I was speaker of the senate at a precarious time in the country’s history of collapsing political love affairs. It had begun well when the two men, President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto had a camaraderie much smoother than Gregory Rasputin and Nicholas II’s mysterious relationship in pre-socialistic Russia. The end was however as frosty and painful as that of another political love affair - King Henry VIII of England and his most loyal servant Thomas Moore.
As a student of political science and a latter-day practitioner, I had grown to understand that power was dark, it eats partakers into it who treat it casually. That is what happened a year or so after 2018 when Uhuru had a handshake with his political rival dealing a blow to his Jubilee relations. A time came in the heat of that political upheaval that the DP’s allies had to be removed from the senate leadership to give way to President Uhuru’s loyalists.
As speaker of the house, I had to oversee the removal from Senate leadership of the men and women who were deemed close to Deputy President William Ruto. Prof Kithure Kindiki was one of them.
When you work with Kindiki you grow to like him. He belongs to the kind of people who focus on the core business of their office and share respectful relations with the office above him and the ones below him. He was deputy speaker when I led the Senate and was not surprised, a few days ago, to see the president, during the swearing-in ceremony, hug him. He even handed him a new name that I am sure will turn into his informal reference of him going forward. The name Abra K.
The well-educated man from Tharaka Nithi is personable – any human being who gets an opportunity to work with him will grow to like and respect him.
That is why I faced a great dilemma as a speaker when the time came during the height of Covid 19, May 2020 that Kindiki had to be removed. The wars between a sitting president and his deputy had grown rough and played out hot in the two houses of parliament.
At the senate in the three years that he was deputy speaker, Kindiki, had shown exemplary organizational skill helping me to run the house in a respectful way. He would run the speaker’s seat in his sober style and would brief me on all that had transpired. If he faced a challenge he shared his experience on it.
All institutions have their downside and parliament has its own. In the house, members use travel as an avenue to replenish dwindling coins in their pockets. I must say that Kindiki was perhaps the only senator who did not come to my office or seek me out to be placed on these trips abroad. Nearly all members of parliament live on this. The deputy speaker was comfortable running affairs of the senate from within the country. He would in fact sometimes turn down trips I may have delegated to him. He would tell me, “Boss wewe nenda utuwakilishe acha mimi niendeshe mambo hapa (Boss you proceed and represent us let me remain to handle matters here”. Whenever I returned he’d update me on all developments.
And so it was disturbing for me when the matter of his removal came up and that it had been sanctioned by top organs of the party. The office of the speaker was first to be notified just before the matter of the removal of the deputy speaker was tabled by then-new chief whip Irungu Kang’ata. Losing a loyal deputy, a respectful man with a good intellect who leads house debates expanding arguments to the benefit of the house and country wasn’t exactly what anyone would want.
After I received word from the powers that be, that there was a document that Kindiki was to sign, before the matter came up on the floor of the Senate I thought I owed him and Kindiki showed his usual honourable style.
I called him after I received a document from the state house that indicated that he had attended a meeting there that authorized the removal of the sitting house leadership and that he was in agreement. When he picked up the call he was driving enroute to his village in Tharaka. Upon informing him that there was a document that he needed to sign, he said “Yes boss, I was driving to my village but because that is important, let me just turn and come back”
He had passed Embu when we talked, yet in under two hours, he knocked on my door at the speaker’s office. I owed him an explanation and so I told him where the document had come from. Kindiki revealed one of his second unique attributes as I have noted- honour, he politely turned it down. He said “Sir I did not attend such a meeting. I cannot append my signature to this”
The condition was he would remain Deputy Speaker if he signed, but his honour would not allow him. And so the motion to have him removed went ahead in May 2020.
Today Kindiki bears no bitterness with anyone, including me who chaired the session to impeach him. He has lived up to what he said on the floor that day, “an elitist triviality powered by petty, divisive and vindictive politics as the country hurts from the lethal combination of a nearly collapsed economy, a ravaging pandemic, floods.”
Kindiki is going to be the voice of reason in the current administration. That is what I saw when he was deputy to me in the Senate.
Kenneth Lusaka is the current Bungoma Governor and Second Speaker of the Senate under the 2010 constitution
