The Great Rift

John Githongo and David Ndii
24th July 2010

A most intriguing political development occasioned by the constitutional referendum is how former President Daniel Arap Moi and his onetime political protégé, William Ruto, have closed ranks to lead the NO campaign. It is said that in politics there are no permanent friends or foes, only permanent interests. Do Moi and Ruto have permanent interests, and are these threatened by the proposed constitution? Attempting to answer this question is as interesting and insightful as it is essential to understanding the political ramifications of the proposed constitution.

In a number of articles published elsewhere in the last fortnight, we have argued that the sole purpose of our quest for a new constitution is political reform. In brief our argument is as follows: our political system has three pillars, tribalism, corruption and unfair distribution of resources. The presidency is the center of the system. Tribalism delivers power to an individual who then uses corruption to skew distribution of public resources, primarily to his kinsmen.

To make it in this political system you MUST mobilize along tribal lines. Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Joseph Murumbi, for example, tried national politics at the highest level without doing this and were let down. It forced Prime Minister Raila Odinga, for example, to consolidate the Luo vote and only then reach out to other tribal chiefs. The system makes potentially good leaders tribalists — to lead Kenya, you must first lead your tribe.

Moi is one of the original architects of this system. In the 1950s, he was instrumental in uniting the erstwhile related but distinct ethnic communities into a political hegemony - the Kalenjin. During his presidency, he continued to incorporate others, such as the Pokot, and a grand project to create an even larger hegemon, the KAMATUSA was emerging. This is not unique. The Kenyatta regime made some headway with trying to create a GEMA hegemon — had it survived another decade, GEMA would probably become a bona fide tribe. Not surprisingly, one of Moi's first political initiatives was to neutralize GEMA.

The Grand Compact

We should like to argue that the political centrality of the Rift Valley emerges partly out of a grand unspoken compact between the Gikuyu and Kalenjin elite and their allies in the 1960s. This compact destroyed KADU; helped facilitate marginalization of the Luo political elite from the centre by the early 1970s; and, helped create the monolithic KANU of the 1980s. This was arrived at in exchange for enabling, allowing, facilitating mass Gikuyu migration into the Rift Valley from the 1960s onwards. For the Rift Valley at independence enjoyed a relative land abundance that turned it into the demographic and political shock absorber of Kenya as it soaked up hundreds of thousands of migrants from Central, Western and Nyanza Provinces in particular.

The quid pro quo saw Moi became a powerful vice president and home affairs minister. A section of his tribesmen enjoyed the fruits of incumbency. For the elite around Kenyatta, Gikuyu migration solved the time bomb of Gikuyu land hunger in Central Province that had precipitated the Mau Mau rebellion against the British in the 1950s. The compact made land available in the Rift for Gikuyu and other landless poor and, significantly, it enabled the mainly home guard elite around Kenyatta to take over vast tracts of land in Central Province and even parts of the highlands in the Rift Valley intact without a massive redistribution to those who had supported the Mau Mau. The most politically potent and visible vehicles of the compact were settlement schemes and land buying companies. It does to remember though that by the outbreak of World War II, there were already over 200,000 African migrants in the Rift Valley. The majority of the migrants (122,000) were Gikuyu—many of them victims of land expropriation (as early as 1910, over 10,000 Gikuyu families had been rendered squatters on their own land in Kiambu).

It does here to keep in mind that only 13 percent of Kenya is classified as "high potential", and close to half of this land - 45 percent of it - is in the Rift Valley Province. The Rift Valley is Kenya's bread basket and accounts for virtually all the commercial production of maize — Kenya's staple cereal, and is in fact the only surplus producer i.e. producing more than it consumes. The demographic picture is an interesting one, too. Between 1969 and 1989 the population of Kalenjins in the Rift Valley grew by 100 percent; that of Gikuyus by 170 percent.

While the compact held in the Rift Valley voices of dissent were ruthlessly crushed – by Moi himself, both when he was vice president and as president. This was his part of the bargain, containing Kalenjin land and political grievances in exchange for power at the centre. The most iconic was Jean Marie Seroney, the MP for Nandi North who was detained in 1975 following a career that was memorable because of his 1969 "Nandi Hills Declaration" on land in the Rift Valley, which basically argued that the Kalenjins had an automatic option on settlement in any land that had traditionally been owned by the community. Throughout the 1980s, Moi suppressed political dissent in the Rift more aggressively than elsewhere. By 2002, the Kalenjin elite was bereft of civil society actors who could articulate some of the underlying grievances that had been a reality in the region since the days of Koitalel arap Samoei and Seroney.

Discombobulation of the Multiparty Era

The single party dictatorship was instrumental in keeping the compact in force. It is not difficult to see that had the multiparty system been allowed to flourish, Kalenjin grievances as well as those of the Gikuyu dispossessed championed by Bildad Kaggia would have found political expression and caused considerable difficulty. Mungiki, in part, was born out of these contradictions.

Unsurprisingly, the compact began to unravel in the early 1990s when, with the reintroduction of political pluralism, much of the Gikuyu elite joined the opposition. Their alienation had been completed in the mid-1980s when a number of Gikuyu-owned banks collapsed, only to be replaced by institutions that enjoyed direct patronage from the State. This Gikuyu elite exit and its transformation into political opposition in the early 1990s was greeted with a militarization of the politics of the Rift Valley. The region was declared a "KANU zone", i.e. the compact was over! From then on episodic ethnic cleansing swept the region, targeting the ethnic groups of perceived opposition supporters. The average Gikuyu businessman, farmer, trader and mere survivor bore the brunt of pogroms that accompanied elections throughout the 1990s and of course most furiously in 2007/8.

Moi was going to have to retire in 2002. He surprised many by the lengths to which he went to install Uhuru Kenyatta as his successor in KANU. On reflection, this was not as inexplicable as it seems. With a Gikuyu president, the Kalenjin elite would have "hostages" in the Rift Valley that they could use to negotiate. Arguably, no one fitted this bill better than Kenyatta's son; not only would the Kalenjin elite have their hostages, but Uhuru would also be vulnerable to pressure by his particular economic constituency.

KANU lost, and in 2002 the Kalenjin elite found themselves in opposition for the first time since KADU when the NARC wave swept KANU from power after almost 40 years of incumbency. It was a disorientating time - a shock to the system made worse by the dismissal and retirement from the civil and security services of many Kalenjin managers and officers. Ironically, incumbency had become more the natural condition for the Kalenjin elite than for their Gikuyu and Luo counterparts who at various times were vanguards of political opposition to both the Moi and Kenyatta regimes.

The Kalenjin elite's attempt to restore the compact did not end there. In 2007, when it became readily apparent that Raila was going to be Kibaki's challenger, Moi surprised many by backing Kibaki. Uhuru followed suit. Ruto, on the other hand, led a disenchanted Kalenjin elite – Moi's opharns - to ODM.

In summary, one can argue that the Kalenjin elite owe their ascendancy on the national prominence to two things. First, coalescing a large ethnic hegemony. It is doubtful if they had remained as Nandi's, Kipsigis, Tugens etc, they would have as much clout. Secondly, to the astuteness of Moi in manipulating tribal politics. This enabled him to stay in power for 24 years despite running a corrupt, inept regime that brought the economy to near collapse.

This is the system that the proposed constitution is meant to dismantle. Perhaps no one understands its ramifications more than Moi and William Ruto, who is on the cusp of becoming Moi's successor as the undisputed political leader of the Kalenjin.

Across the Rift Valley, Gikuyus are voting for 2012 already – with their feet. Others are preparing for the next convulsion more robustly in the knowledge that the ability of the government, even if led by a Gikuyu, to protect their lives and property is much diminished in both reality and perception. The latter is often more important than the former.

It is not unlikely that the animus of the failed compact will express itself in an assortment of ways over the coming three years: involuntary outward migration of Gikuyus and other non-Kalenjin ethnic groups from certain parts of the Rift Valley; and, the increased likelihood of violence in certain areas such as Mount Elgon and its environs, Uasin Gishu, Kuresoi, Ziwa, etc. Around Burnt Forest, people have started to quietly move out of some of the farms and set up closer to townships where unity in numbers is more reassuring.

The truth of the matter is that the challenge of Kenyan nationhood will find its most powerful expression in the Rift Valley before, during and after the referendum. The Rift Valley is more "Kenyan" than Muranga or Vihiga where ethnic homogeneity allows a type of politics that would lead to resentment and violence if it were to play out in the ethnically mixed areas of the Rift, Coast and our urban areas. This is a good thing but like going to a dentist for a major procedure – it's going to hurt and the only anesthetic are the kind words of a few foreigners hovering around the patient.

John Githongo is the CEO of the Inuka Kenya Trust
Dr. David Ndii is an economist