{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Return Of The Moi Dynasty | The Star

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Return Of The Moi Dynasty

Mzee Moi has embarked on the last political project of his long and busy life, with
the Moi Dynasty onslaught on the Deputy President William Ruto. 

ALTHOUGH the media narrative has Deputy President William Ruto besieged by Baringo Senator Gideon Moi, this is a political battle to the bitter end that is unfolding against a bigger backdrop – the Moi Dynasty.

The patriarch, the retired Second President of Kenya, Daniel Moi, 91, is still alive and alert and intensely interested in politics.

Kenyans have seen what political dynasties can do, including long range and generations apart. And now here comes the Moi Dynasty while the patriarch still lives. What's more the combination is the same – world-class advisers/consultants; massive financial resources; and a viable candidate for the purpose.

Mzee Moi was the longest continuously serving Member of Parliament for many years, having entered the then Legislative Council in the mid-1950s.

Well into his 24-year-long Presidency he took to referring to himself, a man who never went to university, as the "Professor of Politics" bar none.

When he applied this sobriquet to himself, President Moi had a professor of mathematics for a Vice President and many other academics and basically highly educated people in his government, all of whom he delighted in running circles around in the power politics stakes.

Everyone knew that the Professor of Politics never went beyond Tambach Teacher Training College, Keiyo, but no one mistook his meaning.

The Professor trumped many glittering contenders

In order to become founding President Jomo Kenyatta's third Vice President and eventual successor, Moi outlasted, outwitted and benefitted from the mistakes and pure folly of apparently much better qualified contenders, both older and younger.

Once VP to Jomo, he had to navigate the shark-infested waters of the voyage to the Kenyatta succession as a number of more articulate, self-assured and better-networked operatives fell overboard.

The Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya's first Vice President, was older than Moi by 13 years and cut a towering national and international profile long before Moi had either.

When Odinga fell in 1966, Moi was not even on Jomo's radar as a prospective VP. That honour went instead to another Rift Valley figure, Joseph Zuzarte Murumbi, also born in 1911, like the Jaramogi.

Murumbi, the son of a Goan trader and a Maasai woman, served as VP for barely seven months, from May to December 1966, and then quit, citing ill health. But he promptly took up an executive corporate position in British tobacco multinational Pall Mall, in London.

Murumbi was a highly cultured man, in the Western liberal sense of high culture. He was a keen art and book collector and his legacy includes over 50,000 books, some of them rare (published before the 20th Century). The Kenya National Archives has both a library and a gallery of the Murumbi Collection to this day.

Jomo turned to the Rift Valley for the second time in a year for a VP appointee and this time settled on Moi, 42, in early 1967.

Moi served as VP until Jomo's death in 1978 and then became the Second President of Kenya for 24 years. As both VP and President, Moi lived through some of the most tumultuous times in Kenyan history.

Among the people he beat to the ultimate prize of the first post-Jomo Presidency were Tom Mboya (assassinated in 1969) and JM Kariuki (assassinated in 1975).

As President, Moi went through four VPs – Mwai Kibaki (1978-88), Dr Josephat Karanja (1988-89), Prof George Saitoti (1989-1997, 1999-2002) and Musalia Mudavadi (September-December 2002).

Today, Moi is in the 13th year of Kenya's first Presidential retirement and the elder living statesman, although not the oldest – being younger than Charles Mugane Njonjo, the man who played kingmaker for him during the Jomo transition.

The setback of the rise of Ruto

Moi has been in politics so long that he lived to see his Rift Valley home turf and epicenter turn its back on him at least once, at the 2007 General and Presidential elections, at the behest of a protégé turned upstart – William Samoei Ruto. The setback of the rise of Ruto was soon followed by the spectacle of Kalenjin pitted against Kikuyu in the Rift Valley in the post-election violence of 2007-08.

Ruto was never Moi's idea of a political heir and the two men have yet to meet since the UhuRuto Presidential victory of March 2013. On the other hand, the Second President of Kenya has not only met the Fourth President several times he has also seen a university he started (Kabarak) award the younger man an honorary doctorate in leadership.

Increasingly, it is becoming clear that Mzee Moi would still not prefer that Ruto succeed any other President of Kenya. This has amply been demonstrated all this past week in the onslaught on Ruto's leadership style and political persona by Baringo Senator Gideon Moi, President Moi's youngest but favourite son. The anti-DP drive has all the animus and energy of a political project given the old man's nod.

Mzee Moi has lived for so long that he worked in his own fashion with the sons of both the founder President and VP. Towards the end of his five-term run as President, Moi elevated both Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta to the Cabinet and then entered a political pact with Odinga – but ended up preferring Kenyatta as his successor.

With the Moi Dynasty onslaught on William Ruto Mzee Moi has embarked on the last political project of his long and busy life.

The Mois are moving as if Ruto has reached some kind of terminus in his political career. They are probably calculating that, one way or another, Ruto's crimes-against-humanity case at the ICC will still prove his undoing and President Kenyatta, like his father 49 years ago may yet get to seek a second Deputy President from the Rift Valley in quick succession. What's more, that second time, as in Jomo's case, could actually turn out to be lucky for the House of Moi.

Ruto does not have to spend even a second in jail as a result of his ICC case for his political career to come to an end. Even something as bloodless as a finding that he must pay reparations, for instance, to a number of selected victims would be a verdict of guilt.

The man the Professor of Politics succeeded as VP on Jomo's second try was described by the Jaramogi himself as a political giraffe that sees both dangers and opportunities from afar.

What is it that Mzee Moi has foreseen this time?

Return Of The Moi Dynasty | The Star

http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/return-moi-dynasty

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