Mwai Kibaki
In 2002, President Daniel arap Moi, in his 24th year of rule and recently term-limited, announced to startled leaders of his party that Uhuru Kenyatta, a relative political newcomer and son of the founding President, was his chosen successor. This led to a walk-out of the party by those who insisted that the ruling party candidate be chosen by a secret ballot at a party convention.
A significant exit of prominent KANU leaders in mid-October 2002 into the waiting arms of an Opposition coalition that had already achieved considerable electoral potential. The fact that a number of these individuals had been long-serving members of a regime whose legacy the voters appeared ready to reject seemed to matter little; what counted was that the ranks of those opposing Moi’s designs continued to swell.
Such opposition unity appeared to be cemented by the subsequent signing, on 22 October, of a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) that was widely publicised. Among other things, it identified coalition leaders with specific offices, beginning with the president and vice-president, which the present constitution provides for, as well others for which it does not, especially an executive prime minister. Thus, the National Alliance Party of Kenya (NAK), an amalgam of various Opposition parties, and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a previously unknown entity that was energized by its new “owners,” the KANU rebels, came together in the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition (NARC).
The specific campaign promises it offered resonated extremely well with the Kenyan public. These included: free primary education; a new, more democratic constitution “within one hundred days”; and an end to corruption, as well as the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for past looting of public coffers and the return of illegally appropriated public property. Other campaign pledges addressed the restoration of fruitful relations with the country’s main donors, starting with the World Bank and the IMF; compensation for victims of past human rights abuses and punishment for those responsible; the creation of “half a million jobs a year for the next five years”; annual construction of 150,000 housing units; and implementation of the previous government’s broken promise of a massive pay rise for teachers, as well as similar rises for others, such as the grossly underpaid police. KANU’s pledges – including many of a similar nature – rang hollow by comparison, in light of the incumbent party’s 40-year run.
The leader of the walk-out was Raila Odinga, then one of Moi's ministers and a former Moi regime political prisoner. In the 1960s, Odinga's father had served as a prominent minister in Kenya's first post-independence government, alongside Moi, before the elder Odinga had a bitter falling out with the elder Kenyatta.
Among those who followed Odinga out of the party was Kalonzo Musyoka. Earlier, Musyoka had made his name in the ruling party by vociferously defending Moi and calling for Odinga's imprisonment for subversive activities, a reference to Odinga's agitation for multiparty democracy and against Kenya's one-party constitution in force at that time.
Late in 2002, Odinga helped unite the opposition behind a single candidate: Mwai Kibaki. The opposition had lost Kenya's first two multiparty elections, in '92 and '97, largely due to their failure to unite (and Moi's willingness to use violence against entire communities of presumptive opposition supporters). Kibaki had served in parliament since independence in '63. He had served as a minister under both Jomo Kenyatta and Moi. He spent 10 years as Moi's Vice-President. In 1982, he gave an impassioned speech in parliament about the necessity of moving Kenya from a de facto one-party state to a de jure one-party state, and then formally made the motion in favor of the one-party amendment to the constitution. Nine years later, Kibaki left the ruling party to enter opposition politics. On occasion he was beaten by police while leading anti-Moi, pro-democracy demonstrations.
In the absence of any significant disruption of the voting exercise, it therefore came as no great surprise that on 27 December 2002, encouraged by a large scale domestic and diplomatic election observation effort, Kenyan voters gave 62 percent of their votes to NARC. This put Mwai Kibaki into State House with a hefty majority (125 out of 210 elected seats) in the National Assembly.
President Kibaki’s poor health (together with his age of 71) following a serious road accident during the campaign that sent him into hospital in Britain, and complications that followed his swearing-in (including rumors of one or more strokes) that required an additional local hospital stay, diluted the public’s euphoria. The new government, meanwhile, confronted the budgetary and political challenges of implementing its promises, and of holding its own disparate coalition together.
Odinga and Musyoka (along with their allies) fell out with the President when Kibaki reneged on promises he had made to them about the positions they would hold in government. The moral of the story is that while Kenya's senior politicians all know one another quite well, there are no permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests, particularly when it comes to preserving or improving one's position within the ranks of the traditional political elite. By 2007 former 2002 allies Kibaki, Odinga and Musyoka were now running for President against one another. Their opponents from 2002, Moi and Uhuru Kenyatta, were allied to Kibaki.
Mwai Kibaki
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