By MUTUMA MATHIU
Posted Thursday, January 5 2012 at 20:00
Posted Thursday, January 5 2012 at 20:00
Happy New Year and welcome to 2012, the year of the first General Election since the tribal war of 2007/8.
All election years are typically described as “historic”, “crucial”, “pivotal”.
On the broader canvass of history, not all election years are pivotal. Some are inconsequential, some are mistakes, others are disasters.
Some, such as 2002 when the Moi cabal fell and President Kibaki was elected, take the wheel of political and economic evolution forward. Some will definitely take it back.
Two things are going to happen this year. Kenya will, in a peaceful and credible election, pick a strong, wise, visionary person to lead it; or, as its enemies and rivals hope, it will pick a corrupt jackass who will talk sweet during the day and plunder the nation at night.
Or even a spineless, indecisive minnow might scrape through by means of electoral deal-making.
The other thing that could happen is that the militias will dig up the machetes, bows and arrows for a resumption of war.
You may think that such a thing would surely never happen again. That’s what we all thought in 2007.
The fact is, ethnic violence has so far been so politically and economically profitable – as a means to power, disenfranchising rival tribes, destroying the competition’s businesses, grabbing and keeping other people’s land – that it should not shock us if the immoral still see it as a solution, rather than a problem.
Whatever the outcome, there is one factor which, like the corrosive racism rampant in some work-places, real estate market, and some Nairobi shops, which nobody talks about but which has determined election outcomes since 1957: Neo-imperialism.
A politician’s employee was once explaining to me the philosophy of a well-known leader who believes that a Kenyan president is not determined by the “votes of the Turkana and other tribesmen” but by the goodwill of the big powers, chief among them the British.
To what extent, beyond giving money, do foreigners determine the outcome of Kenyan elections?
Well, let me give you tidbits from some juicy things I have been reading, then you can decide for yourself.
Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s iconic first president, would never have got power had he not met and befriended Sir Macolm MacDonald, the last British governor who also served as the first High Commissioner.
The colonialists had been rigging elections since 1957. The election of May 1963 was pivotal, for it would determine whether the party favoured by the colonialists, Kadu, or the nationalist Kanu, would take power.
Instructions had been given to the colonial administration to “administer” the 1963 election to ensure that it ended in a deadlock between Kanu and Kadu.
MacDonald, a seasoned diplomat and experienced colonial civil servant, evaluated the political talent and arrived at a surprisingly honest conclusion: Kenyatta was “the most shrewd, authoritative and sagacious leader available to Kenya” and Kadu had “far fewer good brains”, its leader “rather second-rate”.
As a result, he changed things and ordered the administration not to “influence the General Election in favour of either a greater or lesser Kadu victory”.
My English is not good enough for me to work out whether that constituted instructions to rig the election in favour of Kanu, though, probably, given Kenyatta’s popularity, he would have had no problem winning a fair election.
In 1974, the same MacDonald is reported to have described Daniel arap Moi as “totally thick” to a British audience, warning that Moi “might go seriously wrong if left to his own devices”.
The British had hoped that Moi would be a puppet under Charles Njonjo and Mwai Kibaki. Ha ha ha! The dexterity with which Moi got rid of Njonjo first, then Kibaki, was anything but thick.
Njonjo was the architect of Moi’s career, working within the system to help Moi clear opposition to the vice-president succeeding Kenyatta, first against Tom Mboya, then against the Kiambu and Gema mafias.
As we prepare to don the party T-shirts and sing the campaign songs, we can only hope that it is our votes, not the wishes of some bloody imperialist, that will put a tenant in the big house on the hill.
Thick? I think not. But the man from Sacho did go terribly wrong, squandering the nation’s wealth setting up a little dictatorship, complete with Romaniesque torture chambers and a cult of personality.
mmathiu@ke.nationmedia.com.
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