As Daniel arap Moi raised his ivory club to speak as Kenya’s president for the last time yesterday, a street-boy wriggled onto the dais beside him.
The urchin had no option if he wanted to hear the final words of Moi’s 24-year rule. The public address system had broken down, and beneath a dais crammed with diplomats and African heads of state, 200 000 Kenyans were whistling and jeering.
”Go away!” and ”bye-bye!” they shouted, as the 78-year-old President Moi shuffled the pages of his speech.
”Everything is possible without Moi!” they sang; a campaign slogan of Mwai Kibaki’s National Rainbow Coalition which on Friday became one of the first opposition parties to win an election in north, east or central Africa.
”The people of Kenya have spoken,” said Moi, and then took his seat, grim-faced, beside a beaming Kibaki.
In his inaugural speech as Kenya’s third president, Kibaki compounded Moi’s misery. ”I am inheriting a country which has been badly ravaged by years of misrule and ineptitude,” he said, to riotous cheers.
Bigger cheers followed when Kibaki hinted for the first time that the massive economic crimes of Moi’s regime would be prosecuted.
”It would be unfair to Kenyans not to raise questions about certain deliberate actions or policies of the past that continue to have grave consequences on the present,” he said.
Beside him, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Tanzania’s President Ben Mpaka listened impassively. Both lead regimes accused of corruption; and both were recently returned to power at elections tainted by violence and claims of vote-rigging.
Zambia’s President Levy Mwanawasa, who, for the first time in Africa, is prosecuting his predecessor for corruption, was on firmer ground.
”The situation here reminds me of what we have in Zambia,” he said, raising Kibaki’s two-fingered victory salute to thunderous approval.
Moi’s convoy was pelted with mud as it arrived for the ceremony at Uhuru Park – where Kenya’s founding father Jomo Kenyatta accepted independence from Prince Philip in 1963. He left Nairobi by helicopter immediately afterwards, skipping a formal lunch with Kibaki and dignitaries including Zanele Mbeki, the wife of the South African president.
Moi’s aides said he was upset by the ceremony. Yet in many ways it reflected his rule, which has reduced 60% of Kenyans to poverty and fuelled violent crime across the country.
After a six-hour wait in the sun, the crowd was violent and light-fingered. Fights broke out on the packed slope where thousands were sitting in the mud or in trees.
Briefly, a mob threatened to storm the dais, bringing diplomats to their feet and security services out in force. As a military band marched past to welcome the presidents, Kenyan Red Cross workers rushed by carrying scores of injured people on stretchers. ”This should be the happiest day in our history but it’s chaos,” said Wambui Kamau, as she sheltered behind a police van. ”Things can’t go on like this.”
But most Kenyans overlooked the mayhem in their delight at Moi’s passing. ”It feels so good. It’s like independence – a second independence for Kenya,” said Jared Othiambo, one of the ceremony’s organisers.
Kibaki’s party members seemed as stunned as many Kenyans by the scale of his victory, with around 63% of the vote. ”It was crushing, unbelievable,” said Najib Balala, who defeated one of Moi’s arch-cronies in Mombasa. ”But now we must work, there is so much to be done.” – Guardian Unlimited Â