Mumias East MP Benjamin Washiali has for the first time spoken after he was reported missing on Saturday morning.
Washiali who was one of the Western Kenya leaders who were to hold a parallel rally to the Building Bridges Initiative rally in Kakamega, says he was forced into the bush to save his life after people he suspected to be police officers cornered his house in Mumias.
In an interview with NTV the National assembly whip narrates the ordeal.
“I am lucky to be surviving; because on the night before the eighteenth day when we were supposed to have had a rally in Mumias, people approached my gate who I believe were police officers because they were using a land cruiser and they were many of them in the vehicle. When they approached the gate, lights shone in my bedroom……,” he narrated.
The legislator goes on to say,
“Given what I had heard in the media through the leadership of Western region and also in the evening coming through the interviews police were conducting in Ekero and Mumias, I was on very high alert and I knew that my time had come….,” he said.
Washiali who alongside other leaders have questioned the intentions of the BBI forums being held across the country, says he was forced into a ‘mini-exile’ as he feared for his life.
“That’s s why I escaped through the backdoor to the bush next to my house, and I stayed there for about an hour and fifteen minutes when I received rescue from a taxi driver, a friend of mine, who drove all the way from Luanda to come and rescue me to take me to Kisumu where I spent the rest of the rest of the night and in the morning I took a flight back to my family….,” said the Mumias East law maker.
According to the legislator, leaders from the Mulembe nation need to rethink their stands on a number of critical issues even as the political fever seems to hold the country at stake.
“I was really traumatized and I thought that I needed time to reflect on what we needed to do as the leaders of Western region,” he concluded in an interview with NTV from Nairobi’s Lang’ata Estate.
