Former Kenyan president dies
DANIEL arap Moi, a former schoolteacher who became Kenya’s longest-serving president and presided over years of repression and economic turmoil fuelled by runaway corruption, has died. He was 95.
Moi’s death was announced by President Uhuru Kenyatta yesterday.
Moi, who ruled Kenya for 24 years, had been in and out of hospital for months. He died peacefully yesterday, said Moi’s son Senator Gideon Moi at the Nairobi hospital.
Kenyatta ordered national flags to fly at half-mast yesterday until sunset of the day of the burial. He said Moi, Kenya’s second president, was a leader in the struggle for independence and an ardent Pan-Africanist.
Despite being called a dictator by critics, Moi enjoyed strong support from many Kenyans and was seen as a uniting figure when he took power after the East African country’s founding president Jomo Kenyatta died in office in 1978. Some allies of the ailing Kenyatta, however, had tried to change the constitution to prevent Moi, then the vice-president, from automatically taking power upon Kenyatta’s death.
In 1982, Moi’s government pushed through parliament a constitutional amendment that made Kenya effectively a one-party state.
Later that year, the army quelled a coup attempt plotted by opposition members and some air force officers. At least 159 people were killed. Moi’s government then became more repressive in dealing with dissent, according to a report by the government’s Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission that assessed his rule.
Political activists and others who dared oppose Moi’s rule were routinely detained and tortured, the report said, noting unlawful detentions and assassinations, including the killing of a foreign affairs minister, Robert Ouko.
In 1991, Moi yielded to demands for a multi-party state due to internal pressure, including a demonstration in 1991 during which police killed more than 20 people, and external pressure from the West. By the time Moi left power in 2002, corruption had caused Kenya’s economy, the most developed in East Africa, to contract.
Commentator Patrick Gathara said in a tweet that yesterday was a day to remember Moi’s victims “as well as the thousands who stood against his brutal and murderous kleptocracy. It is a day to remember that the current crop of politicians helped him escape justice for his crimes”.
Salim Lone, a former UN spokesperson who fled into exile because of harassment under Moi, said the former president began so well and “so many supported your promise of a free more inclusive, corruption-free Kenya”. He said that Moi famously said it was better to eat sukuma wiki (kale) and sleep in peace than seek riches.
“How it went wrong is not for now,” Lone said in a tweet.