Victoria Brittain
KOIGI WA WAMWERE, Kenya’s best-known opposition politician, predicts he will die in a stabbing or car crash when he returns to the country to face yet another trial, for an alleged theft of arms from a police station in November 1993.
He has served a year of a four-year jail sentence, was temporarily released on health grounds, and has an appeal pending.
But Wamwere has never considered the option of simply not going back after medical treatment in London and Oslo. “Of course that would be [President Daniel arap] Moi’s wish, that I stay out, so that he could say I had broken my word.”
Moi has other reasons for wishing that the former MP for Nakuru would disappear into the oubliette of exile politics. Wamwere may represent a greater danger to his power than any of the leaders of Kenya’s half-dozen fragmented and discredited political parties. His fears for his safety are probably well-founded. Political assassinations of those who threatened the leadership have traumatised Kenya four times since independence. The killers of Pio Pinto, Tom Mboya, JM Kariuki and Robert Ouku were never brought to justice.
Wamwere, an outspoken critic of the government while a popular MP in the one-party state of the 1970s, was silenced by five years’ detention without trial under Jomo Kenyatta and then Moi.
In 1990, he was charged with treason and faced a mandatory death sentence, spending two-and-half years in prison before the charges were dropped.
“These days the government knows they can no longer get away with detention without trial, so this time they will attempt to kill me,” he says.
In an opposition lacking strong leadership and failing to match church leaders’ open concern about poverty, government corruption and ethnic cleansing, Wamwere increasingly stands out.
In late December, when he was released from prison and appeared in Nakuru, huge crowds turned out.
“The more the government keeps me out of politics, the more they heighten the myth that I’m a special person,” he says.
Now shunned as too radical by opposition leaders, Wamwere will return to huge expectations among ordinary Kenyans, and a narrow margin of manoeuvre. His goal is to press for a constitutional conference for Kenya.
“It’s impossible to have free and fair elections when the regime has so much power; it’s not reasonable to take up arms; the only prospect for change is civil disobedience in the streets to force Moi into a constitutional conference.”