President Kibaki is preparing to leave office in circumstances that are unprecedented in Kenya. On his way out after a full, two-term tenure, all expectations were that his departure would be attended by minimum fuss and a total focus on the campaign for the 11th General Election and the presidential succession. Instead, long before the official campaign period, the President’s final months in office are rolling out to the accompaniment of a welter of sideshows some of which were completely unforeseen and unscripted even as recently as the end of September or even mid-October.
He has signaled that he is packing his packs with two significant moves – the interdenominational thanksgiving service in his Othaya constituency at which he thanked his constituents for their support since 1974 and his announcement, in his Mashujaa Day Address to the Nation from Nyayo Stadium, that there would be a special national conference at the end of January 2012 mapping out the way forward to the succession and the rest of the General Election.
In the eye of the storm of the sideshows of his final year in power, Kibaki is caught firmly between two younger men, both of them sons of great Kenyans who also happened to be his mentors and benefactors and both of them, like their fathers before them, great and unrelenting rivals. The pundits are widely agreed that Kibaki would dearly like to endorse Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, who is also Finance Minister, as his preferred successor. Most other grown-up Kenyans know that Kibaki owes Raila a ringing endorsement such as the one Raila prefaced Kibaki’s own third bid for State House with in October 2002, with the single word Tosha, and that it would be both churlish and symptomatic of larger negative ethnic factors if he evinced total support for anyone else while the Premier is in the same room.
For as strategic and heartfelt a national leadership endorsement before Raila’s “Kibaki Tosha” declaration Kenyans would have to go back to Odinga Senior’s own endorsement of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta in 1959, towards the end of the latter’s long imprisonment, as Kenya’s leader into Independence. Jaramogi also prefaced Kibaki’s political career with his invitation to him, also in 1959, to leave a teaching career at Makerere University and become founding executive officer of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), the party of Independence, to be founded by Easter 1960.
In his turn, after Independence, Jomo elevated Kibaki to the Cabinet in the mid-1960s and accelerated his rise after Tom Mboya’s assassination in 1969. By the time Kenyatta died in office and was accorded the then only 15-years-old nation’s first State funeral, it was clear who, in a one-party system, was best-placed to become VP to Moi - Kibaki.
Non-contender players
Moi was ineligible to run for office in 2002, just as Kibaki is ineligible in 2012, for the simple reason that he had exhausted his two-term constitutional limit, just as Kibaki will have done by the end of the 10th Parliament. However, though not a contender, Moi ensured he remained a player by latching onto a preferred candidate, Uhuru, and personally campaigning for him up and down the country, including in terms of campaign finance, both of them options that are now clearly not open for Kibaki.
Although he wasn’t in the running, it was the Moi factor that eventually brought about an unprecedented unity among the Opposition, lining up behind a single unified candidate and an electoral result, the routing of Kanu, that had been postponed by disunity for at least a decade. In other words the Kenyan electorate of 2002 defeated the Moi factor by beating Uhuru.
Kibaki is not in the running in 2012 and he does not dare to be seen to be either a player or expressing a preference and then moving both heaven and earth to ensure that his candidate wins, unless that candidate is not from Central. Nothing in the law bars Kibaki from behaving exactly like Moi and gunning openly and brazenly for a preferred successor, but even Moi made sure it was not a Kalenjin that he was trying to sell to the electorate. In fact, Kibaki’s inhibitions in the matter rest almost entirely on what became of Moi’s preferred successor project and of lessons learnt from the dynamics of the 2007 Presidential election and its tragic immediate aftermath.
Moi’s choice of Uhuru was the euphoria trigger on both sides of the political aisle, inside then ruling party Kanu and in the then divided Opposition where Kibaki was Official Leader but not yet unified presidential candidate. In 2007, the euphoria trigger was a campaign formation whose thrust was 41 against 1, or as many of Kenya’s 42 communities against a Kikuyu President and the Kikuyu vote bloc.
Kibaki’s strategy thus far in managing his exit strategy and legacy package has been to avoid a euphoria trigger both for and against him by all means. He appears not to wish to indicate a preference for a successor and to avoid everything that might result in an overtly anti-Kikuyu mood in the campaign for the 11th General Election.
Neither Raila nor Uhuru
Kibaki is therefore going far out of his way to ensure that his legacy does not include a preference for a Kikuyu candidate as his successor. For personal and recent historical reasons, Kibaki is showing no sign either of endorsing Raila. This is despite and in spite of the fact that the two occupy a unique position in Kenyan politics as the principals of the Grand Coalition.
That Kibaki has been an unusual President of Kenya compared to his predecessors is not in doubt. It also looks as if he is all set to make as different an exit as either of them. Kibaki has been the one President of Kenya who was determined not to enjoy or perpetuate certain symbolic perks of the office.
For instance, he would not have his likeness on the currency or lend his name to a street, school, airport, university, other building or landmark, nor have a statue of him erected anywhere in the Republic. Nonetheless he has also been the one head of State and Government who has presided over the unveiling of statuary celebrating the eminence and contribution of others, all of them his age mates, none of whom became President.
Officially unveiling the statue of legendary nationalist, trade unionist and pioneer Economic Planning Minister Thomas Joseph Mboya in the capital city CBD last week, Kibaki took the opportunity to announce that a statue of Coast politician and pioneer Cabinet minister Ronald Ngala is also ready and only awaits a suitable location. This makes it three statues in a row to be erected under the self-effacing Kibaki’s watch. The first was Mau Mau field Marshall Dedan Kimathi Waciuri’s statue, which stands in the vicinity of the Hilton Hotel.
The unveiling of the Kimathi statue also coincided with the lifting of the ban, imposed by the British colonialists in 1950, on the Mau Mau movement, Kenya’s freedom struggle heroes, a ban that the successive Kanu presidencies of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi never saw fit to lift. Unable to endorse either an Odinga or a Kenyatta, Kibaki looks to all intents and purposes as if he is reconciled to leaving the choice of next President entirely up to the registered voters of 2012. As for Kenyans, they seem disproportionately interested in an outward-bound President’s opinion on his own preferences while the memory of how they trashed Moi’s explicit take on the issue is still fresh on their minds.
Dismantling ‘Big Brother’ presidency
Kibaki’s self-effacement could well mean that he will indeed leave it entirely up to the electorate to pick his successor; indeed, part of the imprimatur of his legacy could well be that he was the man who did not seek to impose his view on his way out of the House on the Hill. He has, after all, been the President who presided over the dismantling of the much-reviled Imperial Presidency inherited from the Kenyatta and Moi years, and will be leaving in place a much-weakened and in many ways neutered institution in terms of Big Brother control-freak and micro-management dynamics. He also presided over the crafting and enactment of a constitutional order that introduces devolution, a state of affairs that could yet evolve in quite unforeseen ways, both for better and for worse.
Kibaki’s laid-back style, minimal use of the secret police, lack of appetite for intrigue or a personality cult made him the right man in the right place at a time of much-delayed constitutional overhaul. Almost no other operative now on the political stage could have facilitated such a sea change as Kenyans have seamlessly witnessed in the Kibaki years in terms of constitutional review and expansion of the democratic space. And his achievement is all the more remarkable for having been reached its climax while he was in coalition partnership, not at loggerheads, with the Prime Minister.
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