Drama and controversy, bywords for MP Kizito
Controversy and drama are Shinyalu MP Justus Kizito Mukali’s other names.
His string of run-ins with the law are just a confirmation of his real character, which he never seeks divorce from.
The legislator is no stranger to drama and his recent December 3 over alleged malicious damage to property just adds to several other incidents that have beckoned trouble into his corner.
Kizito was charged with causing malicious damage to property and resisting lawful arrest.
He was arrested by DCI officers at the Kakamega Law Courts and locked up at the Central police station.
The MP was accused of destroying two semi-permanent houses and a wooden fence worth Sh200,000 in a land dispute in Vikutsa village, Shinyalu constituency, in February. He says the land belongs to a school.
In 2013, his brand new ‘Range Rover Vogue’ was burnt to ashes as he campaigned in the constituency on election day eve.
His insurance company declined to compensate him because the campaign period was over.
He had earlier during the same campaign season wrestled with lawyer Martin Oloo at a Kakamega hotel.
Oloo was backing ODM leader Raila Odinga while Kizito was for the then UDF presidential candidate Musalia Mudavadi.
The MP is a party animal and never shies away from admitting his love for the booze and other fine things of life.
“Which man can claim that he does not love women, unless he is abnormal?” he posed when contacted by People Daily.
Drama aside, the legislator knows how to make political somersaults that have seen him win elections.
When he read the mood and discovered that businessman Charles Lilechi Lugano was destined to clinch the Shinyalu parliamentary seat in 2007, he retreated, and threw his weight behind him.
Lugano passed on a year later and Kizito automatically inherited the deceased’s support base.
Come 2013, he lost the seat, albeit narrowly, to former Director of Culture Lisamula Anami.
He petitioned, won in the High Court and Court of Appeal only to lose at the Supreme Court. The apex court also ordered him to foot the cost of the suit.
He failed to do so and was arrested one morning by heavily armed security personnel just outside the Kakamega Law Courts and driven to Kisumu.
Kizito, then a staunch supporter of Mudavadi and UDF seemed to have secured comfort elsewhere as he battles in court and immediately announced his defection to ODM.
He went on to reclaim the parliamentary seat in 2017 on the Orange party’s ticket.
He then announced his interest in the Kakamega governorship and started campaigning across the county.
Not before long, he again announced that he was no longer in the race to succeed Governor Wycliffe Ambetsa Oparanya who is his ally at the moment.
But yet another summersault was in the offing.
He recently engineered a coup to dethrone Deputy Governor Philip Kutima as the Kakamega ODM chairman.
The MP then went ahead and announced that he was back in the race to succeed Oparanya.
Some have dismissed the latest move as the MP’s other way of cunning to blindfold his opponents in Shinyalu.
Reached by the People Daily, Kizito, a teacher by profession, laughed off his latest dramatic arrest and arraignment in court.
“I cannot comment on the case as it is already in court. But I believe I did the right thing because I was safeguarding land belonging to a public school,” he said.
And while insisting that he was firmly in the race to succeed Oparanya on the ODM ticket, the MP however said even if he will not be seeking to retain his parliamentary seat, he will determine who takes over from him.
