He is a self-proclaimed ”professor of politics”, but a growing number of his praise-singers and critics now agree that it’s finally coming unstuck for Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi, one of Africa’s last Big Men.
In power since August 1978 when Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, died, Moi has used both cunning and intimidation to stride the Kenyan political scene like a colossus.
A member of the Rift Valley Kalenjin tribe, Moi (78) has also routinely played the ethnic card to stymie criticism to his often brutal rule, especially by Kenya’s largest and most economically powerful community, the Kikuyu.
Now with a constitutional provision introduced a decade ago with the advent of multi-party politics, which requires him to vacate office by the end of the year, Moi’s critics inside and outside the ruling Kenya African National Union (Kanu), have found new courage to voice their dissent. Desertions are threatening to cripple Kanu.
Since last Sunday six Cabinet and junior ministers have resigned from the Moi administration to join the opposition, citing Moi’s choice of Uhuru Kenyatta, the 41-year-old businessman son of Jomo Kenyatta, as the Kanu presidential candidate. Moi’s choice of Kenyatta, an eloquent but relatively inexperienced politician, was rubber-stamped by Kanu’s national delegates meeting on Monday.
Among the ministers who parted ways with Moi this week were William ole Ntimama and one of the Kanu’s four vice-presidents, Kalonzo Musyoka. Raila Odinga, a perennial Moi opponent who last March dissolved his National Development Party to join Kanu as its secretary general, also resigned.
Odinga , the son of Kenya’s first vice-president, Oginga Odinga, commands near fanatical following among the Luo, Kenya’s third largest tribe.
Raila Odinga and his dissenting colleagues say Moi’s choice of Kenyatta, who has close personal and business links with Gideon Moi, the president’s youngest son, is meant to install a puppet into the presidency to protect a retinue of well-connected Kalenjin wheeler-dealers who have looted the economy and funded ethnic violence in the run up to the 1992 and 1997 elections.
The resigning ministers have joined a growing list of prominent senior Kanu politicians falling out with Moi over the past few months. They include Professor George Saitoti, Moi’s vice-president for 13 years who was sacked in August, and Joseph Kamotho, Kanu’s secretary general of 15 years who was forced to make way for Odinga in March.
On Monday the dissident ministers, Saitoti and Kamotho, formally quit Kanu and joined the little known opposition Liberal Democratic Party.
Through the party, they hope to form a ”super alliance” with other opposition forces, including the mainstream National Alliance Party of Kenya and the People’s Coalition. Leaders from all the groups attended a rally on Monday in a downtown Nairobi park where they pledged to launch an umbrella National Rainbow Coalition. The coalition would mark the first time that Kenya’s fragmented opposition fielded a single candidate to oppose the Kanu choice. Fourteen candidates ran against Moi in 1997, enabling him to take the presidency with 40% of the vote.
Observers say the rebellion in Kanu is actually the eruption of deep-seated frustration with Moi’s authoritarianism and misrule over the past 24 years. Many Kenyans blame Moi for the country’s deepening economic mess, which has seen widespread corruption drain state coffers and bureaucratic inefficiency cripple the civil service.
”The possibility is growing every day that for the first time in Kenya’s history, Kanu may lose the general elections, or win the presidency with a minority parliamentary representation,” said Sammy Wambua, a political analyst with The EastAfrican, a respected regional weekly.
The growing polarisation of Kenya’s political scene, mostly along ethnic lines, raises the spectre of a repeat of the tribal violence that marred the 1992 and 1997 elections, when thousands were killed or displaced in the Rift Valley.