Chiefs the little village tyrants who just won’t go away

By Joseph Karimi

On August 4, 1988, a man named David Mbugua told the heart-wrenching story of an attack by a chief that left him nursing wounds all over his body.

David Mbugua said that nearly a year earlier on November 22, a villager arrested him for trespassing on his farm in Gatundu. He was taken to the local chief for disciplinary action.

“When I was taken to the chief’s place, he asked for paraffin which he poured on me. He then asked for a match which he lit and placed on my shoulder,” Mbugua said. When the fire was finally put off, the chief was “just smoking a cigarette and staring at him.”

Kenyans were hearing of yet another abhorrent action by a chief. At independence, chiefs, who were first installed by the colonial government became a symbol impunity, torture and absolute authority.

The village chief was a god: he presided over kangaroo courts, passed guilty verdicts, fined culprits on the spot or took household items by force. When he spoke, people froze to listen. By 1983, MPs and Cabinet ministers were incensed by chiefs, who they said could even arrest members of the Executive.

To understand their immense power, one has to look at how they came to be.

Having subjugated the ‘natives’ as its subjects, the British colonial government retained their system of governing through clan elders at the village level.

The anointed native leaders were recognised and officially appointed chiefs. They maintained their leadership positions and were allowed to handpick their lieutenants called ‘Headmen’, who linked directly to the grassroots population.  

The office of the chief had been created to act as an agent for local administration. Chiefs were tasked with tax collection, maintenance of law and order and supply of cheap labour for public and settler requirements.

The Chiefs Authority Act was passed in 1937 as part of “indirect rule.” It gave them immense powers.

Chief’s handbook

In 1948, the colonial government published the chief’s handbook entitled: The Work of an African Chief in Kenya. This document did not leave anything to doubt in detailing the work of the chief and his powers.

It said they must “actively maintain a spirit of loyalty to the British Crown and to inculcate the spirit in his people; must maintain order, to prevent offences, to bring offenders to trial and to seize and detain property believed to have been stolen; to see lawful orders affecting them are obeyed by the African inhabitants of his location.”

The indigenous successors of chiefs and colonial DCs had to rely on the existing system of administration and both Kenyatta’s and Moi’s regimes based their grassroots authority on the chief and the assistant chief to govern. The Kenyan population evolving from the colonial rule detested the white man’s oppressive and punitive laws designed to perpetuate the “Colour Bar” policy. But by retaining these two, many people felt the oppression continued after independence.

They were used to do the government or the ruling party’s dirty jobs: to rig elections, force villagers to join Kanu and bankroll its activities. Chiefs would deny services to people who had not paid for Kanu membership cards. In many instances, they confiscated property such as chicken from those who did not toe the line.

By 1983, MPs and Cabinet ministers were openly rebelling against chiefs, who were said to even be issuing orders to senior government officials. The matter was taking a ludicrous twist.

They called for changes to the Chiefs Authority Act, saying they were too powerful. It was the MP versus the chief.

“This is another colonial legislation which ought to be amended because a chief can arrest even a minister in his location or even order him out of his meeting,” the Assistant Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Eric Khasakhala, told Parliament on November 8, 1983.

Kitui West MP Parmenas Nzilu Munyasia told the same session that the chief “can take you directly to court. The Chief is a little employee down the ladder and the District Officer and the District Commissioner are up the ladder, but we are giving more powers to the Chief.”

The member for Parklands, Samuel Kivuitu, added his voice: “The chief can order you to do anything and you can only be saved by the courts. Why should we wait until we are saved by the courts?”

Kivuitu would later become the chairman of the electoral commission. At the time Kivuitu was serving the people of Parklands, chiefs and other officials of the provincial administration were so powerful that they were seen as an extension of the electoral commission.

As the outcry against chiefs reached a crescendo in the run up to the 1988 general elections, Moi tried to deal with it by issuing new directives for polling day.

The directive by the Head of State showed just how much of a big deal chiefs were: he ordered that on election day, they would be the first to vote when polling stations opened at 6am. Once they marked the ballot, they were to be herded from their respective villages to the district headquarters, where they would remain until polling closed.

Soon, leaders started calling for the same treatment for Kanu youth wingers, who were nothing but goons for hire.

Amend laws

The advent of multi partism opened the way for registration of other parties, ending decades of the single-party rule imposed in 1982.

In 1996, the Official Leader of the Opposition Michael Wamalwa Kijana moved a motion in Parliament, seeking to have the electoral laws reviewed and accordingly amended to establish an independent electoral commission acceptable to all parties with a view to ensuring free and fair elections come the next general elections.

Wamalwa said the repeal of Section 2(A) did not automatically bring in a totally democratic atmosphere, but dictated that certain parts of the constitution be amended to suit the situation.

Kenyans were told there would be future amendments to tame the provincial administration. Confiscation of chicken and other property belonging to wananchi by the administration, “which has been the order of the day in rural zones, under the guise of funny colonial laws manifested in the form of forced harambee donations should be a thing of the past.”

Most of the contentious sections on chiefs were repealed in 1997.

Hopes that the provincial administration would be phased out by the 2010 Constitution dwindled after President Kibaki’s government retained the old order. However, they have much less powers today.