There is a particular kind of eloquence that flourishes only in opposition or in retirement. It is the eloquence of the man who, unburdened by power, suddenly discovers the precise vocabulary of accountability, restraint, and servant leadership. Former President Uhuru Kenyatta appears to have found that vocabulary. The pity is that he could not locate it between 2013 and 2022.
In recent public remarks, the former President has spoken compellingly about the attributes that define genuine leadership. He has invoked integrity. He has spoken of leaders who serve rather than exploit, who protect institutions rather than weaponise them, and who place the national interest above personal and dynastic calculation. It is stirring material. It is also, coming from him, deeply uncomfortable because his 10-year tenure was, by almost every measure, the antithesis of the values he now so fluently champions.
Let us begin with integrity. The Kenyatta administration presided over some of the most brazen episodes of public resource misappropriation Kenya has witnessed in the post-multiparty era. The National Youth Service scandal did not merely happen on his watch but it happened twice, with the same architects implicated, and with consequences so light they bordered on institutional mockery. The Eurobond controversy was never credibly resolved. The sugar and maize import scandals exposed cartels operating from within the state's own machinery. If integrity was Uhuru's governing philosophy, it was one honoured entirely in the breach.
Then there is the matter of institutions. The former President now speaks of leaders who uphold the rule of law. Yet his years in office were defined by some of the most aggressive executive pressure on the judiciary in Kenya's recent constitutional history. When the Supreme Court, in September 2017, nullified his re-election in a landmark judgment, his response was not the magnanimous deference to judicial authority that a constitutionalist might have offered. He attacked the bench, threatened to "revisit" the courts, and oversaw an environment in which the Chief Justice and his deputy later faced executive pressure widely perceived as retaliatory. A man who genuinely believed in institutional independence would have stood before the nation and said: the court has spoken, and I respect it. He did not.
On the question of leaders who resist the temptation to entrench personal interests, the record is equally difficult. The handshake with Raila Odinga in March 2018 was initially welcomed as a statesmanlike move to de-escalate a fractured polity. But it increasingly came to resemble a political accommodation designed, at least in part, to insulate the executive from opposition scrutiny and to position allies for succession on terms favourable to the House of Kenyatta. The Building Bridges Initiative that followed was ultimately struck down by the courts as an unconstitutional exercise.
It is worth noting that none of this is unique to Uhuru in the annals of Kenyan political leadership. The tendency of those who leave office to suddenly find religion on governance is almost a structural feature of our politics. Daniel arap Moi, who had governed by the cult of the personality for 24 years, spent his post-presidential years offering sober counsel on national cohesion. Mwai Kibaki, under whose government the 2007 to 2008 post-election violence erupted and whose inner circle was entangled in Anglo Leasing-era corruption, left as a figure of quiet respectability.
Kenya, it seems, has an extraordinary talent for laundering the reputations of its former leaders.
But the Uhuru case carries an additional layer of irony. He was, in important ways, a president of great potential squandered. He came to office with educational formation, with the constitutional framework of 2010 gifting him an opportunity to entrench devolution and redefine the relationship between the citizen and the state. The instruments were there. The moment was there. What was missing, it appears, was the will to subordinate personal and political interest to the national project - precisely the quality he now so eloquently describes.
There is a lesson here for Kenyans watching the current administration, and for citizens of any democracy in which former leaders reinvent themselves as elder statesmen the moment their term expires. The words of the out-of-office are cheap. Power is the only credible laboratory for testing leadership character. Uhuru had his decade in that laboratory. The results are in the public record.
We should listen respectfully to what the former President says about leadership and any other former office holders whether in executive, judiciary or legislature. And then we should remember what they did.
