Quincy Timberlake, husband to former TV queen Esther Arunga, has announced that the Placenta Party will contest the 2017 presidential elections.
In a long post on CNN’s iReport, Quincy describes how the party came into being, narrating the trial and tribulations of its top officials.
He also recounts how the party gained euphoric support as we approached the last elections, with up to 73 members of parliament expressing their willingness to join.
Here was his post.. spoiler alert, it’s a very loooong read.
The PlaCenta Party of Kenya, officially known as the Platinum Centralizer and Unionist Party, is a centre-left political party in the Republic of Kenya that espouses the philosophies of Kenyan unionism. The party was formed in Kenya in 2008 by Engineer Quincy Timberlake. As of 2010 it was the largest political party for the youth and the largest outside the parliament of Kenya. The government, threatened by its massive fincancial support and quick expansion, labelled the organization a cult. Behind closed doors there were 73 sitting Members of Parliament (MPs) who quietly joined the organisation with intentions of winning by euphoria after sensing looming defeat in the upcoming elections. The party was to form a coalition with the NO camp after the constitutional promulgation in 2010 with the then Higher Education Minister William Ruto currently the Deputy President of Kenya. The party president proposed for the coalition to be known as The Red Revolution Movement, a name and an idea which was rejected by senior NO camp figures fearing that the PlaCenta Party would use the new outfit as a bridge to steal its Rift Valley voters.
Quincy Timberlake won the subsequent leadership campaign by beating his closest rival, the late Oscar Kamau Kingara, by a margin of more than two to one, taking 109,096 votes to 54,795. He then announced his intention to reform and realign the party saying he needed to change the way voters looked at it, after politicians started deriding its name. Kingara was a renowned Kenyan lawyer and a prominent human rights activist. He was the founder and director of the Oscar Foundation Free Legal Aid Clinic, a human rights organization based in Nairobi. He joined the PlaCenta party in 2008 with intentions of revamping the party to make it electable. He supported the party financially. He was elected the secretary-general of the party by the National Executive Council. Kingara was a very strong advocate for the party and in an atmosphere where dissent was not tolerated, he actively campaigned for the party underground.
He was a major player in investigative work behind police killings in Kenya. In the same year he joined PlaCenta party, he participated actively in the release of a report titled, The Cry of Blood — Report on Extra-Judicial Killings and Disappearances accusing Kenyan police of killing and torturing thousands of innocent people as part of a crackdown on the Mungiki. The report was widely publicized by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, provoking several arrests, torture and death of top leadership of the party. The ruling elite became increasingly uncomfortable as the campaigns reached their highest peak and party membership grew exponentially. What followed was appalling and deplorable.
As The Cry of Blood — Report on Extra-Judicial Killings and Disappearances became popular by day, state apparatus was busy recruiting cold-blooded killers to hunt down PlaCenta party’s top leadership. Most Kenyans are however unaware that King’ara was a PlaCenta party adherent and financier. The late powerful cabinet minister John Michuki dispatched his cold-blooded killers to bring down the ‘wanted’ infiltrates. Party President Quincy Timberlake was arrested while addressing the party’s NEC conference along Mombasa road in Eastern province in bizzare circumstances. He was brutally assaulted and almost killed.
He was taken to Nyayo house, home to the famous torture chambers where he was electrocuted and deliberately denied access to basic human needs. He was later driven to Embu under the orders of a powerful cabinet minister to face charges of planning to expose government secrets. Dossiers of government graft evidence and officers allied to QweQwe squad were found at the site of party’s office. It was discovered later that the raid was conducted to block the party from holding a press conference which would have seen senior government leaders implicated with murders of innocent Kenyans and graft. Timberlake himself had a dossier in his hands with damning evidence showing that the Grand Regency Hotel had been sold at a throw away price to the then President Mwai Kibaki through proxies. It was previously owned by another graft master Kamlesh Pattni of the Goldenberg scandal fame. Timberlake’s report which is now held by the police had evidence of a bribery plot. Pattni bribed Kibaki with the hotel, selling it to him at Ksh2.9b instead of Ksh 4.2b.
In 2009, Kingara and PlaCenta’s Nyanza’s representative John Oulu, were shot as they sat in traffic in a white Mercedes E 220 ( KAJ 179 Z ) outside of the UoN main dormitories. Oulu was until then the party’s shadow exterior affairs secretary. The officers involved in the killing were dressed in dark suits. They escaped in two cars after firing at the traffic lights. Critics quickly pointed to elements with the Kenyan security forces and police as responsible for the assassinations. Following the killings, the government felt pressured enough to commit to doing something about the seemingly premeditated assassinations that had rocked the country in earlier years.
To date, there seems to be an elaborate plan by the security forces in Kenya to sidestep the judicial system and neutralize suspected criminals. Timberlake openly told Police Commissioner Brgd. Gen. Mohammed Ali that Kenya was not a Police State and that politicians could not get away with extra judicial killings, political assassinations, wiping out ICC witnesses and forcibly evicting targeted communities from particular regions. PlaCenta party put the government on notice to explain why no-one had been arrested and tried for the killing of Mr. King’ara or the hundreds of other young Kenyans killed in cold blood by the mysterious death squad.
It launched scathing attacks on the government of President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga for each using their powerful portfolios to assassinate or forcefully imprison their backyard opponents in the name of inciting the public against them. PlaCenta also questioned Kenyan media who were now fixated on 2013 succession politics and had completely forgotten about the deteriorating condition of security in Kenya because of bribery and souvenirs from their masters in corridors of power. He also launched attacks on Kenyan civil society bodies who seemed to be willing to stop at issuing statements condemning the killings.
The media mocked the party’s name and vehemently referred to it as placenta party to negatively expose it to public attacks since the name “placenta” is a taboo. Politicians labelled it as a cult and often connected it to an organization called the Finger of God church which was a different entity altogether.
The real terminology of the party is PlaCenta and not Placenta. PlaCenta is a combination of 2 other words; Platinum and Centraliser. Membership declined through the year 2011 despite an initial boost shortly after Timberlake was declared persona non grata in February 2010. The party again regained its lost support when the High Court found Timberlake not guilty of treason, theft of $100 million, being a member of cult and planning to assassinate the then Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
The party’s slogan entails taking Kenya back from the hands of foes of progress alias the old grey-haired cronies. There are only 3 centers of power in Kenya which have rivalled each other especially towards general elections. They are, the Mt Kenya Mafia, the Rift Valley Mafia and the Lake Victoria Mafia. At each election, alliances will be formed between any 2 of these groups, in an effort to bring down the odd-one-out. For example, the 2007 election saw the Lake Victoria Mafia gang up with the Rift Valley Mafia against the Mt Kenya Mafia.
The 2012 election saw the Rift Valley Mafia successfully gang up with the Mt Kenya Mafia against the Lake Victoria Mafia to win the elections. One can only guess how the landscape will shift over the next few years as tensions are already rife within the current ruling alliance. The Mt Kenya Mafia is dominated by GEMA, the Rift Valley Mafia is dominated by Kalenjins while the Lake Victoria one is dominated by Raila Odinga. The PlaCenta Party has led the fight for Civil Rights, Health Care, Social Security, Women and Workers’ rights. It is the party of Quincy Timberlake, Oscar King’ara, Paul Oulu, and the countless other everyday Kenyans who work each day to build a more perfect union. The party has always reiterated that if voted in, it would rein in a financial system that has been out of control and deliver the toughest consumer protections ever enacted.
It would rework the student loan system to make higher education more affordable and win the fight for equal pay for women, pass the Recovery Act, which would create and save millions of jobs, and make unprecedented investments in the major pillars of Kenya. Other reasons why the party wants to ” Take Back Kenya, ” are: toxic graft and murder of opponents, scandals like the Murungaru deal which saw the Kenya Army buy rotten Czech jets in 2003 and cost taxpayers Ksh 12.3b, the navy deal which cost Ksh 4.1b while it could have cost only Ksh 1.8b, the Kenya Police mahindra jeep scandal, the CID forensic laboratory that never came to fruition, the Prisons Department $3m boiler project, the Kenya Army Ksh 2.6b nexus scandal, the Department of Immigration’s Ksh 2.7b passport equipment system scandal, the raid on Standard and KTN offices for publishing corruption scandals, the transfer of Moi family’s Ksh 136b to foreign accounts, the Syokimau house demolitions ordered by Lands and Transport ministers, the declaration of Timberlake as a persona non grata, the Triton oil scandal, the maize scandal, attempts to withdraw Kenya from the ICC and extrajudicial killings among others.
Having knowledge and substantial evidence of these scandals, Timberlake remained a subject of focus for MPs and security agencies. They colluded in parliament and declared him a foreigner who was in the country illegally though holding original Kenyan documents. According to the party, the time has come for true PlaCentocrats, party followers and like-minded Independents to secede from their respective parties and join the PlaCenta Party of Kenya.
The PlaCenta Party of Kenya has established this action plan in “Project Take Back Kenya®.” The project was inspired by the erstwhile “Quincy Timberlake Show” about the sheriff of a rural town in Kenya. The people in that town held traditional, patriotic, common sense values seldom seen in today’s Kenya. Project Take Back Kenya® will restore that ethic.
Project Take Back Kenya® is a coördinated, national effort to break the CORD-Jubilee élite stranglehold on liberty by uniting Kenya’s diverse, conservative, traditional family value patriots at the local level. The project will foster a political environment that will encourage members to run for elected office in their localities. Project Take Back Kenya is the PlaCenta Party’s appeal to return politics to the local level. Today’s media, too often liberal and progressive, advances candidates at the expense of face-to-face local citizen interaction needed to truly assess them. The party believes that it is time for Kenyan citizens to offer political guidance to conservative candidates.
It also believes that the time has come for people with traditional moral values, conventional economic wisdom and belief in the foundations of government as set forth by the foundation cornerstone of Kenya to join in a common voice with common purpose, to unite and protect the very core values that have provided opportunities and created an unparalleled way of life that has been the foundation of Kenya.
To accomplish this mission the party provides a true conservative support base that empowers people to join in formulating genuine conservative agendas and to articulate those views to the Kenyan people without reservation or equivocation. The PlaCenta Party offers an opportunity to unite with others, to have individual ideals and opinions voiced in an effective campaign and to promote democratic positions on matters of importance to all.
The party has set aside a special politburo of volunteers which people can join as full members and can take part in the Caucus vote. It is dedicated to supporting and electing candidates who stand for family values, freedom of expression, equal distribution of resources, protection of our sovereign borders from terrorists, and good government. It has a 47-member National Executive Committee; a diverse group that includes barristers, solicitors, secretaries, a barber, insurance agent, realtors, an accountant, former military officers, agronomists, members of the diaspora, police officers (12 unfortunately massacred in bizarre manners by government operatives), government employees (anonymous membership due to intimidation and death threats), community workers, street families, a retired member of the National Assembly, restaurateurs, the president of an investment company and other retirees.
Amid this group, most are victims of torture while many have died in mysterious circumstances. Most Placentriots believe strongly in common-sense progressive democratic principles: lower taxes, less government, protection and increase of life expectancy, fiscal restraint and meritocracy and protection of women and children’s rights. The party opposes the biased, unfair reverse discrimination — and the out-of-control political revenue collection authority.
Timberlake faced 36 charges in court including those related to drug abuse and organising protests. He completed a total of 318 days in torture chambers, isolated forests reserved for torture purposes, under sedation at a remand home and at kangaroo quasi-jails and prisons. He underwent torture including waterboarding and exposure to wild animals including crocodiles. Assistant Commissioner of Police Samuel Chumo led most court appearances against him. Media was barred from reporting news about his prosecution beyond 2011.
He was forced to flee Kenya into exile for fear of torture and death after escaping unharmed from several bullets fired by unknown assailants. He abandoned parliamentary campaigns for safety reasons in early 2012.
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