• Moi, Kenyatta eras bear lessons that Ruto has unwittingly emulated
Over the last few years, certainly since UhuRuto swept to power back in 2013, I have been unable to escape the feeling that the people in charge of the country have been on a mission to drag the country kicking and screaming back to the bad old days.
In certain matters of governance, such as clawing back executive powers while encouraging Parliament, and to some extent, the Judiciary, to let go of their sovereignty, their reversal endeavours have succeeded.
The current regime’s moves, for instance, the recall of dismissed Cabinet ministers, have convinced me that President William Ruto, while not a fan or a student of history, seems hell-bent on repeating its mistakes.
Flashback to November 1975. President Jomo Kenyatta was in power and the political future of Paul Ngei, his roguish favourite buddy from the Kapenguria Six era, was in jeopardy.
Ngei, who had fought many battles in the past against incredible odds and had always managed to survive, had met his Waterloo, as the Weekly Review magazine put it at the time.
A petition against Ngei’s “unopposed” election to Parliament at the 1974 General Election, had succeeded at the High Court, meaning he would loses his parliamentary seat and Cabinet post to boot.
Worse yet for Ngei, the judgement barred him from contesting an election during the next five years. In effect, this meant he would sit out the elections until 1984, unless there was a by-election between 1980 and 1984.
Political pundits were quick to say this was the end of the road for Ngei, but the man himself seemed unperturbed by it all. Those who were there as he left the courtroom said Ngei’s aura was that of someone who knew something that nobody else did.
Outside the court, Ngei addressed journalists and supporters and said he had not come to the end of his political career. He told reporters: “I shall carry on. Kuteleza sio kuanguka, na nimeteleza tu. (Slipping is not falling, and I have only slipped).”
For keen observers of politics at the time, only a political miracle could restore Ngei’s political fortunes.
Enter President Jomo Kenyatta and Kenya’s third Parliament, which was cajoled into hurriedly passing a Constitution of Kenya Amendment Bill 25 of 1975.
The bill was presented to Parliament a day before the MPs went into their long Christmas recess and was rushed through with hardly any substantive debate.
It was just in time for candidate Ngei to contest in the Kangundo by-election, which swept him back into Parliament and the Cabinet. In fact, it was almost as though he had never left.
Fast-forward to the forming of a new Cabinet after the December 1997 General Election. The election had been President Daniel arap Moi’s second and last since the return to multiparty electoral politics in 1992.
Seeing as it was his last term in office, the nation’s eyes were on whom President Moi would appoint as his VP as it was generally believed that this would be a hint about whom he wanted to succeed him.
President Moi, however, decided to keep Kenyans, and the world, in suspense for 14 months and did not appoint a VP. His erstwhile VP from 1988, Prof George Saitoti, was left in Cabinet as Home Affairs minister.
Moi paid no attention to the clamour from opposition parties and Kenyans generally to fill the post so as to prevent the possibility of a constitutional crisis if anything were to happen to him.
When eventually in April 1999, he re-appointed Saitoti, he did so via a roadside announcement, while buying vegetables in Limuru Town. “I have given you a Vice President like you have been asking,” he said. “Now I will wait to see whether it will increase the amount of maize meal in your kitchens.”
President Ruto’s reappointment of some of the same old faces he had dismissed to his Cabinet reminded me of our first and second presidents and how they did whatever they wanted to, and to hell with what the rest of the country wants or feels.