By ARISTOTLE Omondi
President Kibaki’s immediate former aide-de-camp, Col Geoffrey King’ang’i Muturi, who resigned recently to contest a parliamentary seat in Embu County in the General Election, has scored a significant first.
The ADC has revealed to the world dimensions of Kibaki that have been long assumed unfathomable or nonexistent and in the wake, lifted a lid on a cryptic personality.
In a society where being cryptic – even as an expression of depth or sheer force of character – attracts suspicion and instant myth-making, it is difficult to exploit one’s full potential let alone be a president and at the same time enjoy a break from poisoned conjecture.
And that is precisely why this former adjutant to the Commander-in-Chief has actually done a timely thing in unmasking sides of a man-turned-myth.
Even better, King’ang’i has done it during Kibaki’s presidential term.
The so-called aloofness attributed to Kibaki naturally bolsters the sense of bulletproof mystique that surrounds him. Such perceptions inevitably lead to incorrect attributions of character.
But had such revelations by King’ang’i come at the sunset of Kibaki’s presidency – much of the ignorant talk about who Kibaki is or what he is not may well have changed completely. King’ang’i has not only unveiled a solitary Head of State and the loneliness of command, but also thrown a nugget or two on what Kibaki’s legacy will look like long after his term ends.
More fundamentally, King’ang’i has humanised Kibaki and set off a myriad guessing games about what else Kibaki is that is concealed from casual onlookers.
For starters, it is a sheer flight of fancy to as much as imagine Kibaki humming ‘Ndakaiire Jehovah’ (I cried to Jehovah), a very popular Catholic worship song my one time roommate in my undergraduate days was hugely fond of.
But King’ang’i confirms that President Emilio Mwai Kibaki actually does! In comparison though, it is quite easy to visualise Prime Minister Raila Odinga not just humming or singing, but happily belting out, Jaguar’s Kigeugeu in his bathtub.
Such is the yawning gap in public perception on Kibaki and Raila.
King’ang’i also reports that Kibaki reads newspapers religiously and that he is not content with mere summaries given to him by his media handlers. While this is encouraging, I am eager to know what the President thinks of caricatures of him in the newspapers, a good number of them featuring him with distorted physiological features.
In the matter of caricaturing, Kibaki is not alone. A recent edition of Newsweek, the American global newsmagazine, devotes an entire section in its Special Commemorative Issue The Diamond Queen, sub-titled 60 Years of Elizabeth II, to the constant use of the Queen’s features as a pop culture icon.
It probes the Queen’s portrayals by actresses in the movies to the animated series Spitting Image. Like Kibaki, Elizabeth II has often been rendered as decidedly reptilian. Where the lampoonists have a field day with Kibaki’s kipara and nose, their British counterparts also have great fun with distorting the shape of the Queen’s nose and close-set eyes.
Kibaki’s private domain
And, by the way, it is quite telling that Kibaki has never complained about caricatures of him by newspaper cartoonists or XYZ, Kenya’s notoriously hilarious animated TV political parody, which borrows heavily from the aforementioned British Spitting Image.
Indeed, not many African presidents brook satirical portrayal even on the State broadcaster while they are in power. Kibaki therefore stoically reveals a solid character that is completely unmoved by provocations aimed at poking content of character or physiognomy.
Perhaps that is what being a stickler to the ‘proper way’ of doing things – as King’ang’i’s reveals of Kibaki’s personal routine – produces.
It is intriguing to learn that the President owns a mobile phone and even uses it, albeit apparently not a Smartphone. The former ADC told one newspaper interviewer that Kibaki’s use of mobiles is limited and nothing compared to Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete, who maintains FaceBook and Twitter accounts.
Kibaki has seen it all. Probably that’s where his calm demeanour derives from. Kibaki joined politics last century and is riding into the sunset of his career in the age of the Knowledge Economy and is a jump shy of Kenya’s transformation into middle-income nation status and petrodollar economy. Both these feats have their roots deep in his legacy.
Col King’ang’i’s insights into President Kibaki’s private domain could not have happened without the phenomenal, indeed exponential, expansion of the democratic space that is one of the hallmarks of his one decade at the helm in Kenya.
Indeed, the former ADC’s cues are the closest thing to a book on the Kibaki Presidency, something that the State House stint of Kenya’s first graduate President can be said to be fairly crying out for.
The writer is at the School of Graduate Studies, University of Botswana.
aristomondi@gmail.com
