Shikuku: Kenyatta was an opportunist, not a nationalist

By Juma Kwayera

Days before the lights went out of his illustrious political career Martin Shikuku had grown increasingly wary that the reform agenda for which he nearly paid for with his life under the Kanu regime had been hijacked.

His last hope for the future of Kenya were Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi who he looked to as holders of the key to the reform agenda.

In a yet to be released bio-pictorial, The Poor Man’s Watchman, Shikuku details the cause-and-effect of Kenya’s constitutional missteps and missed opportunities. Shikuku accuses the masses and the political elite in equal measure for the mess the country is in. A people get the leaders they deserve, he says.

However, the man who spent his entire life fighting for the rights of the wretched of the earth had a premonition about the last days, which he uses to tell Kenya’s political narrative since independence through his recollections in the documentary done by Rose Lukalo of Media Kenya, and also his upcoming memoirs The People’s Watchman.

The two pieces of work highlight some of the gory details of political intrigues and betrayal during President Jomo Kenyatta and President Daniel Moi’s reigns. Under the two regimes Shikuku served terms in detention for speaking up against political assassinations, ethnic chauvinism and runaway corruption. He had close shaves with death because of his unrelenting push for political pluralism and power disaggregation.

Shikuku, who returned to the “pavilion” on Wednesday afternoon, left behind a ‘will’ for his political progenies to carry on with the struggle for a just and humane society.

The Poor Man’s Watchman had been planned to premier at the French Cultural Centre and TV, but as fate would have it, Shikuku died on the same day the preliminary work on the documentary was being finished. In his last days, Shikuku used his time talking to Raila and Mudavadi on Constitution implementation and power devolution.

In what amounts to a sage’s wise counsel, Shikuku exhorts the electorate to uphold the virtues and mores of a just society. He revisits in chilling details how Kenyan leaders failed to stand up to the excesses of the Kenyatta regime, especially on human rights abuses and economic egocentrism that perpetuated historical injustices that plunged the country into 2008 post-election violence.

According to Shikuku, the degeneration of Kenya into a society of ruthless bloodhounds was hastened by failure to arrest Kenyatta’s elastic appetite for land and money. The founding president, contrary to accounts of kinsmen and beneficiaries, never risked anything for the country. Kenyatta was cowardly and opportunistic, the two vices Shikuku says at the tail end of the documentary, precipitated the 2008 post-election violence and President Kibaki being sworn-in in darkness.

Stinging indictment

“African governments impoverish people so they can look at them (States) as providers. They have embraced the devilish policy of impoverishing the people. We spend a lot of money and resources to employ bodyguards for the president. If he was sure he had been elected by the people, he should have been sworn-in at Uhuru Park. In 2002, it is the other tribes that voted for Kibaki.

However, once in office he retreated into the Kikuyu cocoon and that is why he could not get the same support he had in 2007. He cannot get away with the blood of the innocent,” was Shikuku’s last word on the political mess in the country. The presence of internally displaced people is a living reality that irked to his last day.

He recalls how the Mau Mau were hunted and killed by the colonial regime when he worked for Kenya Railways in the 1950s:

“I was among the first Africans to work for the railways. During that time, I used to hide guns and ammunition for Mau Mau fighters. I would hide the guns under sacks of charcoal,” says Shikuku, in total contrast of Kenyatta, who he says he never openly spoke about the freedom struggle. His desire was for Africans to live a dignified life, not in squalor as post-election violence IDPs.

In the documentary, Shikuku, who served as Assistant minister for Home Affairs in both Moi and Kenyatta governments, says the repression that has coloured Kenya politics was an outcome of Kenyatta’s mortal fear of his subjects and a military ouster.

“Kanu wanted all the powers. After independence, the difference was that we were not being controlled by the White Hall (seat of British government), but from Nairobi,” he recalls. Unlike Kanu, Kadu espoused federalism or majimbo [as a means of dispersion of power and resources to the people],” he narrates.

The fear that Northern Kenya and Mwambao (Coast) would secede persuaded Kenyatta to bribe and arm-twist the Kadu MPs to crossover to Kanu, which effectively gave birth to a single party State in 1964.

“When Kadu crossed over to Kanu, they were promised goodies. I was the last to do so after spending two days as the only opposition MP in the House. But before I did it, I told Ronald Ngala that by crossing over he had killed opposition. I told him ‘you have created problems for this country’.”

The only other person to speak against Kanu’s appetite for power, Pio Gama Pinto, was assassinated. Shikuku was unable to marshal support to move a Motion in Parliament to form a select committee to investigate the assassination. Reason? His colleagues backed off because Pinto was “just a Muhindi” (Asian). Pinto was editor of Citizen newspaper and a thorn in the flesh of Kenyatta’s regime.

JM’s murder

He explains that power had anaesthetic effect on the thinking of his colleagues in Parliament. Five years later, Tom Mboya was assassinated, and this proved to be a turning point in Kenya’s ethnic and class relations.

It sparked fierce protests in Parliament and for the first time, Kenyatta’s grip on power was shaken to the core. Teaming up with JM Kariuki, Shikuku kept the Kanu regime on the back-foot.

The horror of the assassination of JM Kariuki has never been told accurately. Shikuku tells of how, in the company of colleagues, he was walking in streets when they saw a family trying to carry a corpse away. On moving closer, he recognised the dead body as JM’s. However, two lower teeth had been knocked out to make the ‘corpse look Luo.’ When he said that that was JM body, there was panic and the body was abandoned. The body was to be found later in Ngong Forest.

The incident occurred after JM had been reported missing, but then Vice-President and Home Affairs Minister Moi had told Parliament that JM Kariuki was safe.

“What I fought for is not visible; I may die before I see it... I regret that I fought mzungu (the Whites) but the people I fought for are the worse,” says Shikiku in a documentary that was recorded four months before he succumbed to prostrate cancer. In the late 1950s through the 1960s, Kenyan peasants convinced of the value of educated workforce, donated money to send their sons and daughters to universities in the West in the hope they would bridge skills gaps upon their return.

In a stinging indictment, the former Butere MP, attributes Kenya’s current ethnic hostility and disproportionate allocation of national economic resources to the opportunism of the political elite.

“Kenyatta was an opportunist, not a nationalist. He was picked by the Kikuyu Central Association as leader because he could speak English, read and write,” he says.

The outcome was giving Kenyatta a platform to plunder the resources of the country upon ascending to power. Incidentally, Shikuku died on the same day the country was marking 34th anniversary of Kenyatta death that occurred on August 22, 1978.