Government and Opposition in the 1970s
The banning of KPU and Odinga's detention after the Kisumu incident in October 1969 seemed to have a quieting effect on the country. Kenyatta reopened the political process by decreeing that candidates for the approaching parliamentary election would be selected by KANU members voting in primary elections to be held in December. More than 700 candidates were approved by the party to contest 158 seats in the National Assembly. They held the field alone: no other party was functioning that might offer candidates, and independents were barred from presenting themselves.
Coming so soon after a period of intense political unrest, the general election in February 1970 demonstrated the vitality of democratic institutions in Kenya, albeit within the context of a de facto one-party system. Nearly half of the incumbent members, including five ministers and 14 assistant ministers, went down to defeat at the polls. The results were taken, however, as a vote of confidence in the government. Several former KPU leaders had been released from detention before the election and readmitted to KANU, and two of them were selected to stand for the assembly. Only one opposition member from the outgoing parliament retained his seat. The openness of the election and the subsequent inclusion of a number of Luo in the ministerial ranks of the new government helped to ease tension among that group, on which the recent unrest had focused.
In March 1971 the government moved rapidly against an attempted armed coup. There was no immediate suspicion that it was ethnically based, and the plotters appeared to have no following in the population. Thirteen suspects were brought to trial, during which the prosecutor, without naming names, implied that a few men in high places were implicated with them. When the country's two highest ranking officials of Kamba background — one, the army chief of staff and the other, the chief justice — were later cited in testimony, they resigned.
During the next four years, the government was free from outward challenge. The period of relative calm was broken in the summer of 1974, however, when the country experienced its first serious industrial unrest. In August the government with the cooperation of the trade union banned strikes and demonstrations, and the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University College, where students had taken advantage of the disturbances to press demands for better accommodations and less stringent academic requirements, were closed.
Parliamentary elections were called for October. As in 1970 the more than 700 candidates nominated by KANU were the only contenders for seats, but they represented a wide variety of factions within the party. The common theme for all KANU candidates was support for Kenyanization and for the expansion of education as proposed in the government's Development Plan 1970-74, but personalities rather than issues dominated the contest. Typically, candidates stressed their connections in Nairobi as proof that they could deliver more to constituents than could their opponents. Government-supported candidates spent money freely during the lively campaign.
Endorsement by GEMA virtually guaranteed election in predominantly Kikuyu constituencies. The approximately 4.4 million voters who cast ballots represented about 80 percent of those eligible and included newly enfranchised 18-year-olds. A secret ballot was used for the first time. Under election regulations, each party contesting elections was to have a separate ballot box at the polling place but, because KANU was the only party in the field, voters had the choice of only one box in which to cast their ballots. Following the pattern set in previous general and local elections, a high proportion of incumbents lost their places. Also, as in earlier elections, charges of intimidation, corruption, and vote fraud were rife after the votes had been tallied.
Even though limited to approved KANU candidates, voters could exercise a clear political choice at the polls among factions and personalities wearing the party label. In addition to GEMA, representing Kikuyu interests, a rival progovernment faction led by Attorney General Njonjo gathered around Moi, the front-runner, to succeed Kenyatta. The so-called TJ Group (which included onetime proteges of Tom J. Mboya) was dedicated to carrying on Mboya's tradition under the leadership of his brother, Alphonse Okuku Ndiege. Jean Marie Seroney, the recognized leader of the Nandi (an element of the Kalenjin group), was a popular parliamentarian who not only opposed Kikuyu dominance but was also a particular adversary of Moi, also a Kalenjin but of the Tugen group.
Among the most vocal critics of the government during the election campaign was Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, who in 1974 was probably the most popular figure in Kenya after Kenyatta himself. Kariuki, an assistant minister in the outgoing government and formerly the president's private secretary and leader of KAN Us youth movement, drew strong support from Kikuyu dissidents who resented the influence and exclusivity of the Kiambu circle around Kenyatta. He had come to disagree with the government on a number of basic issues that bore on Kenya's orientation to a free enterprise economy.
Odinga, a fixture of the discredited pro-Soviet left, was barred from reentering KANU and was therefore prevented from being presented as a candidate for office, but several of his followers were in the running, and one of them defeated the government's candidate in Odinga's home constituency.
The assembly seated in 1974 was younger and contained a larger percentage of academically and technically trained members, teachers, and trade unionists than the one that it replaced. In all, a small but vocal group of about 20 members, some of whom were associated with Seroney, Kariuki, and the Odinga faction, could be depended upon to offer consistent opposition to the government bench. Both the Kikuyu old guard and the pro-Moi faction were amply represented in the new government, in which places were distributed among the ethnic groups but from which the TJ Group and the Kikuyu dissidents were excluded.
Confrontation between the president and parliament had been anticipated in July when, without consultation, Kenyatta decreed that Swahili would have official status and its use allowed in parliamentary debate. Some members who were outside the government pointed out that, according to the constitution, English was the official parliamentary language, reflecting the country's multiethnic character. An amendment to the constitution was duly passed to back up the presidential decree, but criticism was made at the time of the president's methods in attempting to circumvent the constitutional process.
The lines of confrontation became more sharply drawn in November when Kenyatta postponed the opening of the new parliament in order to prevent Seroney, a frequent critic of the president's inner circle of advisers, from being elected deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives. Support for Seroney, who had no connection with the government, had gained impetus after rallies at which Kariuki had brought into the open charges of corruption by members of the official family.
Kariuki accused government ministers of accepting bribes from foreign businesses in the form of a percentage of their profits, and he had implicated Moi and Mama Ngina in similar dealings. Delaying the opening of the legislative session had also served the purpose of preventing Kariuki from questioning the government on the issue in the National Assembly. Moi responded to Kariuki's attack on him by warning against rumormongering based on accounts in the foreign press. At the same time, foreign newspapers and periodicals reporting the incident were ordered seized.
Kariuki, a onetime Mau Mau detainee who had gone on to become a student at Oxford, broadened his attack to challenge the capitalist structure of the country's economy. Foreign investment, he charged, was a corrupting influence which, together with a landholding system that allowed a few Africans to own large estates while the rural masses went landless, was setting the stage for class conflict in Kenya. His opposition to the government and his denunciation of those in the "ruling circle" carried all the more weight and made him more dangerous to the old guard because he was a Kikuyu.
The period was marked by a number of acts of violence. In the worst of them a bomb was exploded at a Nairobi bus station, killing 27 bystanders. At Gatundu, Kenyatta's cattle were maimed in Mau Mau fashion. Both incidents were blamed on the clandestine Maskini (literally, poor people) Liberation Organization (MLO). Kariuki had no known links with the MLO, but the old guard was quick to accuse him of contributing to the tense atmosphere in which these acts had taken place. The National Assembly convened on February 4, 1975, and Kenyatta was elected unanimously to a third term as president. Seroney, who during the interim had assured Moi that his criticism was not directed at Kenyatta personally, was chosen as deputy Speaker. Kariuki was not present at the opening session.
Kariuki was last seen alive escorted by senior security officers on the day before parliament opened. His mutilated body was found two weeks later. His funeral was turned into a violent demonstration of opposition to the government by students and the unemployed. Many Kenyans were convinced that the government was implicated in Kariuki's murder, and not even the president was exempted from suspicion in the affair.
In March a 15-member parliamentary commission was impaneled to investigate Kariuki's death, but its work was hampered by the refusal of police cooperation. In a report issued two months later, the commission recommended the dismissal from office of the commander of the General Service Unit, Benjamin Gethi, who was with Kariuki on the day that he disappeared. Three others were cited in connection with the murder, and an additional investigation was requested into the roles of five others. The names of two of those in the latter group, including that of Koinange, were expunged from the report on the president's order. Njonjo criticized the report in the National Assembly, and his proposal that it be "adopted" instead of "accepted" was defeated only by a narrow margin. Several ministers who voted with the majority against the attorney general's amendment were shortly dismissed from the government. Criminal charges were never brought in the case.
The Kariuki affair marked a watershed in Kenya's political history. The obvious government cover-up only heightened suspicions of government responsibility. The investigation of his murder and the disregard for its findings revealed deep divisions in Kikuyu ranks, even among those from Kiambu, as the old guard found itself pitted against the younger men. As enraged younger members of parliament became bolder in questioning the government's actions, the government became less tolerant of its opposition. Seroney's allies and friends of Kariuki hammered away at inequitable land distribution and misman agement of public lands. Martin Shikuku, who was named to chair a committee to investigate land use, broadened its scope to probe related instances of corruption and ethnic favoritism.
The government, which chose to disregard charges of corruption directed against its members, counterattacked in the National Assembly, attributing unrest to agitation by "students" and "communists." Drawn into the fray, Kenyatta dismissed his critics as "animals." Shikuku's investigation was halted, and his committee was abolished. As if to spite the critics, a government-sponsored constitutional amendment was proposed and passed after a bitter debate allowing the president to pardon a former minister, Paul Ngei, who had been convicted of corruption in office.
In October 1975 the government turned forcibly on its parliamentary opposition. Seroney and Shikuku were arrested outside parliament and deprived of their seats. Two months later another vocal opposition member, 26-year-old Chelegat Mutai, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for allegedly inciting sisal workers in her constituency to violence, and her seat was also declared vacant. Several others involved in the investigations of Kariuki's death and government corruption, including Mutai's colleague, George Anyona, were detained on suspicious charges, one of them sentenced to a two-year prison term on an old charge of wife beating. Some concluded that there was no legal way left open to challenge the government. When parliament was reconvened after a recess, its energies were devoted to dealing with the breakup of the EAC.
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