By KPC Reporter
Professor Thomas Tonny Onyango Mboya, a distinguished academic at the Technical University of Kenya (TUK), lost his life on Tuesday morning in a violent confrontation over land in Waware village, Suba North Sub-county.
Prof. Mboya, who served as Director of the School of Mathematics and Statistics and was an Associate Professor at TUK, had gone to the disputed site to mark boundaries when he was fatally attacked.
Eyewitnesses say the assailant, who had previously constructed buildings on the contested land, reacted violently after a court ordered them to remove the structures.
Instead of complying, he allegedly arrived at the scene wielding a panga and launched a brutal assault, killing Prof. Mboya and seriously injuring his father.
The elder Mboya sustained deep wounds and is currently hospitalized in Homa Bay County.
The attacker fled as villagers raised the alarm, narrowly escaping a mob that had gathered in response to the violence.
Local leaders have expressed outrage over the incident.
Suba North Member of Parliament Millie Odhiambo condemned the killing, calling for swift justice.
“The murder of Professor Thomas Mboya of Rusinga Island is unfortunate. Violence never sorts out issues. May the killer and any persons who may have aided or abetted in his death be brought to book,” she posted on Facebook.
Impactful life
Prof. Mboya was a towering figure in Kenya’s academic landscape.
Born in 1970, he began his education at Kokuro Secondary School before advancing to Homa Bay High School for his A-Levels.
He earned a Bachelor of Education (Science) from Egerton University in 1993 and began teaching under the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) the following year.
His pursuit of higher learning led him to the University of Nairobi (UoN), where he completed a Master of Science in Mathematics in 1999.
After a stint at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA), he traveled to the UK and obtained a PhD in Inverse and Ill-posed Problems from the University of Leeds in 2008.
Prof. Mboya returned to CUEA before joining TUK in 2012.
He rose through the ranks to become Chair of the Department of Statistics and Computational Mathematics, later heading the Department of Industrial and Engineering Mathematics.
His leadership and scholarship earned him widespread respect across academic circles.
At the time of his death, Prof. Mboya was leading the School of Mathematics and Statistics at TUK.