back soon with goodies.

He had assured his family that he would be back to help his two siblings - Brown Siloya and Mary Sakwa - and to buy their single mother, Beatrice Oleve a shamba to build her a decent house.

This was two years after he had completed a course in electrical studies at Keveye Polytechnic.

Madiga, the second-born in a family of three children, had been working in Nairobi as a freelance electrician.

In Nairobi, he was hosted in Kibera by a relative, Edward Asara. A friend informed him of greener pastures in the coastal town of Mombasa.

“My brother had been staying with my cousin Asara until his friend told him of an electrical job at the Coast, which was better paying; we saw him off to Mombasa.

He returned after a month with shopping for the entire family and said there was no better job than the one he had secured with a European firm,” recalls Mary Sakwa, his younger sibling.

The family escorted him to the bus station where he boarded a bus to return to work in Mombasa, this time around promising to come home and buy a plot and put up a house for his mother.

She was filled with hope that Madiga’s success could ease the burden on her shoulders of providing for her family.

As fate would have it, Beatrice Oleve passed on in 1994 and Madiga was nowhere to be seen at the funeral. Efforts to contact him were futile.

The cruel hand of death also grabbed Madiga’s elder brother Siloya just a few months after his mother’s death.

Still Madiga did not turn up for the funeral.

“I was so disturbed when my brother did not show up for the funeral of my mum and brother. After the burial, I went to Nairobi where he had been staying before he left for Mombasa to trace the whereabouts of the friend who took him there, but I didn’t find him,” says Sakwa.

When a ferry sank in the Indian Ocean in 1994, Sakwa and other family members combed every mortuary in Mombasa, checking the bodies that were retrieved, but he was not among the dead.

In 1996, there was a ray of hope when one of Madiga’s cousins, Evans Oleve, said that Madiga had come to visit him in Nairobi before leaving for Mombasa.

Sakwa, not having enough money to traverse the country in search of her brother, gathered family members to help find Madiga, but so far nothing has been forthcoming.

She vividly recalls her brother as a hardworking and caring man who used to protect her from school bullies while they were young and hopes that he is still alive and probably reading this article.

Sakwa, who has been married for 13 years, says her husband, Benjamin, is her only “sibling and parent”.

She has resorted to prayers because there she believes lies the answer to the puzzle of her missing brother.

“I know one day he will come back and see my family, especially the kids who resemble him. Madiga please come back, I still love and miss you big brother,” she says, thanking one Bishop Joseph Zare “who has been very instrumental in leading me and our family in prayers for the return of my brother”.