How Moi Turned Many Against His Own Rule

By WAMBUA SAMMY

Fire smoulders in a house torched during ethnic clashes in Laikipia district of Rift Valley Province

When he was sworn in as Kenya's second president in 1978, Daniel arap Moi was an immensely popular leader. His polite mien endeared him to many, especially when he announced that he would follow in the footsteps of his predecessor Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, a legend to many Kenyans.

Of course there was the so-called "Kiambu Mafia" that had gone to great lengths to block a Moi presidency. And to have a semblance of legality, they formed the so-called Change-the-Constitution Group in 1976, with the recently converted Kanu loyalists Kihika Kimani and Njenga Karume as its pointmen.

Karume was in the anti-Moi group in his capacity as chairman of the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru Association (Gema), an ethnic business venture whose unwritten objective was to retain the presidency in Central Province.

The group's strategy was to amend the constitution and repeal the clause that provides for the vice president to act as the president for 90 days, to deny Moi a headstart.

Eventually, however, the then Attorney General Charles Njonjo scuttled the group's plot by amending the constitution to criminalise acts of imagining and encompassing the death of the president.

Njonjo had Kenyatta's support, which is why the president assented to the amendment into law. A former Njonjo ally recalls an incident last year in which Karume reminded Njonjo of a day in 1977 when Njonjo tried to convince him to leave the anti-Moi group alone because Moi's presidency would never happen.

After taking power, Moi realised that the "Kiambu Mafia" had powerful connections in the civil service and the business sector and it wasn't easy to dismantle them. But the opportunity for the purge came in the form of an abortive coup in 1982.

Many saw logic and pragmatism in Moi's purge, arguing that besides the civil service, Kenyatta had filled most of the state firms with his own people. These included Mathira MP Matu Wamae, who headed the Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation; John Michuki, now Kangema MP (Kenya Commercial Bank); Stanley Githunguri, the National Bank of Kenya; Chris Kirubi, the defunct Kenya National Transport Company; Matere Keriri (MP Kerugoya-Kutus), the Development Finance Company of Kenya; Maina Gakuo, the Kenya Railways Corporation; and Julius Gecau, the Kenya Power and Lighting Company.

Most of the permanent secretaries also hailed from Central Province as did provincial commissioners Eliud Mahihu (Coast), Isaiah Mathenge (Rift Valley) and Charles Koinange (Eastern).

But Moi's "ethnic re-engineering" did not endear him to many apart from the beneficiaries who landed plum jobs and contracts in the myriad state corporations that he created. Indeed, accusations of nepotism have sometimes forced the president to comment publicly on the issue.

In May 2000, he promised the nation that the government would publish a list of its senior officers and their backgrounds to prove that there was ethnic balance in the civil service.

This did not happen but it would appear that the president was reacting to an unsuccessful attempt to table such a list by Africa Confidential that detailed the ethnic backgrounds of senior public figures.

"The difference between Moi and Kenyatta is that Kenyatta's appointees were qualified for the jobs," says a former permanent secretary, voicing a sentiment that may have been true in the early 1980s but not today.

It is also instructive that most of the Kenyatta-era parastatals posted profits; after 1978 they became bottomless pits in which the government kept sinking public funds. Government-guaranteed debts today threaten to ruin the National Bank of Kenya and the Kenya Commercial Bank.

Former Kanu secretary general Joseph Kamotho agrees that Moi's unpopularity in certain quarters has increased with time. "Familiarity breeds contempt," says Kamotho hinting that the president's 24 years in office cannot endear him to many.

But perhaps what estranged him further, says Kamotho, is what was seen as a deliberate destruction of the Kikuyu economic base in the 1980s. It started with the collapse of the Rural Urban Credit Finance Ltd, amid claims of dirty politics against its owner, the late Andrew Ngumba, a one-time Nairobi mayor.

Its failure was followed by the collapse of other financial institutions associated with Central Province luminaries such as Jimnah Mbaru's Jimba Credit Corporation, Nationwide Finance, Continental Bank, Estate Finance, Estate Building Society and Business Finance Company. There was also the case of the leveraged takeover of S.K. Macharia's Madhupaper by individuals close to the ruling elite.

The collapse of these institutions obviously reflected management inadequacies. However, unlike institutions such as the Kenya Co-operative Creameries and the National Bank of Kenya, which have been kept alive by massive injection of public funds, Rural Urban and others were left to die.

Home Affairs Minister William Ruto says there was nothing peculiar with the collapse of the banks. "Banks have continued to collapse... the reason why the president appeared to be unpopular in Central Province had to do with the introduction of multiparty democracy in Kenya by Kikuyu politicians."

But the president's popularity hit rock bottom during the 1988 general elections that were blatantly rigged to weed out figures perceived to be disloyal to the president. This episode marked a political culture in which sycophants such as the late Kariuki Chotara turned pseudo-governors. The fiery Kanu hawk of Nakuru had the temerity to order Kanu youthwingers to supervise the operations of traffic police officers along the highways.

To alienate the president even further was the infamous Kanu National Disciplinary Committee. Many a politician accused of all manner of political crimes by their rivals would weep before the "Kangaroo court" that rivalled the Spanish Inquisition in its travesty of justice.

The result was that by the late 1980s there was a popular clamour for multiparty democracy, which the government was eventually forced to accept in 1991. But not before it had further "unpopularised" itself by detaining the multiparty crusaders Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia.

This wave of dissent led to the rejection of Moi in Central, Nairobi and Nyanza provinces in the 1992 General Election, in which Matiba garnered 1.4 million votes against the president's 1.9 million, while Mwai Kibaki managed 1.05 million and Oginga Odinga 900,000. Had the opposition combined forces then, its total 3.2 million votes would have ended Kanu's rule.

Nyanza, Central and Nairobi provinces continued to reject the president, with election result figures for the 1997 polls changing only slightly.

The president managed to increase his votes to 2.4 million as did Kibaki, who got 1.7 million in the absence of a Matiba candidature, an increase of about 600,000 votes for each of them.

A blemish that Moi will find difficult to erase from his legacy as he retires is the tribal clashes that rocked the country during the 1992 and 1997 elections. That there are still Kenyans who are refugees in their own country and the government has not provided them with security so that they can resettle in their former homes makes him a hard sale.

This has been compounded by cases where the clash victims' land has been shared or sold out to other people. Even more worrying is the government's refusal to release the findings of the Akiwumi Commission of Inquiry into the clashes five years later.