Kenya’s fractured opposition united this week behind a single candidate for December’s presidential elections to try to prise President Daniel arap Moi’s party from power.
Mwai Kibaki, a close runner-up in the past two polls, is backed by the new National Rainbow Coalition — an unlikely coalition of opposition parties and disaffected members of the ruling Kenya African National Union (Kanu).
”We have gone through a very long period of dictatorship though we are a democratic people,” Kibaki told jubilant politicians gathered at an upmarket hotel in the capital, Nairobi.
”We want a government of national unity involving people from different regions and religions.”
Above all, Kibaki pledged to end the endemic corruption that has sustained nearly 40 years of Kanu rule. ”The new government will not need to be bribed to do what it should.”
Moi, Kenya’s ruler for 24 years, is constitutionally barred from standing in the election. But, having named the political novice Uhuru Kenyatta as successor, he is widely suspected of plotting to rule from behind the throne. Kenyatta is the son of Kenya’s founding father, Jomo Kenyatta, who ruled from 1963 to 1978.
This week’s announcement follows a week of unprecedented setbacks for Moi. More than 30 government members of Parliament defected last week in protest at Kenyatta’s candidacy, stripping Kanu of its parliamentary majority for the first time since independence in 1963 as Moi faces a motion of no-confidence.
About 100 000 Nairobians rallied to support the dissidents — the majority from Kenyatta’s own ethnic group.
Last Friday Moi’s fortunes plunged further when several of his closest allies were accused by official investigators of inciting the ethnic violence that killed hundreds during two previous elections.
But, with several of Kibaki’s prominent supporters also named or otherwise tarnished by the regime, analysts view his promise of reform with scepticism.
Kibaki was Moi’s vice-president during the 1980s and resisted the introduction of multiparty democracy.
”There is nothing about this latest political challenge to offer Kenyans great hope; but sadly it’s our only hope,” said John Githongo, Kenyan director of Transparency International, the anti-corruption group.
”For Kenyans, it’s not about personalities … it’s about any possibility of change.” — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002