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Constitutional and Leadership Crises: Interrogating the Electoral Defeat of Kanu and the Nature of Political Transition in Kenya
Eric Masinde Aseka*
Introduction: The Crisis of Transition in the Recent Transfer of Power
When Kenyans went to the polls on 27 December 2002, there was much at stake than the fate of the regime of the Kenyan African Union (KANU) led by Daniel Arap Moi. For millions of Kenyans, it was an issue of whether or not they can break KANU’s forty years of rule and determine who would lead their country out of the crippling economic and political crises. For the rest of Africa, it was a test case for lessons on whether and how a smooth and peaceful political transition can be made towards democracy after decades of misrule under the hegemony of one political party.
This article examines the political transition in Kenya and highlights the practices that undermined a smooth transfer of power from Daniel Arap Moi to Stanley Emilio Mwai Kibaki following the defeat of the ruling Kenya National African Union (KANU) by the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC). A smooth transition process calls for the creation and nurture of not only good constitutional provisions and institutional arrangements but also of the exercise of responsible political leadership by those transiting into retirement.
Awareness of the importance of the sanctity of the constitution in defining rules and procedures was recently evident when KANU MPs argued that the appointment of Michael Wamalwa Kijana as Vice-President and Betty Tett as Assistant Minister was unconstitutional given that they had not been sworn in as MPs. Apart from this lacuna, the constitution of Kenya does not provide for a transition period during which the incoming president names his team in advance.
The economics of plunder and corruption that the Nyayo regime exhibited left Kenya with a litany of white elephant projects of Nyayo this and Nyayo that even when Nyayoism itself had lost political direction in terms of nation-building and service to Kenyans. This economics of plunder, however, has its international patron-client networks in this world of capitalism that has no human face.
There is need for a national culture that builds rather than destroys the heritage of a country and its social repertoire of values, ideals and visions. That is why the resolve of the NARC government of Kibaki to restructure government ministries in which a ministerial portfolio was created under the Vice-President charged with evaluating and acting on Nyoyo projects is laudable. The Vice-President’s Office under which this duty, including the assessment of Moi’s fatally flawed District Focus for Rural Development, is therefore critical in transnational politics and policy specifications. One hopes that these efforts will take place within a new leadership culture that is driven by ethical considerations. The appointment of John Githongo as the Permanent Secretary in charge of governance and ethics in the President’s Office points to Kibaki’s perception of the centrality of ethics in governance of the state.
Moi attempted to resist pressures for change. The debacle of KANU in the elections shows that there is no need to be as stubborn and proud as Moi had been to the extent that at one time he stated that the word defeat had never existed in his vocabulary. Following the defeat of his Uhuru project, he was forced to swallow his words. In Kenya, this new political register was made in a wave of demands for change that caused a degree of political discomfiture in Moi when rejection of his rule reached a crescendo in chants of “Moi must go” or yote yawezekana bila Moi (All is possible without Moi). Kibaki’s regime ought to deliver so that these chants are not turned against him when he flounders.
Kenya witnessed a very unprofessional hand-over of power by the Moi regime to the Kabaki regime and a very unprofessional send-off of Moi into retirement. The Sunday Nation of 12 January 2003 reported that on the surface the transfer of power from KANU to the NARC appeared smooth since many people feared that Moi would not hand over power should KANU lose the elections. Although power peacefully changed hands in Kenya, it was haphazardly done since there was no clear legislation defining how an outgoing Head of State should hand over. That is why Moi simply left the State House in Nairobi for his private Kabarak home on the outskirts of Nakuru town leaving the Nairobi State House in disarray. His staff were left unattended to and without a briefing on their future. He left with his Comptroller of State House, Mr John Lokorio, and the Director of the Presidential Press Service, Mr Lee Njiru, leaving behind chaos for the incoming team. Although the programme had indicated that the outgoing President and the incoming President were to have lunch together after the swearing in of the new President, this did not take place and the two leaders only met for ten minutes. Kibaki created tension by openly criticising the Moi regime and its conduct of public affairs in front of his peers from outside the country and by not mentioning him in his inauguration speech or even wishing him a good retirement. No wonder Moi criticised Kibaki’s speech the moment he landed in Kabarak. The NARC crowd at Nairobi’s Uhuru Park, where the inauguration ceremony was conducted, had shouted him down and attempted to throw mud at him on his arrival. This uncivil behaviour could have been avoided.
NARC contributed to Moi’s departure in a huff with his retinue of loyalists. Moi’s team simply abandoned the State House. Nobody had an inventory of what was at the State House and nobody explained what was there even though hurried handing over was to be conducted when there followed a stinging criticism of Moi’s lieutenants in the press. There is need for setting up of legal regulations that will govern subsequent transfer of power in order to provide for a civilized transfer of power. According to the Sunday Standard of 12 January 2003, great anxiety had gripped the State House officials as the reality of defeat in the elections sank in with everyone having the foreboding that the worst was yet to come. Their fears seemed to be confirmed by the clownish behaviour of NARC fans at Uhuru Park. There is a great deal of civic education required on this question.
Political Culture and Leadership Crises in the Kenyan State
In a well-managed transitional process, there is need for a series of ceremonies of handing over that are not just symbolic but that formalise the entry of the new regime. However, there is need for inculcating a congenial public ethic that will guide the nation in dealing with those who have lost an election such as KANU and its big wigs. There should be a law governing resignation of former officials when a new regime is coming in. There should be a team of designated professionals to specifically receive briefings from outgoing officials to help their incoming counterparts along with all other necessary details. The outgoing team must be made to be as helpful as possible by law. Consultations between the leaders of the two regimes are necessary to ensure commitment to a smooth transfer of power without a major reshuffle in the bureaucracy.
The mechanics of power transfer aside for the moment, perhaps a word on the mechanics of the electoral process is called for. Apart from the iniquities of campaign financing from public coffers, of which KANU was guilty, other practices equally undermine the integrity of the elections. It is a known fact that a lot of witchcraft is practiced by politicians against their opponents during and after elections in Africa. This in itself is highly immoral. The fatal accident that almost killed Mwai Kibaki at the height of his campaign was described as a normal accident but there is reason to doubt. In Africa, politicians resort to covert politics and the occult to attain power by unconventional means. There are many instances of public discussions of bad traditional medicine practices that have bad political effects, and instances of witchcraft activities have been reported even in the media as well as village gossip circuits. Joseph Nyagah, a former minister in the Moi government, publicly accused his opponent in Mbeere constituency of using witchcraft against him during these elections.
The big wigs of the Coalition Movement called NARC still wear tribal tags. They are not any different from the fallen cabal of tribal boss-men in KANU. Following the appointment to the cabinet, they dashed to their tribal homes to celebrate their elevation to the cabinet. Is NARC a national outfit of alternative transformative leaders or an alliance of tribal boss-men and boss-women surviving on a new brand of ethnic populism? Kibaki’s use of this populism in the name of Gikuyu Embu Meru Association (GEMA) had led to his rejection by other communities in the polls of 1992 and 1997 in which he emerged third and second, respectively. He completely abandoned the ethnic ideology this time round. He worked in close partnership with other leaders such Wamalwa Kijana, Charity Ngilu, before the doyens of the Rainbow rebellion such as Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka, George Saitoti, and Moody Awori joined opposition ranks. These politicians pursued an opposition agenda when the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) joined with the National Alliance of Kenya (NAK) to form NARC. In this new politics, Kibaki was able to strike a deal that had eluded him for years. He struck a concrete political deal of power-sharing. So far, he seems to be faring very well in his quest to uphold a national image and banner of teamwork in a political and economic project of national reconstruction.
Ethnicity in itself is not evil except for the merchants of culture who demonise other communities to achieve their narrow political projects. Such self-serving cultural mercantilism is dangerous because it leads to political banditry. Even the emergence of Mungiki in Kenya (which means “the multitude” in the Kikuyu language) has its roots in perverse culturalism, showing how cultural homogeneity can be abused. Lack of political foresight in the Moi regime led to the eventual manipulation of this Mungiki culturalism in what he thought was a transitional solution. He did this in a manner that embittered and alienated many people in the country. One week before the general election, members of the sect raided Karia village in Githunguri, Kiambu killing one person and burning several houses. The sect openly demonstrated in Nairobi streets in support of Moi’s preferred candidate Uhuru Kenyatta and thereby contributed to the de-legitimisation of young Kenyatta in the eyes of many Kenyans. The damage was irreparable. Even when Uhuru Kenyatta realised the political danger of Mungiki’s support and denounced Mungiki, the extent of the damage was already beyond repair. Mungiki was a civil society organisation that lacked civility.
The question of Mungiki is far from simple. It is not just about wild-eyed, drug-imbibing, panga-and rungu-wielding youths out to destroy Kenya’s social fabric, it is also about the place and status of the displaced and the disenfranchised in Kenya (Sunday Standard, 12 January 2003). Four months before the election as the presidential campaigns were taking shape, the biggest public gathering by Mungiki adherents demonstrated along the streets of Nairobi. In this demonstration, the Mayor of Nairobi, Mr Dick Waweru, who had openly declared his support for KANU, failed to demonstrate a sense of moral obligation to the Kenyan society when he joined the youths in their demonstration. However, this indicated that the group enjoyed immunity from Moi’s government. This is the same party whose sympathizers and candidates for parliamentary seats, Mr. Kihika Kimani and Stephen Ndichu, said that Mungiki could intervene if President Moi was insulted in public. Immediately after the swearing in of the NARC government, Mungiki struck in Nakuru resulting in the death of 23 people - posing a major challenge to the NARC government. In January 2001, Mungiki youths hacked 5 people to death in Dandora Estate in Nairobi while on 3 March 2002, an attack by Mungiki adherents against inhabitants of Kariobangi left 20 people dead. It comprised youths that actually demonstrated while carrying all manners of killer weapons. More than any other crisis, the NARC government will have to handle decisively and fast the Mungiki political menace in Nakuru, Laikipia and Nyandarua and of course Nairobi. The irony of the moment is that NARC’s previous supporters, human rights groups, heavily criticised KANU in its earlier anti-Mungiki stand based on the government’s arbitrary arrests, detention, torture and harassment of Mungiki youths throughout the 1990s. Of course, local human rights groups always used this as a case study on the infringement of the freedom of conscience and religion. This tack was picked up by the US State Department’s Report of 1999 on religious freedom that criticised the Moi regime for not doing enough to stop the religious persecution of the Mungiki. This led to the government’s adoption of the carrot and stick method in dealing with the Mungiki. It resorted to the use of pseudo-Mungiki gangs to counter the larger real Mungiki by carrying out barbarous acts to discredit the Mungiki in the public eye (Sunday Standard, 12 January 2002). NARC’s Minister for Internal Security, Mr Christopher Murungaru’s order that the police shoot Mungiki adherents on sight following the Nakuru massacre of innocent citizens who had voted for NARC is a contradiction of terms on the part of the Coalition. The opposition parties had been criticising KANU government’s violation of human rights in its unjust handling of criminals through murders by trigger-happy police officers. Two wrongs do not make a right and it is a pity NARC may find itself subject to the same principles and norms it has been criticising
Globalisation and its neo-liberal logic have emphasised the project of political and economic reform in which the demand for human rights is writ large. However, its embedded logic of the market that allocates value to the powerful generated a cabal of marketeers, profiteers and syndicateers who oiled and benefited from KANU’s despotic political machine under Moi. How will NARC handle the anarchy of the market logic when it has not broken away from the KANU project of populism of the abortive Nyayo political project in clear ideological terms given that nearly all leaders of the NARC regime have also served in the Nyayo government? How safe is Kenya from politics of clientelism and patrimonialisation of the state that characterises neo-liberalism and its panopticist agenda of globalisation? Under the new regime, there is need for an ideological production that goes beyond nyayoism, and whose philosophical profundity will lead to the re-definition and re-invention of leadership in Kenya.
To cope with crises such as the ones Kenya has witnessed, political systems have to adopt drastic crisis-oriented measures. It takes good leadership to steer a nation out of a moment of crisis. Ideology is an organisational instrument of leadership.
Revisiting the Legacy of Kenyatta in Moi’s Leadership
A leader’s future realization of his potential takes the form of reclamation of unrealised potential that he knows he has. He looks for a chance to express and demonstrate this in pursuit of a given vision. Moi seems to have been grossly underestimated by his handlers in managing the Kenyatta succession to realize his political goals. Kenyans had very little understanding of Moi until he began to establish himself as his own man moving out of the shadow of Kenyatta under which he served meekly for twelve years. Moism as a leadership style clouded in the obscurantist epithet of Nyayoism became completely distinct from Kenyattaism. The much talked about Nyayoism as a philosophy of continuity was characterised by its intellectual vacuity. Nyayo is a Kiswahili word for footsteps. Its slogans of love, peace and unity were Moi’s expression of humanism against a mission background that made even his attending of church service be followed by a huge retinue of those who sought to get his ear. Where he worshipped became a matter of national news on the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation radio and television stations. He however failed to put in place programmes that would help Kenyans who had been degraded over the years through bad leadership to recover their full humanity and dignity. Nyerere of Tanzania had once referred to Kenya as “the men eat men society”. Moi assumed the Presidency after Kenyatta’s death and promised Kenyans that he would pursue Kenyatta’s footsteps in terms of political practice and policy.
The building of the Nyayo hegemony, in spite of its philosophical vacuity and political viciousness, was the key in the construction of the oppressive Nyayo State. This process was to be reinforced by a deepening system of authoritarianism that smirked of colonial instincts of political control that the Moi government did not pretend to avoid at any cost. Authoritarianism was an instinct of political self-preservation and it was necessitated by the simultaneous re-moulding and revival of KANU both to serve Moi’s objectives and recover ground which the party had lost to the tribal conglomeration that called shots in Kenyatta’s leadership called GEMA. Surprisingly, the leader of the defunct conglomerate, Njenga Karume, decamped from the opposition and joined the Moi wagon of Uhuru Kenyatta.
Hopkins says that the discretionary power of Kenyatta over policy was more analogous to that of a king than a president. This was equally true of Moi. Will that be true of Mwai Kibaki? The numerous constitutional amendments under Kenyatta ended up strengthening the presidency to dangerous proportions. Why was there abuse of office and constitutional privileges under his regime? Raila Odinga says that the Kenyatta regime retained or resuscitated draconian colonial laws and resorted to highly authoritarian measures to silence and stifle all democratic dissent and opposition. He resorted to excessive use of detention without trial and resorted to changing and tampering with the constitution to preserve personal rather than national interests. Moi inherited the Kenyatta system and exacerbated the abuse of power and official corruption in high places and encouraged opportunistic careerism. He baptized the inherited Kenyatta legacy Nyayoism and went ahead to perfect the negative aspects of the Kenyatta legacy and statecraft tampering with whatever little was left of the constitution by Kenyatta. He turned the country into a de jure one party state in 1982 (Odinga 1994).
The dawn of the Nyayo era arrived with a degree of populism revolving around the slogan Nyayo that Moi sought to elevate to a philosophical concept and political practice embodying the virtues of love, peace and unity as fundamental ingredients of the Nyayo political dispensation. The populism of this so-called philosophy drove its supporters overboard into unpalatable obstruction of other people’s rights, denial of independence of opinion and freedom of association and assembly. Aaron Segal describes Kenya’s political system as a presidential personal rule comprising contested, allegedly fraudulent elections, and co-opted and opposition parties (Segal 1996, 371). Ihonvberre talks of leadership and personalization of politics in the new movements in Africa (Ihonvbere 1996, 352). Kenyatta had an ethno-dimensional ruling cartel whose structure Moi was to imitate in forming his kitchen cabinet. Kibaki must avoid the temptation of a similar approach to politics. Under Kenyatta, there was created a multi-ethnic patronage system that sustained the political regime in the Kenyatta days from 1963 to 1978. Political restructuring under Daniel Arap Moi, Kenyatta’s successor, led to the dismantling of Kenyatta’s tribal cartel. Moi required in 1979 that all ethnic associations should be disbanded. But despite the effort of Moi to dismantle ethnic organisation as a means of undermining state politics of the Kikuyu ethnic group that was dominant in the central region, the role of ethnicity in allocating resources continued to be dominant under Moi.
Under both Kenyatta and Moi regimes, a number of leaders were to come from detention virtually maimed - a state of affairs indicative of the inhuman conditions to which detainees and prisoners are subjected in Kenya. Human dignity ought to be respected even for those in custody. Good leadership is humane leadership, and it strives to make custodians and enforcers of law and order, including courts, policemen and prison guards embrace humane social values. The real function of law is to serve as an instrument of normalising behaviour. During the Nyayo hegemony, inefficiency and negligence characterised the leadership culture in the civil service. Public management reform requires dynamic and visionary leadership. However, management reform takes time. First, it takes considerable time to be able to determine and then focus upon realistic and significant targets of reform opportunity. Second, it takes time to build the sense of trust with the relevant officials and policy makers, stakeholder organisations and individual citizens, which must precede any effort to introduce significant management reform. Ideological interpellation is a historical process in which encounter, interaction, negotiation and synthesis take place in clearly constituted forms of consciousness. Political discourse and playing politics are key elements in societal theatres such as our own. Politics is about articulation of conflicting opinions and their reconciliation through public institutions. The peaceful and democratic resolution of differences requires a consensus on certain fundamental values and public morality is one such value. Consensus is so valuable for the realization of political stability that in itself is very important in entrepreneurial activity.
Visionary leadership generates directional factors that come from the immediate goal setting. Instead of embarking on a clear transformative agenda, the party under Moi became a vehicle of mounting attacks on the integrity of those who were opposed to the President’s manner of rule. Insults were hurled at government critics rather than reasoned responses (Chege 1995, 58).
Conclusion
There is a crisis of values in today’s leadership process not only in Kenya but also in the rest of Eastern Africa. Unlike Kenyatta and Moi, post-Moi leaders need to recognise the importance of developing a culture of integration in which all human beings are respected. The big man syndrome of the Kenyatta and Moi regimes is characteristic of command-mediated and command-dominated political systems. Command based leadership that is characterised by the issuance of presidential directives by dictator-like rulers encourages the further development of a deviant leadership that has no transformative agenda. Good leadership is also moral leadership.
Corruption in the Kenyatta and Moi eras violated the formal rules governing the allocation of public resources by leaders in response to offers of financial gain or political support. Bribing is an attempt to change rules governing allocation of resources and rights (Khan 1998, 18). Leaders need to be ethically grounded in a public morality of useful moral insights and intuitions. That is why Nyerere says tyrannies and dictatorships do not have constitutions or if they have them on paper, they are disregarded and irrelevant to practice. Citizens, however, have a right to call to account the leaders at all levels. If they find things are going wrong, they have a right to expect explanations and immediate correction (Nyerere 1995, 2). A transformative anti-corruption strategy has become necessary as a basis of laying a strong long-term social foundation to rout out corruption that has become systemic. Social empowerment is required which expands and protects the range of political and economic resources and makes alternatives open to citizens of Kenya at this critical hour of transition. This is an empowerment which entails strengthening civil society to enhance its political and economic vitality providing more orderly paths of access and rules of interaction between state and society and balancing economic and political opportunities (Johnston 1998, 84).
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