Kanu might rule us for many more years

Kenya held a colourful handing over ceremony where the world witnessed the inauguration of Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta as the fourth president. The ceremony was a big move from the embarrassment witnessed in 2002 when the second President, Daniel Moi, handed over power to Mwai Kibaki. In 2002 there was the perceived removal of Kanu from power and Moi was seen as a monster. However, if asked today to repeat what happened to Moi, no Kenyan would dare because they have now voted for Moi’s 2002 choice. But what has changed between 2002 and 2013? Moi was thought to have been against democracy, and this made him an enemy in the eyes of many Kenyans. However, Kenyans were never told clearly that democracy is an open race where the person supported by the majority becomes the leader. Instead, Kenyans were told that once Moi and Kanu were out of the picture then that equals democracy. Moi, a self-proclaimed professor of politics, was known to make no mistake as far as political calculations were concerned, and to think that his choice for Uhuru was a mistake is failing to see it deeply. We saw in the 2007 elections both Moi and Uhuru strangely rallied behind Kibaki’s second bid, proving that there was no bad blood between the old Kanu regime and the man who ‘humiliated’ them in 2002. At the end of this story you might not want to believe it, but Moi’s prophecy of Kanu ruling for a century sounds real just as Kibaki’s equation of the independence party to a huge mugumo tree.

Andrew Mibei, via email