Former nominated senator Joy Adhiambo Gwendo is serving two and a half years in jail after Chief Magistrate Douglas Ogoti found her guilty of “hoodwinking the court.”
The former legislator entered into a plea bargain with the state but could not honour it. She pleaded guilty to using her position to grant herself a Sh2 million benefit and in 2016 defrauded Kisumu East Cotton Growers Cooperative Society.
According to the Nairobian, Ms Gwendo, a former Ramogi FM presenter entered into politics right after meeting now Kisumu County Assembly speaker Onyango Oloo.
Oloo was then the TNA secretary general. His interview on Ramogi got her thinking about joining politics.
An ambitious 33 year old Gwendo campaigned for President Uhuru Kenyatta in an opposition stronghold of Kibera.
Fast forward to 2013 when she set foot in the Senate, the 2017 Kisumu East MP aspirant’s first order of business was to take a mortgage withe the Parliamentary mortgage facility.
She is said to have purchased a Sh23 million home in Phenom Estate, Lang’ata from her matrimonial home in Kibera.
Gwendo then left her husband and jumped into a romantic relationship with a married man identified as Thomas Mbewa.
Theirs was a full blown relationship that strained Mbewa’s eight year marriage forcing out his wife out of their home in Madaraka Estate.
The former legislator is also said to have over the five years she was in office, enjoyed the finer things in life especially the whiskey.
Her home pub, Kahawa Tungu has learnt was the popular 1824 and sometimes The Pitstop.
She and her friends enjoyed live music, especially Congolese music and only the finest whiskey money could buy.
They danced the nights away, something that friends now say was a bit over the top.
“I thought it was a bit too much seeing that she drank nearly every day,” a friend told the Nairobian.
Friends also intimated that sometime in 2014, Gwendo asked friends for money to help pay off a loan in Parliament only to apply for another. This one, Kahawa Tungu understands, was meant to finance a trip to Brazil for the FIFA World Cup.
Two years later, she was seeing queuing for handouts from an ambassador who at the time was running Jubilee Party operations in Nyanza.
Her five year stint was filled with filled with drama, a pinch of arrogance and violent outbursts.
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Take for example, Gwendo attacked her secretary Annette Oyuga on March 15, 2016.
Ms Oyuga had been friends with the Bachelor of Library Science degree graduate from the University of Nairobi for the longest time.
The matter was reported to the Parliament Police Station under OB number: OB No 23/15/16.
She later accused her friends of nearly “infecting her with tetanus.”
According to the Nairobian, two days before the “cat fight”, she had been assaulted by her then boyfriend in the middle of a road in Milimani Estate, Kisumu.
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