Kipkoech Tanui

The meeting that ICC judges are convinced President Kibaki, Mr Uhuru Kenyatta and Mr Francis Muthaura had with Mungiki members at State House is shocking. I am tempted to believe my President can never do that, and trust his word the judges, like those sinners who crucified Jesus, chose to believe false witnesses.

I also do not imagine any rational leader would meet Mungiki knowing what happened after it was reported that during the Kanu days, they were darlings of the State.

But of course when retired President Moi met Munguki, it was something between a youth wing, political hirelings and handouts seekers. It had not bloodied its hands with brutal killings and extortions.

They also came to him in the hands of Mr Kihika Kimani, whose judgment in his last years was impaired. In one of the political rallies in Laikipia I Iistened as he assured Moi the people of Laikipia West had vowed they would never let Mr G.G. Kariuki anywhere near Parliament, even if just to relieve himself in its toilets.

Strange metamorphosis

Sadly for African culture, G.G was in the dais with his wife and a young man who seemed to be his son.

That is the guy who was the bridge between Kanu’s top command and the youth group that was slowly metamorphosing into a killer ring.

I am sure this did not escape Kibaki’s attention, who was then the icon of the brave and unbendable opposition in Kenya, the one that could not accept offers of beach plots, huge bank loans, bribes with briefcases stuffed with money, and enticements such as ministerial appointments to defect to Kanu. Kibaki just does not seem like the guy who can sit with people who puff tobacco, but then if you do not change politics, it changes you, and that is why today there is so much Kanu in the way Kibaki does things.

Graphic account

So again, you never know, it could have happened under the frustration to get a second term, because Moi and Kenyatta had many, so why would he walk away with one.

So here we are reading the 193-page judgment given by Justice Ekaterina Trendafilova on Monday, and grappling with the graphic account of how the meeting started on November 26, 2007.

How Muthaura introduced the youths to the President, how Uhuru gave them millions, the speeches made by the youths asking for President’s intervention in their arrests, and how the President asked Muthaura to act on their complaints.

We read of the assurances from the youths that if Kibaki heeded their request, they would reciprocate by voting him back to office.

Thereafter, according to the witnesses, one of whom was in the two meetings, the arrests stopped, and wherever an overzealous police officer collared one of their members, they would just call Muthaura and he would order their release.

Now, as I have said before, I do not hate my President but I love Kenya more. Three things compromise my trust in him. First is what he turned into once elected in 2002, stuffing security agencies, Treasury and the mega-million energy sector with names picked off a manicured tribal list on his table.

That is not the Kibaki some of us enjoyed being assigned to follow and cover during the 8th and 9th Parliaments. Second, we need to look back at the events preceding 2007 when he dismantled the Opposition and reduced its then leader, Uhuru, into his political flower-girl through an arrangement called GNU (Government of National Unity) that undermined our evolving democracy, whose pillars are checks and balances set out as constitutional guarantees. It amuses me there is an animal called gnu!

The point is we then had a desperate President who not only had failed to stop corruption, whose roots were now sprouting in the lawns of State House and under his desk by way of Anglo Leasing, but one who had turned captive to narrow tribal and business interests.

Derailed

They wanted him back so as to keep the gravy train in the Central Kenya circuit after they forced it off the Rift Valley rail tracks.

That explains why, at least to me, we ended up with the electoral mess that led to the violence, presided over by a President who had become the project of others who picked the succulent and fatty pieces falling off his table.

A useless and spineless chairman of the defunct Electoral Commission of Kenya, whose members this President handpicked in complete disregard of common decency, public morality and spirit of a gentleman’s agreement struck in 1997, helped him in this. I mean, even Moi had allowed him to pick a member to ECK!

The President, therefore, will have to work harder to convince Kenyans he did not meet Mungiki at State House.

After all, in the list given the judges by Mr Hyslop Ipu, who was his comptroller, the name of Maina Kangethe Diambo, a self-confessed Mungiki member, appears. Also, even the picture on the State House website purporting to show Uhuru and Mungiki were not in the meeting is not convincing as it is sourced from subordinates who would do the President’s bidding any time.

There is no guarantee they were not edited out, or that it was the only thing the President did that day in Nairobi.

We have three chances of breaking this hard nut and getting the truth. One is that by offering himself as Muthaura’s character witness at ICC, Kibaki has made himself a candidate for the witness chair at The Hague.

So unless he wins the petition, Kibaki may, bible in hand, be cross-examined about all these.

Two, he can open up State House for a UN inquiry over what transpired. With forensic audit of the CCTV cameras and satellite images from above it won’t be rocket science anymore. Lastly, if the cases go to full trial, as it looks set to, then we are yet to hear more.

• • •

You realise I have left out the fallacy of Uhuru and Muthaura sitting tight in office despite facing murder, rape and other serious and shameful charges at The Hague.

It is because it bothered me little and it was inevitable. They had no chance and they would have soon slithered away, for the rocks raining on their hideouts were turning into boulders.

Ringera, Kiraitu, Mwiraria, Saitoti, Kimunya and Wetangula acted in the same manner, but finally fled with their tails between their legs.

Even those who got a chance to return to Cabinet have never been the same.

Writer is Managing Editor, Daily Editions, at The Standard.

ktanui@standardmedia.co.ke