Nairobi — Forty years ago today, the life of one of this nation's brightest politicians, Tom Mboya, was snuffed out by an assassin's bullet.

It was a sad day for Kenya for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that no serious political system should feature assassinations as one of the means of arbitrating disputes or advancing the ambitions of competing players.

Mr Mboya was by no means a perfect leader or a flawless man. His ambition sometimes got the better of him and he was the brains behind some of the controversial amendments to the constitution which handed excessive power to the presidency and the central government. The way he outmanoeuvred political opponents exposed an unhealthy degree of ruthlessness and calculation.

BUT HE IS ALSO WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED as a brilliant nationalist who was an indispensable player in the battle to win internal self-government for Kenya.

He accomplished a great deal in his life. He laid the foundations for two decades of economic growth in post-colonial Kenya while his policies and ideas were widely adopted by the Asian Tigers which achieved independence at about the same time as Kenya.

Mr Mboya made a major difference in the lives of hundreds of young men who benefited from a programme that saw them land scholarships in the US. The current occupant of the White House, Barack Obama, probably owes his position to this programme, which saw his father benefit from a scholarship to Harvard University.

Perhaps Mr Mboya's biggest legacy and the reason this nation misses him so much, was his unique approach to politics. He and the second vice-president, Joseph Murumbi, were perhaps the only major politicians of the time who did not lean on the tribe as the principal base on which their political careers relied.

Mr Mboya was a visionary who actively refused to play the ethnic card when he was a trade unionist and in later years after joining politics.

HE INSISTED ON RUNNING FOR PARLIAMENTARY office in Nairobi, when it would have been easier to dominate in rural Nyanza. As a minister and Kanu heavyweight, he built a coalition of supporters from across the country.

Mr Mboya was the greatest hope this country had of emerging as a united and vibrant nation, capable of fulfilling its vast promise.

It is a tragedy that inferior talents who felt intimidated by Mr Mboya's brilliance decided to cut short his life in a brutal and cowardly fashion.

But later generations should take lessons from Mr Mboya's life. Voters should reward those politicians who aspire to national office by advancing clear ideas and advertising their talents rather than those who solely rely on alliances based on ethnicity. That is Mr Mboya's greatest legacy and it is well worth repeating the words of one of his biographers on the subject of the importance of cultivating "Kenyanness."

"TOM MBOYA WAS ABOVE ALL A KENYAN: A man whose life-experience reflected all the complexity and controversiality of his society. He was born under settler colonialism, a child of the labour lines. He grew up knowing exploitation and discrimination.

But he grasped also the system's technical and metaphysical culture, and learned therefore how to assert himself against the forces whose victims his people were. In the process of growing up, he experienced his country and its native cultures as few others ever did. He absorbed a whole spectrum of Africanity: Suba, Luo, Kamba, Kikuyu ... He demonstrated, in times of great social and political fragmentation, that a national vision was possible.

In his lifetime, no other political leader in Kenya fulfilled this function in quite the same way. Nor has any since, though the lesson he taught then is one that needs continual re-learning. And that is one of the major reasons why he deserves to be remembered."