PERFECT PHOTO OPPORTUNITY: President Uhuru Kenyatta with the Obamas at the White House. Photo/WHITE HOUSE
No President of Kenya has undergone so perilous a voyage – personally, institutionally, politically, diplomatically and reputation-wise – as has Kenyatta the Younger in the early phase of his incumbency
All Presidents of Kenya entered office under extraordinary circumstances, but the fourth and youngest at State House, Uhuru Kenyatta, has got off to the most testing time of them all.
When his father Jomo Kenyatta, then in his mid-70s, became first Prime Minister (June 1, 1963) and then President (December 12, 1964), Kenya had a population of barely eight million people. There were huge poverty, ignorance and disease challenges in a context of the biggest chill of the Cold War.
When Jomo died and was succeeded by Daniel arap Moi, then aged 54, in August 1978, there were about 15 million Kenyans and the Cold War was entering its final decade.
When Mwai Kibaki, aged 71, took over from Moi 24 years later, on December 30, 2002, there were about 36 million Kenyans, the Cold War was long over and cold warriors like Moi were increasingly out in the cold in a rapidly democratizing world.
The national unity factor that got lost
The first three Presidential changes of guard were remarkable for the national unity factor that is now in such short supply. Under Jomo when he was incoming, the country had just emerged from an epic anti-colonial struggle, including the deadly decade of the 1950s and the State of Emergency.
When Jomo died in office aged about 90 and Moi took over, there was nary a dissenting voice and the country was under a de facto one-party state.
Charles Mugane Njonjo, the first African Attorney general in this country and a Presidential kingmaker, introduced the device of regional delegations that called on the then acting President Moi and pledged their “loyalty”, code for that he must succeed Kenyatta unopposed.
Njonjo even prevailed upon media owners and editors to stop referring to Moi as ‘acting President’ for the 90-day period then prescribed by the Constitution for this status for a successor head of state and government preliminary to a Presidential poll.
By the time the 90-day period was over, delegations from all regions in Kenya, including one from the Asian community, had visited Moi at State House Nairobi, Nakuru and Mombasa and assured him of their total faith in and support for him as Jomo’s successor.
Moi’s ‘election’ unopposed as the Second President of Kenya took place in October 1978 without the expedient of even one vote cast, and he was sworn in on the 10th of that month.
Kibaki entered office at the end of 2002 as the first post-Kanu President, seated in a wheelchair, wearing a neck brace and with one arm and leg in plaster.
He had survived a car crash on the campaign trail on the Mombasa Road only because the airbags of his Range Rover deployed successfully.
The majority of Kenyan voters had given Kibaki 3.6 million votes in his avalanche victory against Uhuru, Moi’s preferred successor, who garnered only 1.8 million votes.
The national unity factor behind Kibaki’s advent was such that the Kikuyu and Luo voted together for the first time since the Independence General Election of mid-1963.
Kibaki’s bid for a second term in 2007 saw him pitted against Raila Amolo Odinga and both men garner upwards of four million votes, an unprecedented number for a presidential poll, an outcome of, respectively, 4,578,034 (or 46.4%) and 432,860 (44.1%).
The disputed vote plunged Kenya into bloodshed in the post-election violence of 2008, for which President Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto still have ongoing cases at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
After the 2007 dispute and the PEV, the pretence at national unity that had been such a staple of Kenya’s presidential politics until 2002 is a thing of the past.
Today, Kenya is split right down the middle and Raila, at once almost paradoxically the most polarizing and yet the most unifying political figure, is convinced he can divide the country in yet more ways, as long as the endgame is total isolation of the long-dominant Kikuyu.
Serial baptisms of fire
Having tried mightily to oust the Mt Kenya factor in two consecutive presidential polls, driving the top two tallies to northwards of five million votes each in 2013, Raila has now hit on the gambit of a truly contentious national referendum early in a presidency that has undergone a series of baptisms of fire both locally and internationally.
Kenyatta and Ruto made history when they entered office as the first members anywhere of a presidential institution with ICC crimes-against-humanity charges.
The Western powers were absolutely opposed to their candidature and even gave thinly veiled warnings to the Kenyan electorate not to vote them in.
Ambassador Johnnie Carson, one of the US State Department’s oldest ‘old Africa hands’ (he was first posted to East Africa in 1966, before Ruto was born and when Uhuru was barely five-years-old), issued the most blatant of these warnings. Carson cautioned Kenya’s voters that “choices have consequences”.
British High Commissioner Christian Turner declared that London would relate with Nairobi only when absolutely necessary. After the Kenyan election President Barack Obama visited East Africa in June 2013, but gave the country of his father’s birth, where a grandmother of his still lives, the widest berth, spending two days in neighbouring Tanzania.
But international diplomacy, like Kenyan presidential politics, has no permanent friends or foes. In a matter of months, Dr Turner and US Ambassador Robert Godec were showing off newly acquired Kiswahili phraseology skills before President Kenyatta at an Equity Bank-sponsored young achievers’ ceremony.
From August 3 to 12, President Kenyatta was in the United States for President Barack Obama’s three-day US-Africa Leaders’ Summit and received a warm welcome all round, from the White House to the business community and the Kenyan Diaspora. There was not a whiff of transacting with an international pariah in all his engagements and encounters.
President Kenyatta was also welcomed by former US presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. However, back home, the Opposition was preparing a nasty surprise for the Presidency – a coming together of Cord, civil society and the county Governors in an eminent persons’ formation (see Boxed Item analysis) that Jubilee does not seem to possess the antidote or counter-strategy to.
The post-Imperial Presidency
President Kenyatta has faced leadership, management, insecurity, inflationary, and discontentment challenges in his first one-and-a-half years in office that are more than enough even for a complete first-term incumbency.
His first term is the first post-Imperial Presidency in Kenya. His victory over Raila on March 4, 2013, which the IEBC reported as a First Round win of 6,173,433 (50.51%) against 5,340,546 (43.7%) and the Supreme Court adjudicated as free, fare and accurate, was the first such triumph to be subjected to litigation since Kibaki took Moi to court in 1998, and lost.
Uhuru left State House as a teenager in 1978 and returned at midlife, aged 51, as Fourth President, to a much changed place, country and world order.
Under the new Constitution, the Presidency has been shorn of much of its power and fiat. Privately the President and his handlers express their frustrations at having to work with a Constitution whose spirit is decidedly NGO, a contradiction in terms if there ever was one.
Today, the President cannot so much as support an initiative such as the Safaricom security contract without being stopped in his tracks by parliamentary probe committees, albeit temporarily.
A nationwide police recruitment of 10,000 cadets is similarly held up following allegations of corruption, in the midst of al Shabaab’s terror campaign and many other insecurity factors.
Uhuru has had to resort to the device of trying to rewrite key sections of the NGO-ish Constitution via omnibus miscellaneous amendments, winning some and losing some in a long and annual process that will doubtless still be going on even in the fifth year of his first term.
These many tests of his administrations, some of them unprecedented and other factors, are swiftly snow-balling into serious legitimacy challenges that point to an early onset of the lame-duck phase of a presidency, particularly in the face of the looming referendum challenge.
Meanwhile, the crimes-against-humanity case at the ICC has entered endgame territory, with demands for full disclosure of all his property portfolios, banking and land transactions in the period 2007-2010.
This is a make-or-break phase pregnant with all sorts of dangers for the President. In this era of digital hacking, the compiling in one place of such a comprehensive file on such a VIP will almost certainly attract hackers’ collectives like Anonymous and Wikileaks and the resultant leaks could have consequences, including of a taxation nature, far into the future. This is a dilemma faced by no other incumbent head of State and Government.
No President of Kenya has undergone so perilous a voyage – personally, institutionally, politically, diplomatically and reputation-wise – as has Kenyatta the Younger in the early phase of his incumbency.
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