HAPPIER DAYS: From left, State House official Jomo Gecaga, President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Director General of Intelligence Michael Gichangi. At the height of their power,the outgoing DGI and these key advisers of the Kibaki presidency could move MOUNTAINS. They were the spearhead of Mt Kenyan bureaucrats and securocrats that kept the then Prime Minister Raila Odinga and his half of the Grand Coalition compromise under saturation surveillance and counterintelligence strategising and actions.
After a US visit on which he was warmly welcomed by not one but three American presidents (Obama, Clinton and Bush), the President took one look at his spy chief and then let him go
Every presidency, bar none, has its fall guys, and they are not necessarily scapegoats nor are they confined to the political sector. The phrase “it’s nothing personal” usually prefaces the presidential fall guy device early in an administration’s first-term tenure. It is uttered perfunctorily and completely insincerely to ease the severity of the dumping.
Five days after he returned from his remarkably successful American visit, where he attended President Barack Obama’s US-African Leaders’ Summit, and, in only 72 hours, met not one but three of the superpower’s presidents – the incumbent and two retirees – President Uhuru Kenyatta struck. He made Director General of Intelligence Michael Gichangi the first fall guy of his one-and-a-half-year-long presidency.
Gichangi was not felled alone. His closest associates in the Mwai Kibaki-Raila Odinga Grand Coalition regime of 2008-2013 were also neutralised, although they are still in office in one much-reduced capacity or another.
The official narrative was that Gichangi, who is 56, had retired for personal reasons. The multimedia journalism sector went into deep analytical mode, working all its intelligence and relevant diplomatic contacts and separately came up with the unanimous conclusion that the one-time fighter jet pilot had been downed, not merely stepped aside.
Gichangi was asked to remain in his post until the most suitable replacement is found. The retired General is now in the twilight zone of a long career in the security sector.
Effectively shunted aside and neutralised as power and influence players are: immediate former Interior Principal Secretary Mutea Iringo, now the PS at Defence; State House-based presidential political adviser Nancy Gitau, now operating from the Office of the President at Harambee House in the CBD; and former Head of the Civil Service Francis Kimemia, now the State House-based Secretary to the Cabinet.
Gichangi & Co could move mountains
At the height of their power, the outgoing DGI and these key advisers of the Kibaki presidency could move mountains. They were the spearhead of Mt Kenyan bureaucrats and securocrats that kept the then Prime Minister Raila Odinga and his half of the Grand Coalition compromise under saturation surveillance and counterintelligence strategising and actions.
At the same time, this small group managed two other realities for the former regime – the government of Kenya response to the ICC cases and the deep politics and, or, security strategising for the Kibaki succession.
Gichangi and Co juggled so many balls and enjoyed such massive operational funding that they earned Raila and Co’s undying suspicion and animosity as well as that of the then prospective presidential candidates Uhuru and William Ruto, the controversial but resurgent ICC suspects’ ticket.
Whether Raila or Uhuru succeeded Kibaki, the DGI and his associates in government were going to lose their jobs prematurely – it was only a question of speed and hard (under Raila) or soft (under Uhuru) landings.
Karim Khan explodes a campaign myth
The first sign that these movers and shakers of the old regime were themselves going to be vigorously shaken and stirred soon came, when Deputy President Ruto’s British lawyer Karim Khan exploded one of the biggest myths of the presidential election campaign leading up to the March 4, 2013, race: Raila had nothing whatever to do with putting Ruto in the dock at the ICC on crimes-against-humanity charges arising from the post-election violence of 2007-08.
Instead, Khan named members of the Gichangi team, particularly Iringo and Gitau, as having well and truly fixed his client and served him on a platter to the ICC by procuring, coaching and otherwise streamlining witnesses against him.
Khan, a longstanding practitioner of international crimes law, made these remarks in open court at The Hague on live TV. The plot thickened. The ICC judges ruled that eight witnesses against Ruto, who had withdrawn their participation and cooperation with the court, be compelled to authenticate and verify their original statements, wherever they were.
Noting that the ICC has no infrastructure to pursue and get hold of the recalcitrant witnesses, the judges ordered that the government of Kenya finds them and compels them to validate their statements via video link.
A damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t scenario kicked in. If the ICC witnesses validate their statements against Ruto, some of which contain extremely serious allegations, then the question of having been procured and coached by a team of top bureaucrats/spies who are still in the same positions acquires a new perspective.
If they coached them, they are surely culpable; if they persist in denying everything and the testimony is verified, the top team is still in trouble. The fall guys could not possibly be in place, occupying the same elevated positions they had enjoyed when probing Ruto several years ago, during the verification, or lack of it, regarding the eight witnesses’ statements against Ruto. Gichangi, above all, had to go.
Kenyatta ICC case hangs by a thread
President Uhuru has no witnesses lined up against him in his case at the ICC, not one. Indeed, his case, scheduled, but not guaranteed, to start in September, now hangs by the very slender thread of a full disclosure of financial and other confidential records.
Even if the President and thegovernment (which has been ordered to obtain and furnish the court with the documents) comply in full, documents have to be painstakingly authenticated and banks, for one, on several continents will most likely not verify many of them, to say nothing of telecoms like Safaricom and Airtel. What’s more, the ICC manoeuvre sounds too much like a case of imposing self-incrimination on Uhuru.
In Ruto’s case and the compulsion of the eight reluctant witnesses, the judges are clearly looking to declare they have enough evidence to proceed.
And so, the Presidency’s first crop of fall guys in Nairobi appears to be protective much more of Ruto than Uhuru, whose case involves no witness statements.
The question of how both Kenyatta and Ruto’s names ended up being at the ICC was settled by Khan’s impassioned outbursts in court at The Hague.
The Presidential fall guy syndrome
Some of the most famous fall guys of past presidential administrations in Kenya have included former Cabinet ministers Chris Murungaru, David Mwiraria and Kiraitu Murungi, when the Anglo Leasing scandal first made the headlines, 36 months into the Kibaki administration, as well as his personal assistant Alfred Getonga. All but Murungaru and Getonga were reinstated after a while.
Deep into former President Daniel arap Moi’s regime, in the 13th year of a 24-year tenure, the then minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Robert John Ouko was assassinated.
The subsequent crisis and a probe led by detectives seconded from Britain’s Scotland Yard led to the resignations of the then two most powerful and influential men outside the Presidency – Trade minister Nicholas Biwott and Internal Security and Provincial Administration Permanent Secretary Hezekiah Oyugi.
Biwott and Oyugi were even arrested and held in custody for a while before being released on grounds of lack of evidence. Oyugi died of a mystery illness and Biwott remained out of the Cabinet for five years. Moi also made a fall guy of Kenya’s first African substantive spymaster, the legendary James Kanyotu.
Kanyotu, trained by the British during the 1950s at the height of the State of Emergency, was an Old School, Cold War era operative. When former Vice President Kibaki, demoted to Health minister in 1988, admonished the advocates of the restoration of multiparty democracy by telling them famously that taking on Moi’s one-party supremacy was as foolish as seeking to fell a mighty mugumo (oak tree) with a wembe (razor blade), both Moi and Kanyotu dropped their guard where the humbled Kibaki was concerned.
But then, on December 24, 1991, Kibaki quit ruling party Kanu and the Cabinet and dived straight into a brand-new outfit called the Democratic Party, as leader.
Moi reacted furiously. In the words of Pius Nyamora, then the editor-publisher of the now-defunct Society magazine, Moi responded 'like a jilted lover'. He fired not only spy chief Kanyotu but also KTN Head of News Rose Lukhalo, who had broken the news of Kibaki’s move. At that time, KTN was nominally owned by the ruling party, and in its infancy as Kenya’s first broadcaster outside the KBC network.
However, Moi recovered his equanimity swiftly when it became clear that what Kibaki had actually done, wittingly or unwittingly, was to fatally split the Kikuyu vote bloc between himself and firebrand oppositionist Kenneth Matiba, handing Moi his first term of the multiparty era.
Gichangi is therefore just the latest in a long line of operatives, including intelligence, shunted aside, and sometimes reinstated to act as mud-guards to an aspect of Presidential power and incumbency.
Gichangi will go down in the annals of espionage as the spymaster whose misfortune it was to probe Kibaki’s successors at a time when it was not at all clear that they would indeed comprise a presidential race ticket, much less win.
His goose was well and truly cooked on June 10, 2014, when the ICC’s Trial Chamber V(a) adopted 15 NIS reports that had been presented to the Waki Commission, the Commission of Inquiry on post-election violence, the international probe established by the Kibaki administration in February 2008 to investigate the crisis in Kenya following the disputed Presidential election of 2007.
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