When Moi pounced on Matiba

To watch Mr Kenneth Matiba today walk with a shuffled limp and follow his laboured speech is to forget the energetic leader who on May 3, 1990, teamed up with Mr Charles Rubia to shake the very foundations of the repressive one-party establishment with this demand: “The single party system must go now and not tomorrow. Twenty seven years of experiment are enough.”

It was not exactly a new call. Activist lawyers, politicians and clergymen, most notably the Rev Dr Timothy Njoya and Bishop Henry Okullu, had even earlier broached the prospect of Kenya joining the wave evident in eastern Europe away from totalitarian single-party regimes.

But it was the entry into the fray of Mr Matiba and Mr Rubia, wealthy, establishment figures and former Cabinet ministers with solid political constituencies, that changed the ball game forever.

Mr Matiba was then a 58 year-old avid outdoors man famous for his hard driving ambition and singleness of purpose. He had lost his party position in the rigged elections of 1988, and he complained loudly by quitting the Cabinet.

Being expelled from President Moi’s Kanu those days spelt the death-knell for any political career, and the list of the condemned was rapidly growing.

After cooling his heels out of Parliament for a while, Mr Matiba caused a firestorm when he teamed up with another Kanu expellee, Mr Rubia, to launch the multi-party campaign.

Even though the statement he read with Rubia was a joint effort, President Moi singled him out for attack, labelling him a dictator. Those who worked with him were called tribalists and puppets of foreign masters.

The pro-democracy movement was growing, however, and the litmus test came when Matiba, Rubia, Oginga Odinga and others applied for a licence to hold a public meeting at Nairobi’s historic Kamukunji on July 7, 1990, to test public opinion on a new political order.

Moi, the self-described professor of politics, whose tender caressing of the Bible often camouflaged his predatory instincts, knew the time to pounce.

On July 4, 1990, both Matiba and Rubia were picked up in the city by teams of plain clothes policemen. Barely 24 hours later, their detentions were gazetted.

A close associate of Matiba’s is certain that the former Kiharu MP never expected President Moi to detain him.

“Moi was a business associate and a family friend from the 1960s,” he says. “Despite their political differences, Matiba did not figure out that Moi could go to the extent of personally neutralising him.”

It was a tragic miscalculation. Matiba would not leave Kamiti Maximum Security Prison the same man again.