Saturday, June 15, 2013

THE VERY LONG SHADOWS OF JOMO AND MOI

Saturday, June 15, 2013 - 00:00 -- BY JOE ADAMA
The Very Long Shadows of Jomo and Moi Why Uhuru and Ruto have steep mountains and valleys indeed to traverse in Kenya’s rapidly evolving political topography By JOE ADAMA Depending on who you talk to, the Uhuru Kenyatta/William Ruto government has yet to gain traction or is already well on its way on a very hard slog indeed in a political topography that is quite unlike any other negotiated by an incoming Presidential administration in Kenyan history.
The UhuRuto dynamic duo made the election campaign and its aftermath look effortless, surmounting every hurdle in their path, including the Raila Odinga Supreme Court challenge to their victory as declared by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).
Nothing seemed to stand in their path, except the stern yet strangely pacific glare of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda of the Gambia.
But even the crimes-against-humanity charges against them at The Hague arising from the 2007-2008 post-election violence seem to be tottering, with headlines like the latest issue of the Paris-based newsmagazine The Africa Report’s “Who Is on Trial?”, which has the preamble “The ICC is fighting for its credibility as Kenyan politicians demand it abandon the trials of those accused of mass killings”, increasingly becoming the norm.
Now that their government is more or less fully loaded, with the appointment of the Cabinet and top bureaucracy and the delivery of their first national Budget on Thursday this week, all eyes, whether friend’s, foe’s or neutral’s inside Kenya, are turning to the style and substance of their administration.
Increasingly, and despite the fact that comparisons are odious and the times and circumstances have changed drastically, President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto are being compared and contrasted with Presidents Jomo Kenyatta (in office 1964-78) and Daniel arap Moi (1978-2002).
Jomo Kenyatta founded and established the imperial Presidency, amending the Independence Constitution negotiated with the British and dismantling Kenya’s first experiment with federalism while the strains of God Save the Queen, the UK’s National Anthem , still echoed in the ears of a generation of Kenyans.
Moi succeeded Kenyatta in August 1978 and went on to rule for 24 years with an iron hand, establishing a system which historians and other analysts are now routinely characterizing as a kleptocracy (derived from the Greek for “power” and “thief” to mean the “rule of thieves”).
Today, 35 years since the death of the founder of the office, some Kenyans who are neither the fans of Jomo Kenyatta nor Uhuru Kenyatta are looking at the son in the midst of the unsightly and unedifying spat with the Senate and wondering out loud exasperatedly, “What is it about a President Kenyatta, incoming, and a Senate and a devolution project?”
Today, 11 years since Moi left the office, some Kenyans who are not Ruto’s well-wishers are looking at his choice of Cabinet and Principal Secretaries, drawn mostly from the Rift Valley and clearly beholden to his patronage, and preferring to see the beginnings of another marathon Rift Valley hegemony and scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners procedure.

SHADOWS OF ‘ORIGINAL SINS’
This past week, two national newspapers that have covered all the three Presidential regimes since Independence, the Standard and the Daily Nation, separately ran prominent features highlighting the phenomenon of the very long shadows of the Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi eras, underscoring public perceptions both inside Kenya and the Diaspora about what could well lie ahead for UhuRuto.
The Nation’s Jaindi Kisero analysed the recent suspension of the Kenya Pipeline Company’s CEO Selest Kilinda and pronounced it distinctly suspicious and a throwback to pre-reform Presidential administrations.
Observing that under Kilinda the company was in the process of floating a tender for the construction of a new, bigger, pipeline to replace the existing 34-year-old structure, as well as having built very large reserves indeed in readiness for the massive project, Kisero noted that a multiple-billion-shilling loan taken by KPC barely three years ago is almost fully paid up and the key State corporation has registered profitability.
Kisero flatly refused to accept that Kilinda should be brought down on grounds of nepotism. Apparently Kilinda just looked on as a sister and brother were employed by KPC in menial capacities.
Instead, Kisero turned a critical laser ray focus on the Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Davis Chirchir, a Ruto ally and nominee readily appointed by Uhuru, and read an “it’s our turn to eat” paradigm into Kilinda’s plight.
All eyes are now on who replaces Kilinda and how the new pipeline project pans out. Ruto and his handlers looked at Kisero’s hard-hitting analysis with baleful eyes and seemed to put much stock by the fact that Kilinda was a former senior colleague of the columnist’s at the Nation Media Group, something which the opinion piece did not disclose.
Kisero’s overriding point was that the economic transformation promised by the Jubilee Government will not come soon if there are relapses into Moi-era ways.
Moi had all the chances, and all the time in the world, to build even more roads than Kibaki, collect more taxes and facilitate an even bigger real estate building boom and a bigger middle class, but he and the people around him elected not to take the path of growth.
The result was a kleptocracy that serially killed most of the geese that laid the golden eggs. For its part, the Standard, Kenya’s oldest newspaper, focused on the even longer shadow still cast by the fallout between Founding President Kenyatta and Founding Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (Raila’s father) way back in 1963-1966.
Rummaging in its archives, as well as quoting British academic Charles Hornsby’s 2011 book, Kenya: A History Since Independence, the paper retold the story for a new generation of Kenyans of how at least two controversial arms shipments from the then Soviet Union and the then so-called Red China were intercepted by the Kenyatta side of the then infant regime and promptly and definitively tied to Odinga.
It was the height of the Cold War between the capitalist West and the communist east and Kenya was just emerging from the deadly decade of the 1950s with its complex legacy of the Mau Mau State of Emergency and Kenyatta’s nine-year-long imprisonment/restriction by the British.
Kenyatta was working overtime cultivating his Father of the Nation image and a pragmatic foreign policy in which he contrived to be both firmly with the West in the global struggle against the East and also a luminary of the Non-aligned Movement, a pan-Africanist and a proponent for the liberation of all of Africa.
And yet there was Odinga, apparently running rings around Kenyatta, with British Intelligence frequently whispering into the President’s ear that his VP was up to no good.
We now learn that during the East African military mutinies of January 1964 in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, the President of Kenya, then barely four weeks in the office, not only expressly ordered his VP to remain indoors in his official residence for the duration of the troubles, but also had a unit of Britain’s fearsome SAS (Special Air Services) guarding him at State House and his Gatundu residence, on top of Kenya’s GSU (General Service Unit) and the rest of the nascent Presidential bodyguard and escort units.
When a new generation of Kenyans reads these latter-day revelations of that long-ago falling out of the very first President and his principal assistant, when the Republic was still in its diapers, they have major cause for pause.
They naturally fast-forward to the UhuRuto duo and its bold synergies and symbiosis and begin to speculate on what could possibly go wrong, how soon, how drastically and with what long-term effects that might still resonate and reverberate 50 years hence in 2063, as the Republic marks its first century.
President Kenyatta II is still very deep in his father’s shadow and Deputy President Ruto in the shadow of retired President Moi’s 36-year career in the Executive as, first, Vice President (1967-1978) and then President.
What’s more, both men now have in their possession the Final Report and Recommendations of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC), a document that damns the first 45 years of the Kenyan Presidency, comprising Jomo Kenyatta’s three terms, Moi’s five terms and Kibaki’s first term.
The TJRC’s remit was to delve into the worst that happened in Kenya in the public and governance sphere from Independence Day, December 12, 1963, to February 28, 2008, when the Kofi Annan mediation pact that ended the PEV crisis and formed the Grand Coalition regime kicked in.

THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENTS
No incoming Presidency team in Kenya has arrived on the scene to the accompaniment of a document like the TJRC Report. Indeed, from where their supporters are sitting, both President Kenyatta and Deputy President Ruto have evinced tremendous grace under pressure, particularly when the ICC albatross is factored in.
And although Uhuru has his father’s oratorical ringing tones and Ruto is a far more gifted speaker than Moi ever was, neither man can speak with the authority of the first two Presidents.
Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi could, and often did, literally, tell Kenya to shut up, as a country, and the nation, like a classroom writ large, actually did, and not merely because they were autocrats.
Jomo Kenyatta and Moi could pour such scorn on a concept or a negative national trait that it got a bad name that actually stuck on the basis of the give-a-dog-a-bad-name-and-hang-him paradigm.
Jomo Kenyatta gave federalism such a bad name, vis a vis national unity, that, to this day, even with devolution being rolled out, the words majimbo and majimboist still carry residual pejorative freight.
He ruled a Kenya of only 10 million people, and strode like a colossus over a much smaller country, among other things summoning and proroguing Parliament at will and asking an Uhuru Park National Day crowd whether robbers who used violence should be hanged.
The crowd of course roared back in the affirmative – and Death Row has been full to overflowing since then. Decades before the Internet, Moi orally declared early in his marathon tenure that so-called “men’s entertainment” magazines – global titles such as Playboy, 'Penthouse' and 'Mayfair' – should not be sold in Kenya.
They had been openly on sale in every big town both on newsstands and in bookshops and were even left by passengers in Kenya Airways and other jets in Nairobi and Mombasa.
However, upon that early “roadside declaration”, they disappeared and went underground and have never openly resurfaced in hardcopy formats.
Watching President Kenyatta II at two important forums this week – the 2nd National Conference on Alcohol and Drug Abuse and the National Leadership and Integrity Forum, it was clear that he is far from speaking with the authority of either Jomo or Moi yet (and Kibaki never bothered to, giving the impression of being both too laid-back and more of a chairman-of-the-board than a national political leader galvanizing the masses into action).
It was also clear that Uhuru needs to be rid of the ICC charges like yesterday if he is to hold forth authoritatively and persuasively on such touchy themes and issues as the various wars on addiction, graft and terrorism.
And the same holds true for Ruto, with the same urgency. If and when the ICC charges are dropped and the two occupants of Kenya’s Presidency find themselves free to speak and act without the shadow of being indictees in international jurisdiction, a very Kenyan thing will transpire.
As with Jomo Kenyatta before the fallout with Oginga Odinga and Daniel Moi before the 1982 coup attempt, Kenyans, both friend and foe, will forever speak of a sea change in their demeanour and personalities.
Kenyans will recall the UhuRuto of “before ICC went away” and “after ICC vanished” – and endlessly, and controversially, say which version they prefer.
The TJRC Report and Recommendations certify the reality of the very long shadows that the Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki eras still cast on the emergent UhuRuto era.
And Kenya’s latest President and his Deputy will not emerge from the very deep chill of these very long shadows until two things happen – the ICC cases are somehow resolved and they show leadership and initiative on implementation of the TJRC Report, which names them adversely over the PEV but refrains from recommending any action against them in deference to the ongoing ICC process.

TJRC AND UK/MAU MAU SETTLEMENT
By a huge historical coincidence, the TJRC Report was finally tabled at State House, Nairobi, the same week the British Government announced that it had reached a multi-million sterling pound out-of-court settlement with the Mau Mau veterans who had sued Elizabeth Regina in UK jurisdiction.
The settlement came with a fulsome apology. It was an extraordinary event and gesture and hugely symbolic, coming as it did in the Golden Jubilee Year of Kenyan Independence and with Queen Elizabeth II still on her throne, just as she was during the Mau Mau State of Emergency and throughout Kenya’s first three Presidential tenures.
Kenya’s TJRC Report also recommends reparations for diverse categories of survivor-witnesses of a variety of atrocities and it deals with adverse events of a much more recent vintage than the Mau Mau war of mid-century last century.
President Kenyatta II and Deputy President Ruto are doubtless feeling the deep chill of both being deep in their predecessors’ long shows and the shadow of the ICC. Their passport from all these shadows could well consist in how they act on the TJRC Report – and when.
- See more at: http://the-star.co.ke/news/article-124410/very-long-shadows-jomo-and-moi#sthash.HAaHsbuO.dpuf

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