Bob Odalo
21 January 2008
Nairobi — She had just arrived in Nakuru Town three days to Christmas and was ready to join her husband and two children for the festivities.
But a phone call from Nairobi instructing her to report to the Chief Justice's office on the eve of Christmas made her restless.
For Mrs Hellen Omondi the call left her guessing.
She was a member of the Auctioneers Licensing Board which had just held its last meeting of the year before she retired to Nakuru. In her thinking Mrs Omondi thought that maybe the Chief Justice wanted an urgent brief on what had transpired during the meeting.
Come Sunday December 23 and she took a matatu from Nakuru to Nairobi to be on time for the Monday engagement. She carried with her the Auctioneer Board meeting files.
By 8 am sharp Mrs Omondi was already at the Chief Justice's office and announced her presence to the secretary.
"Sorry, but you will have to see the Registrar of the High Court. She has a message for you," came the reply from the secretary.
Shock of her life
For a few seconds Mrs Omondi was at a loss on what was happening. She urgently marched to the registrar's office and it was there that she got the shock of her life.
"If you have come with your gown put it on. You are going to be sworn in as a High Court Judge," came the bombshell from the registrar.
"I was shocked and lost for words. I asked the registrar why they did not prepare me in advance. I was dumbfounded. It was one of those moment you think you are dreaming," Mrs Omondi told the Nation in an interview last Friday.
She afterwards called her husband in Nakuru to tell him the news but he too doubted her.
"I remember him telling me as we talked on phone that April Fools Day comes once in a year, on April 1 but not December 24th," she said adding "I understood why he said so because when I left Nakuru for Nairobi my being appointed a High Court Judge never featured at all."
Firm, efficient, fearless, tough and down to earth! Those were the fitting adjectives that described Lady Justice Omondi who, at 46 years of age, is arguably one of the youngest High Court judges, when she attended a farewell party hosted for her by members of the Machakos branch of the Law Society of Kenya on Friday at the Garden hotel.
The branch chairman, Mr Larry Wambua, said Mrs Omondi deserved the appointment. "You were God-send.
You were posted to Machakos at a time when practice in the courts both for the litigant and the practitioner was very chaotic. There was disharmony all around and disunity was the order of the day but you turned all that positively to the benefit of all," Mr Wambua said.
Lady Justice Omondi admitted that she came to Machakos as a chief magistrate at a time when the relationship between the Government, the Judiciary and the bar was at its lowest ebb.
The relationship was made worse by the strike involving magistrates.
She said when she took her Machakos office nothing was moving.
The strike, she said, had a big effect on operations of the courts.
"Eight magistrates were removed from the station, but the government brought in only five to replace them. There was problem," she said adding, "I would come to the office and while away the day filling crosswords, you see capital remand prisoners were not being brought to court while civil cases were piling up nothing was moving. After two weeks of boredom I said enough was enough and decided to act".
She employed an approach she called 'shared wisdom' where she brought all the stakeholders involved in the dispensation of justice and within time she identified the problem and set things in motion to the satisfaction of all and sundry.
In the three years she served in Machakos, Lady Justice Omondi commuted daily from Nairobi choosing to travel by matatus every morning.
She kept time and was always in the town by 8 am.
"We would always find her in office by 8 am or earlier. Sometimes we thought she was a resident in the town," said lawyer Phillip Mulwa during the luncheon.
Mrs Omondi came into the limelight late last year when she summoned the Commissioner of Police and his Prison counterpart after some 32 suspected arsonists who had earlier appeared before her and remanded in custody were unprocedurally released from prison the same day.
The incident brought into sharp conflict the judiciary and the prosecution after it emerged that a Cabinet minister had put pressure on the Commissioner of Prisons to have the prisoners released.
When the two failed to obey the summons she issued a warrant for their arrest. She followed the move with a strong letter to the Chief Justice explaining her predicament.
The issue embarrassed the government and the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr Keriako Tobiko, and the Chief Justice were forced to intervene. The matter is still in court.
Greatest challenge
This incident apart, Mrs Omondi says the greatest challenge to her career occurred when she was serving as a magistrate in Nakuru in 1992.
"At the height of the tribal clashes that gripped some parts of the Rift Valley a large group of suspects was brought before me and they readily pleaded guilty to the offences. I jailed them for ten years each, this did not go down well with some people in the establishment who issued some threats. I had my share of concern then," she said.
But Mrs Omondi says a burial dispute between children of a woman who had died in Nakuru with relatives made her apply a lot of wisdom before delivering the verdict. "It was a case involving people from my tribe. Apart from being one of them I was too a Christian just like them. The case required me to balance tradition and religion," she said.
The children wanted to bury their mother at the Nakuru Town cemetery and were stopped moments before they lowered the body into the grave.
The clan wanted the deceased buried in her ancestral home.
"I ruled in favour of the clan," she said.
At the Machakos Law Courts Mrs Omondi was admired as an environmentalist. Occasionally she would lead members of the bar and the bench in planting trees, a project she started.
As she leaves Machakos to take up her new responsibilities, Mrs Omondi says she dreams of a time when the station will have more spacious court rooms for magistrates.
The judge says she is disturbed by the state of instability following the announcement of last year's presidential election results. "As a mother my heart goes out to those suffering children who will never understand what brought them to their current pathetic state. I equally grieve for mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters who have been rendered helpless in their own country".
The judge added: "We have not given dialogue a chance. I always believe in the power of talks. Dialogue works in our places of work, I believe it can work in the current stand-off".
She is married to a Nakuru medic Dr Omondi and they have two children Joshua and Richie. She is the daughter of a retired civil servant, Mr Arthur Reuben Owino, and mama Dorina Owino.
Born on August 1, 1961, Mrs Omondi begun her education at Temple Road primary school, Nairobi, before moving to Kileleshwa primary where she sat her Certificate of Primary Education exam.
She later joined Kenya High School for her 'O' and 'A' Level courses. Among her classmates were lawyers Betty Murungi and solicitor General Muthoni Kimani.
She joined the University of Nairobi in 1980 and earned her law degree in 1984.
After completing her two year course at the Kenya School of Law, Mrs Omondi joined the Judiciary as a district magistrate in Nakuru. She left the town in 1999 as a principal magistrate when she earned a scholarship for a post graduate course in Minnesota, USA, courtesy of the Hubert Humphrey fellowship.
She majored in the administration of justice with a bias in women and children's affairs.
When she came back in 2000 she was transferred to Thika Law Courts as a Senior Principal Magistrate. Two years later she was moved to the Milimani Courts as a Chief Magistrate.
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