By Ngari Gituku

The Third President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki (2002-2013) presided over the beginning of the transformation of the institutions of the presidency, the Judiciary and the enlarged Legislature, among many other reforming administrative and governance entities.

On March 30, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out two elaborate petitions against the IEBC and Uhuru.
And so, for only the second time across two generations, a Kenyatta again bestrides Kenya as President and Commander-in-Chief, equipped with a new constitutional order and pledged to delivering on a transformative agenda.

The office of President has been refined to its highest application in the United States. In the US, it has evolved across almost 240 years from an institution overshadowed by Congress throughout the 19th Century to the presidency-centred government that makes the tenant of the White House the most powerful man in America and in the world.

Scholars described the US presidents of the 19th Century, the first full century of the office created in 1775, as being little more than the “Clerk in Chief”, doing Congress’s bidding and with very little input into initiating policy or power politics.

But all this changed with evolving presidential campaign and election dynamics, particularly when presidents were finally able to appeal to the people directly. The first really assertive US President and the one who made Congress take a back seat for a change was Abraham Lincoln (in office 1861-65), who arrogated a number of powers to the presidency in order to conduct the American Civil War efficiently.
The first two American presidents of the 20th Century, Theodore Roosevelt (in office 1901-09) and Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) were also very assertive and grabbed hold of federal policy. Wilson was in office throughout World War I and for a few years thereafter.
But the prototype of the president as the fount of power, national, foreign and security policy was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in office 1933 to 1945, breaking the two- term limit set by Founding President George Washington on account of World War II (1939-45). Roosevelt came to power during the Great Depression.

He was also the first US President to go for the Great Communicator template, with his weekly ‘fireside chats’ with the populace broadcast nationwide on radio.   
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first US president born in the 20th Century and the youngest to enter the office, at 43 in 1961. Although in office for only 1,000 days, JFK redefined the US and all presidencies; he was the first TV president, had a young and photogenic family and was a great communicator and orator. His Cabinet, composed of appointees described at the time as the “best and the brightest”, drawn from academe and the corporate private sector, was the youngest and boldest America had yet seen.

Presidents Uhuru Kenyatta and Barack Obama were born the same year, 1961, still look youthful at 50-plus-1, as it were, have photogenic young families and aspire to oratorical speechmaking.

There is another parallel between Presidents Uhuru and Obama. Global newsmagazine TIME, in an essay celebrating their second investiture of President Barack Obama as “Man of the Year”, spoke admiringly about the “keys to the kingdom” of his second term victory over Mitt Romney.

According to TIME, Obama’s campaign researchers first noticed the keys by listening keenly to voters organized in focus groups across the United States across an 18-month period. The researchers organized the focus group encounters secretly in rented halls, eight at a time; the men separate from the women. TIME says it was David Simas, a former registrar of deeds in Taunton, Massachusetts turned senior White House aide who first spotted the keys:

“The first discovery Simas made held the keys to the kingdom. ‘Here is the best thing’, he said of Obama when he went back to home base. ‘People trust him’.”
Uhuru, too, possesses the keys to the kingdom in the Kenyan context. The Kenyan people trust him implicitly, which is why they propelled him to State House in spite of and despite the allegations tabled against him at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Nothing else can possibly explain why and how Uhuru and his Deputy William Ruto were able to traverse the incredibly treacherous and hurdle-ridden campaign trail, a veritable minefield of adverse circumstances, including interferences woven and boomeranged from beyond yonder.

The writer is editor of Duncan Ndegwa autobiography ‘Walking in Kenyatta’s Struggles’ and a fellow of Kenya Leadership Institute