Jowi! Jowi! Jowi!
Wuod Adonija,
Wuod Nyar Alego,
Son of the wind and will.
You were born in a time when voices were whispers,
and men feared their own tongues.
But you spoke, and the air changed.
You called out freedom by name,
and it answered, even from behind prison bars.

They locked you up for believing too much,
for seeing what others were afraid to imagine.
But dreams don’t serve time,
they grow wings.
You walked out of those cells carrying a country on your shoulders,
tired, scarred, but still sure of tomorrow.
And that is how Legends Begin.

You fought for a Kenya that listened to itself.
For a people who could finally speak in their mother tongues
without asking permission.
You taught us that democracy isn’t ink on a paper,
it’s breath-taken, held, then shared again.
You bled through the cracks of history
so that others could walk without bleeding.

Devolution,  they call it policy now.
But we remember it was once your prayer,
your stubborn insistence that every village should matter.
Counties rose from that conviction like sunrise over the lake,
and yet, those who eat from your harvest
pretend they do not know the farmer.
Kenya, ever forgetful,
quick to mock its midwives once the child is born.

They said you shook hands with your enemy,
and they spat the word betrayal.
But peace is never popular, it is necessary.
You taught us that victory isn’t always in winning,
sometimes it’s in choosing not to destroy.
You swallowed pride to save a nation,
and still they called you weak.
But the wise know, restraint is a louder strength than revenge.

You stood in Parliament like a storm,
your words cutting through hypocrisy like glass in sunlight.
You were feared, adored, misunderstood,
and sometimes, all at once.
You turned politics into something alive,
something dangerous, something holy.
Even those who called you stubborn
secretly wished for your courage.

They say you loved power,
and maybe you did,
the way a surgeon loves his scalpel:
not for the cut, but for the healing it can bring.
You weren’t chasing a seat,
you were chasing justice across decades.
And when power refused to listen,
you spoke to the people instead.

Five elections, five heartbreaks.
Yet you never stopped showing up.
You smiled through rigged dawns and broken nights,
still believing in a country
that sometimes forgot how to believe in itself.
You didn’t lose, Jakom,
you only taught us how to endure disappointment with dignity.

They’ve called you names, hero, traitor, messiah, menace.
But your story has never fit into one sentence.
You are Kenya’s contradiction,
the man both loved and feared,
praised and punished,
remembered and erased,
yet always present in the nation’s breath.

And now, as history exhales your name,
we see what you’ve always been,
the mirror this country avoids,
the conscience it still needs.
You lived, you fought, you forgave.
You gave us more than leadership,
you gave us language for courage.

Jowi! Jowi! Jowi!
Wuod Nyar Alego.
The man who kept walking,
even when the road kept ending.

@doddyokelo