{UAH} In Barng’etuny and Mulu Mutisya, Moi was in good company

In Barng'etuny and Mulu Mutisya, Moi was in good company

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Ezekiel Barng'etuny, former nominated MP, died on December 20, 2013 aged 92. FILE |Nation

By Kwendo Opanga
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Hate them or love them, your sentiment counted for nothing. Indeed, they had neither time nor room for sentiment. Come rain, come shine, they were President Moi's loud and proud, yet trusted lieutenants and court jesters.

They fought his wars viciously as if they were their own. They made their wars the president's and fought them just as ferociously.

They thrived in the days of single-party rule, the soldiers who dug in and fought bitterly and fiercely to keep Kanu's constitutional monopoly of power. Apologists of political monopoly loved them; agitators for political plurality loathed more than they feared them.

Kariuki wa Chotara died in 1988 and Mulu Mutisya in 2004. Shariff Nassir received his trumpet call the following year and, last Friday, it was Ezekiel Barng'etuny's turn. Mr Wilson Leitich is still alive. Had he lived, the burly Barng'etuny would have been the star auctioneer at Satirday's Kimalel goat sale.

Why were they powerful and frontline allies of President Moi's? Mr Moi fashioned Kanu into an instrument for pushing through his political agenda, no matter the opposition, and for fighting his opponents. Fiercely loyal, Chotara, Nassir, Mutisya, Barng'etuny and Leitich who served as Kanu chairmen and Nominated MPs, ensured the party's bidding was done.

In 1979, the late Jean Marie Seroney, a giant of Nandi and national politics and a former Deputy Speaker of the increasingly-assertive Third Parliament, was surprisingly felled in his Tinderet stronghold by an inelegant greenhorn named Henry Kosgey.

His supporters insist to this day that it was the barely literate Barng'etuny who mobilised all resources necessary and employed all tactics — more foul than fair — to defeat the will of the people of Tinderet. It was Seroney who led the Nandi in the 1960s Nandi Hills Declaration that claimed the land of Nandi was for the Nandi.

Seroney was seen as a hero in Nandi and the greater Kalenjin territory for opposing the settlement of the Kikuyu in the area, while Mr Moi was seen as the acquiescent party. In 1976, Seroney supported claims in Parliament that Kanu was dead. Mr Moi led the opposing side in singing the emblematic Kanu yajenga nchi (Kanu builds the nation) chorus. Seroney was swiftly detained -- without trial.

Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, nobody dared contradict garrulous Chotara in Nakuru District. Nakuru had always been the hotbed of Rift Valley politics and among its kingpins was the late Kihika Kimani. Rich and arrogant, he was one of the people who led the failed change-the-constitution drive of 1976.

Its aim was to stop Vice-President Moi from succeeding founding President Kenyatta. It was as if the illiterate Chotara's brief was to ensure that Kihika never rested easy or forgot his bid to block Mr Moi from becoming president. Fiery but younger and better-educated politician Koigi Wamwere read the warning signs and fled into exile in Norway in 1986.

CHOP OFF THEIR FINGERS

When Chotara died, he was succeeded by Mr Leitich whose zest and zeal for prosecuting Kanu's causes and its opponents was rivalled only by the passion with which he loathed the party's enemies. When agitation for pluralism took centre stage in the 1990s, Mr Leitich would ask Kanu supporters in the Rift Valley to chop off the fingers of the agitators.

In Ukambani, the late Paul Ngei, a freedom fighter and a close ally of Kenyatta, came into the crosshairs of Kanu. Ngei, like Kimani, had joined the change-the-constitution group. Aware that the VP would act for three months in the event of Kenyatta's death, Ngei pointedly warned, "give me those 90 days and I will teach you a terrible lesson."

As the star of the former cabinet minister and Kenyatta favourite waned, Mutisya's shone brighter and eventually eclipsed Ngei's. Though illiterate, Mutisya was a successful businessman who, in 1961, formed the New Akamba Union as an instrument for political mobilisation. Mutisya hailed from Machakos but held sway throughout expansive Ukambani.

That Kenyatta nominated Mutisya to Parliament in 1974 alongside the late Njenga Karume of Gikuyu Embu, Meru Associations (Gema), attests to his political skills. Mutisya was to be a Nominated MP for 18 years and was appointed chairman of the National Water Conservation and Pipeline Company, a state parastatal, by Mr Moi. This means Mr Moi, too, appreciated Mr Mutisya's political acumen and rewarded him for his services. Among those who sought and treasured Mutisya's counsel is former VP Kalonzo Musyoka. Many more paid homage at Mutisya's court.

Following Kenyatta's death in 1978, it was Mombasa-based Nassir who led the call for Kanu to elect Mr Moi unopposed as the party's presidential flag-bearer. Similar calls were made from elsewhere in the country as a hitherto unheard and unseen Kanu forcefully stirred to life.

Dissent was limited and muffled.

Then in 1988 Nassir boldly made the extraordinary claim that Kanu was superior to Parliament. The upshot of this was that Parliament was no longer one of the three co-equal arms of government.

If Kanu did not think much of Parliament, it is highly unlikely Nassir thought any differently of the Judiciary. The message was clear: there existed only the Presidency and Kanu.

Nassir & Co are credited with something else. They did have President Moi's ear and unfailing defence, but also the rare ability to make him laugh uncontrollably as if he were watching a rip-roaring comedy. The kings of yore needed jesters to lighten the mood and provide comic relief; they also had praise singers. Chotara, Nassir, Barng'etuny, Mutisya and Leitich combined the ruthless politics of influencing and mobilising political opinion with praise-singing and comic relief. Nassir, Barng'etuny and Mutisya especially were accomplished story tellers.

FITTING NICKNAMES

Therefore, battered by the business of state and politics, Mr Moi may have needed them to tickle his ribs. But if they made the President laugh, they were themselves the subjects of hilarious jokes.

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, students at the University of Nairobi nicknamed Chotara Chapati Dialogue.

Reason? Rioting students, time and again, asked for dialogue with the authorities. Chotara thought it was some food they wanted introduced in their fare. When chapati was introduced, students called it "dialogue" in honour of Chotara.

However, many were left in stitches when he called for the immediate expulsion of Karo Maks (Karl Marx) for persistently inciting students to violence. Mutisya, it is said, welcomed the idea of multiparty politics "as long as there was only one multiparty called Kanu". Barng'etuny, a large-scale farmer and businessman, was known as "bulali hell", his rendition of "bloody hell".

It was a phrase he used to imply anything and everything and on anybody and everybody anywhere and everywhere. For his fingers remark, Leitich acquired a new middle name -- Mkata Vidole (chopper of fingers).

All these anecdotes provide a glimpse into Mr Moi's political mind at the zenith of his power.

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Ocen Nekyon