[UAH] From Cold War to M-Pesa, events that shaped our history - Politics - nation.co.ke
|
3:23 PM |
No comments |
The "Change the Constitution" movement lost the day for two reasons. First, Kenyatta felt that a rotation of power between ethnic groups was important for national unity and so prevented efforts to remove Moi from office – a lesson as relevant today as it was then.
Second, senior Kikuyu leaders such as Mwai Kibaki and Charles Njonjo rallied to Moi's side, enabling him to see off his rivals.
Kenyatta's death not only left Kenya without a president, it left the nation without its figurehead. Shortly into Moi's tenure, the deep political divisions that had surfaced in 1978 reappeared. Following efforts by Odinga to set up a new political party to rival Kanu, Moi passed legislation that turned Kenya from a de facto one-party state (in which there was no legal restriction on opposing parties) to a de jure one -- Kanu became the only legal party under Section 2A of the constitution.
This was a critical moment because it set the scene for the battle between Kanu and pro-democracy activists in the late 1980s and suggested that Kenya would be less open in the Nyayo era than it had been under Kenyatta's rule.
Together with the restriction on political freedoms, Moi's decision to prohibit ethnic welfare associations such as the Gikuyu Embu and Meru Association (Gema) generated considerable political unease and further instability. On August 1, 1982, members of the air force mounted their coup against Moi. Some coups are important because they lead to a change of government. But coups that fail can be just as important in the way that they change the perceptions and actions of the survivors.
In the years that followed the coup Moi's regime became increasingly repressive of critical voices. For much of the rest of the decade, real and imagined critics of the government were subjected to harassment, arrest and in the worst cases torture. But this did not succeed in silencing dissent. Coercion has never proved to be an effective means of maintaining stability in Kenya, from the era of colonial rule onwards.
In Moi's case, the 1988 elections proved to be a critical juncture. The clear evidence of rigging – made obvious by the use of queue voting, so that it was plain for all to see that in many areas the less popular candidate had been declared the victor – undermined the legitimacy of the one-party state.
At the same time, by plotting to lock out many prominent leaders such as Charles Rubia and Kenneth Matiba in party and national elections, Moi unintentionally created a leadership for the country's nascent pro-democracy campaign. As a result, Kenya experienced another period of intense political turbulence as Matiba, Odinga and Rubia came out in favour of regime change.
This period of Kenyan history is perhaps best remembered for the saba saba riots, a genuine moment of popular mobilisation against authoritarian rule, which played an important role in setting the scene for the reintroduction of multiparty politics.
The return of competitive politics had major implications that reached far beyond the political sphere. The need to fund election campaigns, combined with the weakening of state institutions as a result of Structural Adjustment Programmes and the strategies employed by the Moi government in the late 1980s, ushered in a new phase of rampant corruption that demonstrated just how fragile the country's mechanisms of fiscal and political accountability had become.
This period was epitomised by the Goldenberg scandal, in which hundreds of billions of shillings of government revenue were misappropriated in an elaborate export scam. That none of the major players in the scandal were ever effectively prosecuted demonstrated the extent to which law and order had broken down, while the economic impact of the scandal – estimated to be well over Sh100 billion – illustrated the high cost of weak institutions.
VIOLENCE:
Assassination of popular leaders sowed the seed for political reform
Partly as a result of episodes of instability, Kenya has suffered a series of episodes of traumatic violence. It is tempting to ignore these moments in favour of a more rose tinted celebration of 50 years of independence, but that would do a disservice to some of the most important figures in the nation's history.
In the 1960s there was the assassination of Pio Gama Pinto (1965), which dealt a significant blow to those more radical members of Kanu such as Oginga Odinga, for whom he had been such a successful organiser.
In terms of national politics, the 1969 assassination of Tom Mboya, one of the most talented and respected politicians of his generation, was perhaps more significant. With his death, Kenya not only lost a brilliant mind, but one of the few political leaders capable of mobilising support across ethnic lines.
Pinto and Mboya were not alone. In 1975 the popular Kikuyu leader, JM Kariuki, was killed, sending shock waves through Central Province. Kariuki's claim that Kenya had become a nation of "10 millionaires and 10 million beggars" suggested that had he lived he would have focussed greater attention on the need to limit the growth of the super rich and super poor – sadly, we shall never know.
The assassination of Foreign minister Robert Ouko on February 13, 1990, was every bit as important in its ramifications. Most notably, it led international donors to take a much more critical attitude towards the Kanu government, which eventually translated into greater pressure for the end of the one-party state.
The "Change the Constitution" movement lost the day for two reasons. First, Kenyatta felt that a rotation of power between ethnic groups was important for national unity and so prevented efforts to remove Moi from office – a lesson as relevant today as it was then.
Second, senior Kikuyu leaders such as Mwai Kibaki and Charles Njonjo rallied to Moi's side, enabling him to see off his rivals.
Kenyatta's death not only left Kenya without a president, it left the nation without its figurehead. Shortly into Moi's tenure, the deep political divisions that had surfaced in 1978 reappeared. Following efforts by Odinga to set up a new political party to rival Kanu, Moi passed legislation that turned Kenya from a de facto one-party state (in which there was no legal restriction on opposing parties) to a de jure one -- Kanu became the only legal party under Section 2A of the constitution.
This was a critical moment because it set the scene for the battle between Kanu and pro-democracy activists in the late 1980s and suggested that Kenya would be less open in the Nyayo era than it had been under Kenyatta's rule.
Together with the restriction on political freedoms, Moi's decision to prohibit ethnic welfare associations such as the Gikuyu Embu and Meru Association (Gema) generated considerable political unease and further instability. On August 1, 1982, members of the air force mounted their coup against Moi. Some coups are important because they lead to a change of government. But coups that fail can be just as important in the way that they change the perceptions and actions of the survivors.
In the years that followed the coup Moi's regime became increasingly repressive of critical voices. For much of the rest of the decade, real and imagined critics of the government were subjected to harassment, arrest and in the worst cases torture. But this did not succeed in silencing dissent. Coercion has never proved to be an effective means of maintaining stability in Kenya, from the era of colonial rule onwards.
In Moi's case, the 1988 elections proved to be a critical juncture. The clear evidence of rigging – made obvious by the use of queue voting, so that it was plain for all to see that in many areas the less popular candidate had been declared the victor – undermined the legitimacy of the one-party state.
At the same time, by plotting to lock out many prominent leaders such as Charles Rubia and Kenneth Matiba in party and national elections, Moi unintentionally created a leadership for the country's nascent pro-democracy campaign. As a result, Kenya experienced another period of intense political turbulence as Matiba, Odinga and Rubia came out in favour of regime change.
This period of Kenyan history is perhaps best remembered for the saba saba riots, a genuine moment of popular mobilisation against authoritarian rule, which played an important role in setting the scene for the reintroduction of multiparty politics.
The return of competitive politics had major implications that reached far beyond the political sphere. The need to fund election campaigns, combined with the weakening of state institutions as a result of Structural Adjustment Programmes and the strategies employed by the Moi government in the late 1980s, ushered in a new phase of rampant corruption that demonstrated just how fragile the country's mechanisms of fiscal and political accountability had become.
This period was epitomised by the Goldenberg scandal, in which hundreds of billions of shillings of government revenue were misappropriated in an elaborate export scam. That none of the major players in the scandal were ever effectively prosecuted demonstrated the extent to which law and order had broken down, while the economic impact of the scandal – estimated to be well over Sh100 billion – illustrated the high cost of weak institutions.
Assassination of popular leaders sowed the seed for political reform
Partly as a result of episodes of instability, Kenya has suffered a series of episodes of traumatic violence. It is tempting to ignore these moments in favour of a more rose tinted celebration of 50 years of independence, but that would do a disservice to some of the most important figures in the nation's history.
In the 1960s there was the assassination of Pio Gama Pinto (1965), which dealt a significant blow to those more radical members of Kanu such as Oginga Odinga, for whom he had been such a successful organiser.
In terms of national politics, the 1969 assassination of Tom Mboya, one of the most talented and respected politicians of his generation, was perhaps more significant. With his death, Kenya not only lost a brilliant mind, but one of the few political leaders capable of mobilising support across ethnic lines.
Pinto and Mboya were not alone. In 1975 the popular Kikuyu leader, JM Kariuki, was killed, sending shock waves through Central Province. Kariuki's claim that Kenya had become a nation of "10 millionaires and 10 million beggars" suggested that had he lived he would have focussed greater attention on the need to limit the growth of the super rich and super poor – sadly, we shall never know.
The assassination of Foreign minister Robert Ouko on February 13, 1990, was every bit as important in its ramifications. Most notably, it led international donors to take a much more critical attitude towards the Kanu government, which eventually translated into greater pressure for the end of the one-party state.
At the same time, the investigation into the assassination contributed to the fall from grace of one of Moi's most notorious allies, Nicholas Biwott.
It is often said that Kenya has been peaceful and stable since independence, but these assassinations – which occurred in pretty much every decade of independence – tell a different story.
It is tempting to wonder how Kenya would have developed if so many of those who put forward a different vision of the country's future had not been cut off in their prime. For example, imagine if Tom Mboya, who was born just a year before Mwai Kibaki, had just retired from public life rather than been buried in 1969.
While their methods differed significantly, what united Mboya, JM Kariuki and Pio Gama Pinto, in particular, was a concern for equality and social justice. Although many Kenyans did well under Jomo Kenyatta, the gains that were made were not shared equally, which contributed to the grievances of those groups who consider themselves the 'have nots'.
At times violence has also erupted on a mass scale. Thousands were killed and many more displaced during the 1992 and 1997 elections in which Kanu supporters instigated ethnic clashes in the Rift Valley in an attempt to displace, and hence disempower, communities assumed to support opposition parties.
This violence not only assisted Moi to retain power throughout the 1990s, it sowed the seeds for instability and inter-communal tensions in the 2000s.
The difference between the 2007 election and those that had gone before was not that political leaders engaged militias to act as 'protection' around election time, but that many of the groups that had supported Moi in 1992 and 1997 had broken away from the government following Kanu's defeat in 2002 and were now in opposition.
As a result, the fragile state could not cope with the forces ranged against it, resulting in a loss of life on a tragic scale. The collective loss of a sense of security and the damage done to national identity continues to haunt the country, particularly given the failure to provide justice to the victims.
But violence can unite as well as divide. Few moments of national unity have been as sincere and pronounced as the outpouring of grief that followed the terrorist attack on the US embassy on August 7, 1998 as well as other similar incidents. Although the city centre recovered quickly, the trauma of that day and the incomprehensibility of the act will never be forgotten by those there.
The attacks also had an important impact on Kenyan foreign policy: thereafter, anti-terror strategies became increasingly central to the country's engagement in the region.
Kenya's regional relations have largely been peaceful, but not always. The status of Somali citizens of Kenya has been a long-running debate that the country has yet to fully resolve.
The Shifta War began less than a fortnight after independence and although that conflict ended in 1967, successive Kenyan governments remained uncertain of their relationships with their Somali citizens and with Somalia itself.
This situation has been further complicated by Kenya's invasion of Somalia in October 2011, which was the first time that Kenyan troops have been deployed on foreign soil to attain a military objective. In years to come we may look back on this moment as a key development in Kenya's journey to becoming a more proactive regional force.
How to deal with past instances of violence remains a thorny topic, but justice is increasingly being done for those who have suffered. In July 2002, some 200 Maasai and Samburu who had been bereaved or maimed as a result of British army explosives left on their land accepted more than $7 million in compensation from Britain.
More recently, Mau Mau victims won the right to pursue their claims for compensation in relation to the mistreatment that they experienced during the insurgency. It now looks likely that the British Government will pay compensation to thousands of Kenyans, which will not only right a colonial wrong, but also set a precedent for how governments should deal with atrocities in their past.
At the time of writing, Kenyans are still trying to come to terms with crimes that may have been committed by its own government. The Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) set up in the wake of the power-sharing violence has been dismissed by many as flawed process, but the publication of its report last month was nonetheless important.
The 42,000 witnesses who gave testimony give the Commission's report a weight that it would not otherwise have, and it has raised important questions about how to deal with political leaders who stand charged with a range of violations – including some that are often forgotten as a result of the overriding focus on the post-election violence of 2007.
However, in some cases Kenyans may not be able to decide how to deal with the past themselves. The ICC case against three prominent Kenyans accused of committing crimes against humanity will go ahead this year (24), despite the government's efforts to have the charges against the President and Deputy President dropped.
The outcome of the cases, and how the government responds to them, will shape Kenya's domestic and international politics for decades to come.
Not even inflation and poor leadership dampened quest for better lives
This political and economic fragility, as well as the harsh climate in much of the country, has meant that Kenyans have had to exhibit resilience in their daily lives.
This reliance and determination has found expression in a variety of forms. One of the first was the harambee schools movement by which communities across the country through their own hard work and funds sought to give their children education with which to escape poverty.
Without such initiative, it would have been impossible to cope with demands for education created by the dramatic increase in population witnessed over the past 50 years, which has seen the number of Kenyans grow from 7 million people in 1963 to over 40 million today.
Another way of coping with that enlarged population has been for Kenyans to move away from the countryside into the towns and cities. With a population of just under 400,000 at independence, Nairobi's population reached a million just 20 years later.
That growth created obvious problems that continue to be visible on a daily basis: crowded roads, insufficient houses and poor public health. But the city has also been a place of cultural dynamism and become the heartbeat of the national and regional economy.
The effects of demographic change and the fluctuating economy have been felt in the countryside too. Channelling the spirit of harambee, self-help groups dominated by women helped provide welfare, protect access to land and, in the case of Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement, campaign against damage to the environment that put livelihoods in rural areas in jeopardy.
In the absence of opposition parties during the dark days of one-party rule and its aftermath, such groups increasingly became vehicles for political change. In February and March 1992, women activists joined the wives, mothers and sisters of prisoners to protest against political imprisonment at Freedom Corner. Their courage shamed the Moi government and shows that Kenyan civil society groups are far from being the puppets of foreign interests. Kenya's civil society was built on the blood and sweat of Kenyans, not the money of donors.
Other important forms of resistance had gone before. In the 1980s, the underground Mwakenya movement linked university lecturers, students, and literary figures in a widespread critique of the one-party state.
Although Mwakenya never threatened to topple the Moi regime, the Draft Minimum Programme published in September 1987 was one of the most serious attempts to discuss the state of the nation in the 1980s, and played an important role in keeping alive the idea that a more democratic future was possible.
The other great pillar of civil society has been the churches. Although a minority of the population were Christian at independence, by 1988 that figure stood at more than 80 per cent. It was not just the numbers of Christians that changed the face of Kenya, but also the engagement with politics exhibited by the clergy and congregations.
The protests by the churches against the practice of queue voting in the 1988 general election, and the willingness of some bishops to speak out in favour of reform, provided a groundswell of popular support for the pro-democracy movement and set in train the series of events that led to the abandonment of one-party rule.
Without them it seems unlikely that it would have been feasible for leading opposition figures to launch the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (Ford), the umbrella movement that actively campaigned for multiparty politics. Although Ford later fragmented, enabling Moi to win power in the 1992 election against a divided opposition, it forced the political opening on which so much of the progress in Kenya over the last 20 years has been based.
Supporters of democracy learnt quickly that the mere fact of holding elections was not enough to guarantee a change to the way the state treated its citizens. They came to realise that major constitutional change was the only way to protect the individual and collective rights of all Kenyans.
For more than two decades, civil society activists demonstrated courage, leadership and resilience in their efforts to fundamentally change the relationship between the rulers and the ruled.
Along the way they gradually expanded the boundaries of what was possible. Despite successive aborted periods of constitutional review under Moi, they continued to push for power to be devolved from the president to the people. In 2004, their efforts crystallised into the Bomas Draft of the constitution, which proposed significant new constraints on the Executive.
0 comments:
Post a Comment