Inside Uhuru Kenyatta's last lap at State House

Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema greets Azimio la Umoja presidential candidate Raila Odinga during the State Banquet as President Uhuru Kenyatta looks on. [File, Standard]

With just under two months left to the August 9 General Election, President Uhuru Kenyatta is now most clearly in the twilight days of his regime.

In a few weeks’ time, he will be referred to as “former president,” or “retired president.” His tenure will henceforth assume the various forms of the past tense, as his performance is recalled only in comparison to those before and after him. 

In spite of this, Kenya’s fourth president does not seem to show any signs of one who is set to leave the arena. Kenya Kwanza leaders, and especially ANC chief, Musalia Mudavadi, have increasingly spoken of President Uhuru as a lame-duck leader, with his great days now behind him.

“If you go to State House, you will find him busy showing his domestic detail what to pack in which suitcase, in readiness to depart,” Mudavadi jocularly puts the message across, even as he encourages national government administrators in the country not to take seriously what are usually referred to as “instructions from above.”

In Kenya’s political parlance, “instructions from above” is a euphemism for directives that will not be questioned, regardless of their illegality. Their hallmark is the expression of the will of the powerful of the land. Their might makes right everything they desire, say, or do.

The mightiest of them all is the president and commander-in-chief of the defence forces. There is the law, and there is his will. When the two clash, the inclination is towards ignoring the law. But that is only to the extent that the incumbent is seen to represent both the present and the future. 

Under President Uhuru, Might has often been right. That has been the case with numerous court orders that the Executive has ignored. The refusal to admit maverick lawyer Miguna Miguna back into the country after his curious deportation to Canada stands out. Miguna has been locked out of the country further to his extra-legal swearing in of Raila Odinga to the non-existent office of “the people’s president.”

Curiously, President Uhuru and Raila patched up their differences and have been the best of political friends for the past four years. Miguna is now a harsh social media critic of the two, with sentiments he is likely to carry into the next regime, should Raila become the next president after Uhuru. 

President Uhuru also refused to appoint five judges, following their selection by the Judicial Service Commission and two court orders directing that they should be appointed at once. Under President Uhuru, therefore, there have been court orders, and orders from above. Yet, time is running out of joint for orders from above.

President Uhuru has uncharacteristically acted like someone who is still going on. At this proximity to the elections, he should be doing, on a larger scale, what Mudavadi has implicitly recommended. It was in this season, in his time, that President Daniel Arap Moi was traversing the East African region, bidding his fellow heads of state and government farewell. The same was done around the country.  The president blended his valedictory remarks with asking for votes for his ‘Uhuru for President’ project in 2002.

President Uhuru Kenyatta. [Stafford Ondego, Standard]

 

The president would ideally be out in the countryside, thanking Kenyans for the privilege to lead and serve, while also drumming up support for the Raila Odinga-Martha Karua for the presidency ticket. Without a doubt, Raila-Karua is President Uhuru’s project, which he is most fond of.

In his Madaraka Day address, essentially his last national day function ahead of his imminent retirement, he did not miss the chance to position the pair. “You now have the chance to elect the first woman deputy president,” he said, obliquely inviting Kenyans to vote for Raila and Karua.

Needs to step out

Yet, the president needs to be more emboldened and forceful. He needs to step out, starting from his Mt Kenya region to the rest of the country, campaigning robustly and unapologetically for Karua and Raila. In his own time, President Moi took Uhuru everywhere in the country, beginning from Kapsakwony in Western Kenya, where he first explicitly told the country that Uhuru was the person he wanted to take over from him. 

 It turned out that President Moi did not have the silver bullet with which he was going to deliver an Uhuru presidency in 2002. Yet, there were those who believed in him so ardently that they eventually fell with the project. Does President Uhuru Kenyatta have the silver bullet with which he will deliver a Raila Odinga-Martha Karua presidency? 

When Moi stepped out with Uhuru in 2002, he found that the path was rocky. In Kakamega, the then Western Province headquarters, the rocks were literally on the road. They compelled the State to bring choppers to State Lodge Kakamega, to airlift the president and other stately notables and grandees, who were marooned with him at the state lodge. But even after this, the diehards still banked on the possibility of some unknown secret weapon. They hoped there was some unknown silver bullet that the self-proclaimed professor of politics would unleash at the eleventh hour, to defeat a throbbing opposition that was led by Mwai Kibaki. 

In the end, the diehards were shocked when President Moi instructed Uhuru, William Ruto and Mudavadi to call the Press and concede defeat. The silver bullet dream was over. The rest has been a history that eventually saw President Moi’s pet project become a reality in March 2013. Uhuru Kenyatta became Kenya’s fourth president, succeeding Mwai Kibaki, whom he had learned to support in 2007, after the 2002 debacle.

Besides, Uhuru’s support for Kibaki and the Party of National Unity (PNU) had landed him into the troubled waters of international law, for his perceived role in the 2007/8 post-election violence. Together with the man to become his deputy, William Ruto, they faced crimes against humanity charges at the International Criminal Court (ICC). 

Twelve years after he was first cited before the ICC, Uhuru now stares at retirement, with the ICC saga only partly closed. But is he ready to go? Some of the optics are confusing. On the political front, President Uhuru is the chairman and head of the Azimio la Umoja-One Kenya coalition party. His Jubilee Party is a dominant member of this  formation, with candidates fielded in much of the country. 

 As head of the Jubilee Party, a preponderant presence of Jubilee MPs in both houses of Parliament will be good for Uhuru. It will give him a perch from which he will not just negotiate with the next president, whoever it will be, but he could also force agenda in government by virtue of these numbers. But apart from Jubilee, Uhuru has also got a coterie of smaller parties to sign up with Jubilee and are, accordingly, members of the alliance only through Jubilee. Regardless of who becomes Kenya’s fifth president, President Uhuru expects to be a part of the power matrix in the next dispensation through this construction. 

The battle for Nairobi is another one of the clearest signs that the President is not writing himself off anytime soon. The city of Nairobi is the nerve centre of commerce and industry in the country and the region. It contributes about 28 per cent to the national GDP, followed by Kiambu at a distant second of 5.9 per cent, according to World Bank statistics. Next is Mombasa at 5.2 per cent and Nakuru at 4.9. Whoever controls the politics of the Kenyan capital has a huge stake in the country’s production of wealth and business, alike. 

A section of Nairobi's changing skyline. [File, Standard]

President Uhuru is keen to have the city in his corner. In the ending dispensation, Governor Mike Sonko was coaxed, and eventually pushed out of office, to put in place an arrangement more comfortable to the president and the business community. State House wheedled several gubernatorial hopefuls out of the way, to make room for the preferred Polycarp Igathe. Igathe has come in from the blues, having resigned as deputy to Sonko, a few months into their term that began in 2017.

There are those who will see the ongoing tribulations of Kenya Kwanza’s Johnson Sakaja as an extension of the effort to ensure that Igathe takes City Hall, at all costs. Sakaja risks being knocked out of the gubernatorial race for Nairobi over allegations of spurious university certification.  After that, whether Igathe can be his own man or not remains to be seen. But first, he would have to win the election. Those behind him are leaving nothing to chance.

Business as usual

The president, meanwhile, continues to carry on business as usual. A retiring president will be expected to slow his hand on fresh appointments, for example, or extending appointments that will tie the hands of his successor. Among the more recent appointments by the outgoing president is that of the COTU representative to the National Social Security Fund (NSSF), Rose Omamo. Last month, the president ordered the Labour Cabinet Secretary, Simon Chelugei, to gazette Omamo’s appointment, following a complaint by the COTU Secretary General, Francis Atwoli, at the Labour Day celebrations.

Separately, President Uhuru signed a bilateral cooperation agreement with President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia on 15 June, less than two months to his exit date. The accord will bind Kenya in various areas of trade cooperation with Zambia, long after he has left the scene.

He has also signed into law the Military Veterans Bill, 2022, to establish a regulatory framework for managing the welfare of military veterans and their dependents, among other recent activities that will tie down the next administration. Equally significant is the raising of the national debt ceiling from Sh9 trillion to Sh10 trillion. The next regime will reckon with the implications. However, it does appear, President Uhuru will not be too far to be reached.