FAREWELL, MWAI KIBAKI

  Okello Oculi pays tribute to Kibaki, former Kenyan President

Kenya’s third president, Mwai Kibaki, died on 22 April, 2022. He served under both Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi, doing so continuously from 1963 to a two-term presidency.

His home in Nyeri District held soils rich from centuries of volcanic eruptions which built Mount Kenya and associated highlands. It was highly prized by invading European immigrants.

Out of Nyeri was also born Dedan Kimathi who from within a Nairobi slum recruited fighters for a guerrilla war to win back their lands. The success of guerrilla war in China under the leadership of Mao Tse Tung (now Zedung) was reflected in the name “MAU MAU’’ which he gave his struggle. One of his lieutenants was called ‘’General China”.

 On being elected President Kibaki named a street Kimathi in the centre of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi; and also embraced China in Kenya’s economic diplomacy. Kibaki was a secondary school boy when the Mau Mau war ravaged Nyeri District.

Dedan Kimathi and the youth who withdraw support from newly returned Jomo Kenyatta and told the Gikuyu that he would use tea-sessions with the Colonial Governor to persuade him to hand over power to him. John Nottingham, a former colonial Officer in charge of Nyeri District, told me in his Nairobi office that the loss of hero worship by the militant youth drove Kenyatta into heavy drinking of Whisky upon which the Colonial Governor encouraged his officials to support this appetite in the hope that liver disease would become a welcome political ally.

Kenyatta never led the MAU MAU war. The British detained him as investment for future cooperation over terms on which UHURU would be granted to him after the guerrilla warriors were weakened. Kenyatta paid back with the policy of ‘’Suffering Without Bitterness’’. A loan from Britain was used to buy back land from British immigrant farmers.  He allocated the land to top politicians from Kenyatta’s KIAMBU home area; top civil servants and members of parliament.

In anticipation of bitterness by ex-Mau Mau fighters, Kenyatta co-opted Mwai Kibaki with his record of rare academic brilliance. However a visit to Nyeri in1971 showed that their hero was Dedan Kimathi. Unlike other towns whose main streets were named after Kenyatta, Nyeri preferred their son.

Kenyatta appointed Kibaki a junior minister to Tom Mboya in charge of Economic Planning. Kibaki later hit back when Kenyatta died in 1978 by backing the constitutional stipulation that Vice President Daniel Arap Moi should takeover. Dr Njoroge Mungai, a nephew of Kenyatta, swallowed that bitter pill.

 Moi rewarded Kibaki with portfolios ranging from Vice President to Minister of Finance. While at Finance, Kibaki hired a brilliant economist from Harvard University whose son would, decades later, become the first African-American President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama. In her book, Obama’s sister asserts that the brilliant economist was murdered through an officially executed motor accident. That murder style would become known as ‘’ACCIDENTING’’ political opponents.

Obama’s crime was to oppose Kenya borrowing of an IMF/WORLD BANK loan. Moi’s inner circle saw this as blocking money they longed to “eat’’.

Several minor incidents gave hints of the difference between Moi’s rule and that of Kibaki. Several Gikuyu female staff at a German NGO in Nairobi complained about Kibaki’s aloofness. They missed Moi telling them how to do their hair and length of their skirts. A guide grabbed my mobile phone on a Nairobi street saying that Moi’s Secret Police would have hauled me into their vehicle and driven off. The General Manager of Kenya Literature Bureau claimed to have buried copies of my novel ‘’KOOKOLEM’’ in villages to avoid punishment by Moi’s police; while a young man claimed that he had left teaching in a secondary after he was detained and tortured for six months for teaching my novel “PROSTITUTE’.

While university academics welcomed a new freedom of speech and writing under Kibaki, his wife did break into the offices of DAILY NATION newspaper and served free slaps to journalists; and several Ukraineans were alleged to have been hired to assassinate opposition politicians.

While Kibaki was accused of being slow in arresting kingpins of corruption, he avoided assassination of critics. His main gift to Kenyans must be his supporting the 2010 Constitution which broke up the concentration of key money-guzzling ministries and agencies located in the Presidency.

 Officials from among the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru ethnic groups were accused of using this structural grip to build Kenyatta’s ‘’aristocracy’’. In 1968 Jomo Kenyatta told a British journalist that he desired to create an aristocracy in Kenya because those socio-economic parasites had ensured stability and peace in Britain.

The post-election violence of 2007/2008 spared that “aristocracy” the fate of their models in France, Russia, Cuba and China. Kibaki allied with his radical critics to invent an open Kenyan political economy.

Prof Oculi writes from Abuja