Curtain falls on first coup plotter

By JOE OMBUOR

He would have been a Cabinet minister were his dream to topple founding President Jomo Kenyatta succeeded.

But this did not happen for retired Captain Fredrick Omondi, who will be buried tomorrow at his home in Nyakach, Kisumu County.

Captain Omondi was the star actor in the first military coup attempt in the country. Then, the captain was an officer in his 20s when he mobilised colleagues for a coup attempt that was nipped in the bud by President Kenyatta’s government in 1971.

Captain Omondi breathed his last on May 3. He was 68.

One of his widows, Rose, said the former Air Force jet fighter pilot was “vibrantly living” with high blood pressure. He suffered two strokes before he succumbed at Port Florence Hospital. In the aborted coup of 1971 that entangled, among others, then Chief of Defence Staff Maj Gen Joseph Ndolo, Omondi was the co-ordination liaison officer.

Also enmeshed in the coup attempt were then Chief Justice Kitili Mwendwa, then Yatta MP Gideon Mutiso, former legislator Prof Ouma Muga and coup leader Lieutenant Daniel Owino. Captain Omondi recently opened up on the attempted coup, describing it as better organised than the 1982 one.

“Unlike the failed 1982 coup that was planned by junior officers, ours involved top brains and officers in the military,” he was quoted saying.

He divulged that the person who would have replaced the late president if the coup succeeded had been identified. 

“I was among the people proposed to serve in the Cabinet that was to be formed,” he was quoted saying in a 2010 newspaper interview.

He had earlier in 1965 been decorated by President Kenyatta with Sword of Honour Medal for a job well done after he conducted the president through a military parade at the Eastleigh Air Force Base.

He was only 20 at the time and was a newly graduated jet fighter pilot from Royal Air Force Training College in UK. He said the attempted coup was the culmination of tension that had gripped the country and the armed forces after political events that followed the assassination of charismatic Cabinet minister Tom Mboya and the detention of opposition leader Jaramogi Oginga Odinga.

Asked why he was chosen to play the role of co-ordination and liaison officer for the coup, Captain Omondi said he had easy access to other barracks as a fighter pilot.