ANGER AND BALLOT IN NAIROBI

Okello Oculi provides historical perspective to Kenyan politics

Afurious mind in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, sent over the following gist from within the post-election chemistry of political relations in Kenya: ‘’You know what they say ...the bigger the lie the more people will believe it. ...the stealth oppression by the jubilous coated in their assumption of ethnic superiority continues to be perpetuated as hoards of community members are slaughtered and disappeared for bearing wrong names... all this happens as the local media and religious zealots stay muted in the name of peace...’’

The Kikuyu intellectual added that he had ‘’settled as a Jaramogi Vanguard’’. Jaramogi Odinga was Raila’s father and a main campaigner for Jomo Kenyatta to be the first ruler of independent Kenya. On becoming president, Jomo Kenyatta soon feared that Odinga would garner votes of landless Gikuyu and topple him from power. His British and American friends also resented Odinga’s leanings towards communist China and the Soviet Union.

Kenyatta told a British newspaper that he wished to create an aristocracy in Kenya. That class ensured political stability in Britain. He ignored the raw reality that immigrant European aristocracies in Africa were fighting bitter wars to keep rich agricultural lands they had robbed. Kenya’s Mau Mau war was competing with Algeria’s liberation from brutal French occupation. Subsequently, horrendous freedom wars followed from Zimbabwe in the east to Angola on the Atlantic Ocean.

John Nottingham, a former colonial District Officer, told me in his office in Nairobi, that Kenyatta lost support among younger radical youths committed to armed struggle. They opposed his choice of negotiations with British officials. His arrest as Mau Mau leader was a clever British ploy for boosting his support by throwing on him a cloak and myth of ‘’liberator’’ rotting in their prison. He emerged from prison to win support from European immigrant farmers with a plea to landless Kenyans to ‘’suffer without bitterness’’.

Here was the onset of the key flaw in the political legacy of Jomo Kenyatta. The language of racial superiority by white immigrants was also inherited by the Gikuyu elite who took over vast landed property and political offices. Biblical notions of God’s chosen people who suffered enslavement in ‘’Egypt’’ had been nurtured by GiKuyu Christian churches adapted for resistance against colonial oppression. When scrambled with Kenyatta’s drive to create an ethnic aristocracy, this notion of God’s anointed people crippled the task of ‘’nation building’’ from the dawn of Kenya’s Uhuru (freedom). Subsequent assassinations of pan-ethnic politicians with dreams of succeeding the ailing Kenyatta, notably: Tom Mboya (a Luo); J.M. Kariuki (a Kikuyu), Ronald Ngala (from Mombasa) became inevitable inconveniences.

Observers of Kenyatta’s office noted that Gikuyu cabinet members and top officials treated his Vice-President Daniel arap Moi with open

THE LANGUAGE OF RACIAL SUPERIORITY BY WHITE IMMIGRANTS WAS ALSO INHERITED BY THE GIKUYU ELITE WHO TOOK OVER VAST LANDED PROPERTY AND POLITICAL OFFICES. BIBLICAL NOTIONS OF GOD’S CHOSEN PEOPLE WHO SUFFERED ENSLAVEMENT IN ’EGYPT’ HAD BEEN NURTURED BY GIKUYU CHRISTIAN CHURCHES ADAPTED FOR RESISTANCE AGAINST COLONIAL OPPRESSION

disdain and contempt. He was a Kalenjin, an ethnic outsider. On assuming power on the Kenyatta’s death in office, Moi announced a policy of ‘’Nyayo’’ (or following in Kenyatta’s footprints). It was at once deceptive and prophetic. To the orphaned hostile Gikuyu ‘’mafia’’, he dangled a promise their uninterrupted dominance. In reality, he too ruthlessly built a Kalenjin ‘’mafia’’ in political jobs; routinely snatching property from Kikuyu elites. In building allies, he rewarded minority groups including Somali and Masai. He earned the reputation of killing opponents with car accidents (labelled as ‘’accidenting’’); and death in dungeons. ‘’Nation-building’’ was drowned in the slogan of ‘’IT IS OUR TURN TO EAT’’; and another murderous ethnic exclusivism.

The bitterness that this policy brewed drove Raila Odinga into leading the campaign to get Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu rebel from the same homeland as Dedan Kimathi, leader of Mau Mau; an outsider to the ‘’Gatundu mafia’’ – the base of Kenyatta. Kibaki, however, focused on repairing the economic and bureaucratic exclusion President Moi had inflicted on the Gikuyu elite. Betrayed allies led by Raila Odinga, would pledge to deny him a re-election in 2007. Their mountain of frustration over denied rights of citizenship exploded in the arson and slaughters directed against Gikuyu from the last week of December 2007 to March 2008. In the peace negotiated by the African Union, Raila settled for a mainly symbolic post of Prime Minister. The ethnic cabal around Kibaki; and their corruption survived him. Uhuru Kenyatta was a cabinet minister in that government.

A French historian has claimed that President Bill Clinton believed in anchoring democracy in Africa on genocide and hosting power in the hands of minority ethnic groups. In Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda the formula holds. Nkurunziza, in Burundi, disrupts this formula by coming from the majority Hutu ethnic group, hence the hostility to his holding power. Ethnic minority power is inherently insecure and fragile: needing support from the Americans. If Raila’s claims of being rigged from electoral victory are valid, this thesis might have favoured Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta.

Kenya’s long coastline on the Indian Ocean; access to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Cape of Good Hope as a route to the Atlantic Ocean, offers an intelligent ruling elite resources for enticing support from naval powers, namely: NATO, China, Russia, India, Ian, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Korea, and South Africa. In a post-Cold War ecology populated by global terrorism, Kenya’s strategic location can also become a grave source of vulnerability. Arms dealers would be tempted to promote conflict in Kenya especially when the oil and gas deposits now being developed become a source of income. Her current war against Al Shabaab in Somalia offers the hazard that failure to undertake inclusive nation-building may compel Chinua Achebe to warn Jomo Kenyatta, in ‘’After-Africa’’, that things are falling apart in Kenya. Prof. Oculi is a member of THISDAY Editorial Board