President Uhuru Kenyatta sent his condolences to the family of Chris Karumba Mburu, hailing him as a distinguished career public servant and a great diplomat.
“Death has robbed us of a great public servant who served his country with distinction. Since his appointment as our envoy to Juba, Ambassador Mburu has worked hard to ensure the free flow of trade and investment between Kenya and South Sudan.
“Kenya has lost a brilliant public servant whose star was shining bright and whose service shall be dearly missed,” he wrote.
Kenyan Ambassador to South Sudan Chris Karumba Mburu is dead.
According to his family, Mburu died of a heart attack on Sunday, February 16. He reportedly collapsed and died at his Juba residence in South Sudan.
A former Director of External Intelligence at the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Mburu was appointed as Kenya’s ambassador to South Sudan in July 2018 by President Uhuru Kenyatta.
He was part of a cohort that included several civil servants and politicians, among them former Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) boss Ndegwa Muhoro who was posted to Malaysia and former Chairperson of the Salaries and Remunerations Commission (SRC) Sarah Serem who was posted to Beijing, China.
In recent weeks, Mburu had led an aggressive campaign against counterfeit Kenyan goods being sold in South Sudan as it emerged that Kenyan manufacturers could be black-listed due to the thriving counterfeit operation in Juba.
The sub-standard goods are either produced in Juba’s black market or smuggled through the border with Uganda.
“The Embassy is in possession of products that have been withdrawn from shelves following backlash from consumers over low standards.
“Some of the manufacturers have gone through proper certification of their products by the Kenya Industrial Property Institute and Kebs but produce substandard (goods) for this market, in effect counterfeiting their products,” Mburu wrote in a letter to the Kenya Bureau of Standards (Kebs) shared by The East African in December 2019.
He was also pursuing an agreement to have Kenyan and South Sudan nationals exempted from producing visas during cross-border travel to facilitate easier movement.
Speaking to Juba Monitor in December 2019, Mburu stated that all that remained for the agreement to be sealed was a meeting between immigration officials of the two countries.
“The process is still ongoing but the two directors of Immigration of Kenya and South Sudan should meet. They already have the agreement, it’s only a matter of signing before it is effected.
“It’s through the meeting in Nairobi that the two directors shall sign the visa waiver agreement, the meeting should have taken place but because of so many things going on, it didn’t,” Mburu told the publication.
