For all his failures, Uhuru has united Kenya more than any other president

Most prominently, the president has undone the Luo-Kikuyu rivalry that held Kenya hostage by uniting Kenya’s two most politically inclined communities 

By Ouma Ojango

In 2013 and 2017, the Jubilee Government had probably the best campaign manifestos ever presented to the Kenyan electorate since independence. Yet, it is difficult to pinpoint President Uhuru Kenyatta’s legacy in the end of his ten-year leadership even as we know that he has endeavoured to deliver on some of the promises in his second term through the Big Four Agenda initiative.

In their 2013 – 2017 manifesto dubbed ‘Transforming Kenya – Securing Kenya’s prosperity’, UhuRuto had it all figured out. In three pillars of Unity, Economy and Openness, the ruling coalition promised to shore up national cohesion, security, trade and foreign affairs, healthcare, education, youth and women empowerment and social protection in the first pillar.

Under the economic pillar, the duo promised, eloquently so, to spur growth and development by building an enterprise economy, sparking an industrial revolution, a digital take off, improved tourism, land reforms, power for all, food security, clean water for all and improved transport and housing. In the third pillar, they committed to transparency in governance, promising to deal firmly with corruption, work with the civil society and empower the people through accelerated Devolution.

In ‘Continuing Kenya’s Transformation, Together’, Jubilee Government’s 2017 re-election manifesto, President Uhuru Kenyatta’s specific manifesto highlights included creating 1.3 million jobs every year, ensure every citizen is  connected to reliable and affordable electricity by 2020, establish a government sponsored apprenticeship programme of up to 12 months for all university and TVET graduates and expand free maternity care to include NHIF cover for every expectant mother for one year just to mention a few.

The tragedy for President Kenyatta is that the little that his government has delivered of the colourful promises has been lost in, one, the rampant corruption that bedevilled his government; and, two, in the din of political squabbles within the ruling party.

Jubilee might have delivered more than any other Kenyan Government in the transport sector. Picking from where President Kibaki’s Government left off, President Kenyatta’s Government has opened up Kenya’s cities including Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Kisumu and Eldoret by building more by-passes thereby decongesting traffic in the cities. Besides, Uhuru’s Government is touted to have built more than 9,000 kilometres of roads since 2013. It is this Government that built the Standard Gauge Railway from the scratch, connecting Mombasa and Nairobi. It has also delivered the Expressway, which has the ability, if well utilized, to ease access to the country’s main airport.

The reason why these landmark projects are hardly celebrated is because they were mired in grand corruption that inflated their initial costs, overburdening the already struggling taxpayer. The land rates in the Standard Gauge Railway was, for instance, inflated, becoming the milk cow for officials at National Land Commission and other related agencies. The trend has been replicated in every other development project that involved land acquisition. The net effect of the runaway corruption in Jubilee Government’s development projects is that it denied citizens value for money and pushed government more towards heavy reliance on expensive private loans for execution of its programmes.

With a Deputy President that has stood aside, only wanting to associate with the successes of the Government in which he also claims to have been the brainchild and lurching on its failures for political mileage in his quest for a presidency in the impending General Election, you can only struggle to find the President’s footprint as he heads home after ten years of being in charge.

There’s, however, a legacy to President Uhuru Kenyatta’s name, that will endure the test of time. No one is talking about it today, but it is a legacy that eluded Kenya’s first three Presidents including President Uhuru Kenyatta’s own father and the founding President of the Republic of Kenya, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. It is a legacy of unity.

The President leaves behind a more united Kenya than he found it. More so, Uhuru Kenyatta has managed to break the ceiling by achieving what generation after generation touted as impossible: he has united the Luo and the Kikuyu, Kenya’s two prominent and most politically inclined communities that had hardly shared political power for the better part of independent Kenya.

The story of political relationship of the Kikuyu and the Luo dates back to the struggle for independence. Coincidentally, it revolves around the fathers of Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga who were comrades in the independence struggle. When Jomo Kenyatta was detained in the infamous Kapenguria Six together with Bildad Kagia, Kung’u Karumba, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei and Achieng Oneko for the 1952 insurgency, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was to play a major role not only in the struggle for his release, but also in securing Kenyatta’s place in the independence party even in his absentia as the British Government slowly steered Kenya towards black majority rule.

In 1960, organized by black nationalists, Kenya African National Union (KANU) elected Kenyatta President in absentia and resisted treacherous maneuvers by the colonialists to negotiate for independence with Kenyatta behind bars. He was formally released on August 21 to join others in negotiations for independence 

Kenyatta went to London in 1962 to broker Kenya’s independence, and in May 1963, he led KANU to victory in the pre-independence elections. On December 12, 1963, Kenya celebrated its independence, and Kenyatta formally became Prime Minister. The next year, a new constitution established Kenya as a republic, and Kenyatta was elected Kenya’s first President. He named his friend in the struggle, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, his Vice President.

As Vice President, Jaramogi did not agree with the President, particularly on the policy direction the young nation was to take. While he favoured closer ties with the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union and other countries of the Warsaw Pact, Kenyatta was in favour of the Western bloc and the United States. This led to Odinga resigning from his post and quitting KANU in 1966 to form the Kenya People’s Union (KPU) thereby starting on a journey on the back benches of Parliament that would earn him the name the doyen of Opposition politics.

Comrades in the trenches of independence struggle, Kenyatta and Jaramogi became bitter rivals after independence, birthing a hatred between their communities that would not only endure the test of time, but that also grew stronger every sunrise. A few incidences cemented this hatred in Kenyatta’s regime notable among them, the assassination of Tom Mboya on July 5 1969, and the near massacre of Luo youth in a standoff between Jaramogi and President Kenyatta in Kisumu when the latter’s tour of Western Kenya, hardly four months after the assassination of Tom Mboya culminated in an event to open the New Nyanza General Hospital in Kisumu town. 

With tension still high in the region, the youth of Kisumu in their legendary fashion, pelted the President’s motorcade with stones on its way to the venue with the police opening fire indiscriminately. At the venue where Jaromogi had arrived in advance to chants of ‘Ndume, Ndume, Ndume’ (the bull) the youth shouted down Vice President Daniel Moi when he tried to introduce the President. The President’s intervention to calm the crowd fell on deaf ears. Panicked for the President’s safety, the presidential security detail fired live bullets into the crowed. For the remainder of Jomo Kenyatta’s regime, the Luo community was largely given a wide berth, ruining any hope of reconciliation between these two heroes of independence, and by extension, their communities. Henceforth, the political relationship between these two communities was forever treacherous.

President Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978, ushering into power the long serving Vice President Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi whose Nyayo philosophy of following in the founding President’s footprint meant, among others, continued exclusion of the enemies of the previous regime. The Nyayo regime’s cosiness with the Kikuyu ended with the attempted coup on his government of 1982. The unsuccessful mutiny also turned Moi into a dictator. In June the same year, for instance, Parliament, which was now under tight control of Moi, amended the Constitution, making Kenya, officially, a one party State.

Moi’s regime consolidated more executive power and ruled by an iron fist. This again, brought the Kikuyu and Luo together, being the most politically inclined communities as alluded to afore, in a struggle of what was dubbed the second liberation. For ten years, from 1982 to 1991 when the Constitution was again amended to revert Kenya to a multiparty democracy, the two communities under the stewardship of Jaramogi worked hand in hand with other communities, enduring subjugation including torture, detention and assassination by Moi’s government.

However, in the first multiparty elections of 1991, again, the Kikuyu parted ways with their Luo comrades in the struggle through Stanely Matiba when he splintered from the original Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD) to form FORD Asili, living Jaramogi with FORD Kenya. This weakened the Opposition and handed Moi an easy win, extending his tyranny. Moi was to exploit this treachery between these two communities to cling on to power until 2002. 

Jaramogi died in 1994, like Jomo Kenyatta, before he amended relations between his Community and that of his friend turned foe.

First forward to 2002, when Raila Odinga teamed with Mwai Kibaki in National Rainbow Coalition to ascend to power after the amendment to the Constitution that barred Moi from seeking re-election. Immediately after winning elections, Kibaki and Raila fell out, with the latter together with his team getting fired from government. This set up a duel between the two in 2007 that took the country to the brink of an abyss in an unprecedented post-election violence. While every other non-Kalenjin community in the Rift Valley was attacked, the Kikuyu Community with business interests in the larger Western Kenya region generally and in Luo Nyanza in particular, was targeted for displacement and their enterprises were sabotaged.  It took the intervention of the international community for the country to reclaim sanity and heal.

The consequences of the post-election violence and the ensuing indictments at The Hague brought together two main protagonists in the name of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto. They put up a formidable campaign machinery that capitalized on the rhetoric of the Luo-Kikuyu love-hate political relationship to beat (however controversial) Raila Odinga in the 2013 and 2017 General Elections. Their campaigns, more divisive than ever before, especially after the Supreme Court nullification of the Presidential election in 2017, further widening the hate between these two communities.

The Kikuyu, a majority, hated Raila with a passion. They passed this hate and disdain of Raila to their children. The Kikuyu youth with no history of Kenya’s independence politics hated and loathed Raila naturally. Leaders in the larger Mt. Kenya region including Kirinyaga, Embu and Meru were over the years elected to office not only on the basis of who abused Raila Odinga the most, but whose abuses were more lethal and savage.

Because central Kenya, more than any other region in the country, is mostly self-sufficient, its youth hardly get out to other parts of the country in search of subsistence. They hardly, therefore interact out of their culture, Nairobi and Nakuru Cities being their main reach whenever they venture out. A hegemony of thought is therefore easily achieved more so if the same is the target of the community’s political elite. 

In August 2007, for instance, Raila Odinga and a team of his ODM Party officials were thrown out of a hotel they had gone to for late lunch in Karatina after attending a burial of a friend in the neighbourhood in Mathira. Ms Lucy Weru, the proprietor of the hotel stormed the dining room and ordered them to leave. “Who brought you here? We do not want ODM here. Can you please leave now? We do not want your money,” she could be heard shouting as she hurriedly summoned hotel workers and ordered them to ensure that Mr Odinga and his team were out of the premises in the shortest time possible. They had to abandon their orders. That is where it had reached. 

In his four previous presidential bids; 1997, 2007, 2013 and 2017, central Kenya region has always been hostile, with the few political rallies he attempted to hold in the region being disrupted by rowdy, belligerent youth, save for when he campaigned for Kibaki in 2002.

In Deputy President’s scheme of things for the presidential bid in the August 2022 General Election, he was 100% sure that however much he antagonized President Uhuru Kenyatta, the President would never support Raila Odinga’s bid. Even after the handshake, he still believed the union of the two was the legendary cosmetic partnership where the Kikuyu have always withdrawn from pacts with the Luo after achieving an end. He banked on it big time. As late as the beginning of this year, DP’s camp still believed, and hoped against hope that all President Uhuru Kenyatta wanted from Mr Odinga was end to street chaos, support in Parliament and a peaceful second term reign. 

It was the fear in a majority of the Kenyan people as well. Hushed street talk was awash with theories of how Uhuru was playing Raila, how “the perennial loser was being fattened for slaughter.”

Uhuru has disapproved the naysayers. He has broken virgin grounds. He has stuck with Raila Odinga to the wire. Whether this pushes Mr Odinga into the high office is something different. The President has done what his father was not able to do. He has done what President Kibaki was in the best stead to achieve but which he ignored. Raila has been able to seek for votes in the Mt. Kenya region without any fear. He has been received by the people of the mountain in a manner never witnessed before. Hopes are that, for the first time, his presidential bid is likely to fetch at least more than 30% of the total votes cast in the region.

Likewise, President Uhuru Kenyatta has been received in the Luo Nyanza region like a king since the handshake. Sabina Chege, Woman Rep for Murang’a County has been able to hold rallies in Homabay County on her own where she got a rousing welcome on being noticed. Martha Karua, Raila’s running mate in this election, is a darling of the people from the lake. 

A hatchet, borne of two independence struggle heroes and used to sow discord and spill blood ever since, has been buried courtesy of President Kenyatta’s commitment to an accord. That peace, is bound to be one of President Kenyatta’s legacies whichever way the election spins. (