This archive report was first published on 15 September 2019.
Joseph Mwaya, the eldest son of Scolastica Syowiya, is still grappling with the loss of his mother, a 43-year-old businesswoman who was found dead in Kajiado a month after she went missing in Nairobi.
According to Mwaya, his mother had told him days before her disappearance that she had been receiving strange calls and feared for her life. She had planned to meet someone at a club near Mama Lucy Hospital on the evening of July 31, but her body was discovered dumped dozens of kilometers away from the club.
On August 2, Mwaya filed a missing person report at the Buru Buru Police Station, but the police investigation was slow to take off. The family claimed that the police had declined to contact the club where Syowiya was last seen for CCTV footage and had even demanded cash from them.
It was not until three weeks later, on August 2, that the police in Kajiado contacted the family and informed them that Syowiya's body had been picked up from a bush and was lying at the Kajiado referral hospital mortuary. A postmortem confirmed that she had been strangled and hit by a blunt object on the head.
Joseph Mwaya's account of his mother's disappearance and murder is backed up by CCTV footage that showed her walking into the club while speaking on the phone at 18:45:45 and walking out at 18:46:42, barely two minutes later.
