UHURU KENYATTA’S ATTACK ON PRESS FREEDOM IS A
COPYCAT OF HIS FATHER’S TACTICS OF TYRANNY
Posted on December 18, 2013 by Makozewe 16 comments
Kenya: Behind the
Façade of the Ideal State a Rule of Fear
Last weekend’s attempted military coup in Kenya shocked most people who
have come to regard it as a stable African country. CYPRIAN FERNANDES, a Herald
journalist who was born in Nairobi and left Kenya in 1973 recalls that
political division was deeply entrenched at independence in 1963 and it was
only Kenyatta’s power that stopped it surfacing.
JOMO Kenyatta, Kenya’s first President who died in 1978, was all
powerful, ruthless and ruled with fear. For over 13 years as a journalist in
Kenya, my family and I lived with that fear — fear of detention without trial,
deportation or the plain fear of death, if I did not toe the Kenyatta line.
It was this fear that was injected into every sphere of life that
enabled Kenyatta to maintain the façade of Kenya being the epitome of the ideal
African State; stable, democratic and moderately prosperous.
The key to survival in Kenya was the many things one didn’t do:
• Don’t criticize Kenyatta and all things Kenyatta in private and especially
not in public.
• Don’t laugh at Kenyatta, crack anti-Kenyatta jokes, lampoon Kenyatta in
political satire, in jest, or in any way that would make a monkey out of him.
• Don’t write or say anything that might displease Kenyatta.
As several foreign journalists were to find out in the 1960s the price
of any criticism was a quick plane out of Kenya. Why did everyone in Kenya fear
the man? Everyone knew what the Mau Mau had done during the emergency of the
1950s. Kenyatta’s role in the movement was well-known but never proven, and so
the psychology and the terror of his past reputation were enough to frighten
even those who had remained in the Mau Mau after independence in 1963.
Soon after the first batch of deportations and detentions in 1964 and
1965, the two local dailies, The East African Standard and the Daily Nation,
adopted a form of self-censorship until proper channels which were often headed
by the present Minister for Constitutional Affairs, Charles Njonjo, reflected
Kenyatta thinking. He vetted editorial copy on anything from international
reports to a local tribal killing — anything that might even slightly embarrass
Kenyatta.
I was fortunate enough to have grown up with the ministers in office
then. As Chief Reporter on the Daily Nation, I also travelled with most
ministers to international conferences all over the world. At least on one
occasion, I was not able to write the full story, because I knew what the
consequences would be.
At the CHOGM summit in Singapore in 1970, a brilliant procedural manoeuvre
by the British Foreign Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, quashed what had
looked, potentially at least, like an African uprising over the British arms
sales to South Africa.
Daniel Arap Moi, Kenya’s current president, then Vice-President, was
leading the delegation, but he knew very little about the issue and would have
been quite useless (as it proved, since he made little comment) at the family
talk-in suggested by Douglas-Home, knowing full well that most African heads of
delegations would be silent without foreign ministers and advisers.
At a poolside meeting it was agreed by the Kenya team that Moi would
feign illness and the Foreign Minister would take his place. Charles Njonjo,
who was Kenyatta’s right-hand man at the time, had other ideas.
Njonjo said then: “I don’t know why you people (the Kenya delegation)
are bothering with all this. If it was up to me, I would open diplomatic
relations with South Africa tomorrow.” There was a silence that was almost
deathly. In the context of African politics, this was the worst kind of
blasphemy.
The next morning the Foreign Minister who had spearheaded the anti-arms
sales campaign through the Organization for African Unity, the non-aligned
nations summit meeting and the UN, breakfasted early and was rearing to go to
present his case at the talk-in.
Sometime during the night, Moi had had his mind changed. The minister
was standing in the lobby of the Ming Court hotel when Moi swept past him on
his way to the meeting. The anti-arms sale campaign which had threatened to
split the Commonwealth was not silenced at the conference table; it was killed
dead in that lobby that morning.
I mentioned it to my editor and he suggested that I best forget what I had
heard, since Njonjo reflected Kenyatta’s thinking; this was very dangerous for
both of us.
With the press silent, only two other elements threatened Kenyatta: the
Kenya People’s Union which was led by the Luo leader, Oginga Odinga, and
university students and their academic seniors. Odinga, who represents the
second largest of Kenya’s 150-plus tribes, was detained at the first
opportunity along with other officers of the party and the party summarily
banned. Students who took to the streets were bashed silent by the
para-military unit, the General Service Unit, whose members hit first and never
stop to question, just silence their victim. The academics were easily
frightened into submission.
This then was Moi’s inheritance when he was elected to the presidency
after Kenyatta’s death in 1978. At first it looked good, Moi repealed the
dreaded detention without trial. But he was always insecure. He knew that he
was allowed the presidency only because in-fighting within the Kikuyu had
failed to produce a leader. Besides, when Kenyatta was alive, the question of a
successor was never raised; he didn’t like it. Moi was going to be the man for
convenience.
News-generation Kenyans were coming of age and the academics who had
remained silent now asked for a more democratic Kenya, rather than the
autocratic path that Moi was taking to ensure his own position. If Kenyatta did
it why couldn’t Moi? So he ,too took to detaining without trial and hence the
attempted military coup.
Life, in Kenya, is not going to get any better. For some, it will get
worse. Now that it has had its façade blown away, foreign investors will start
thinking twice. The depressed state of the world market will continue to pose
its economy problems. Moi will not be in a position to appease the mass of the
people with any instant solutions. The attempted coup will spur others to
question, where once they had stood silent. Those in power will find it harder
to remain in power. Moi himself could as well have an assassin’s bullet aimed
at him right now.
The ideal looked so good. The reality was a different matter, but until
African politicians learn to lose (gracefully), the situation will be no
different from anywhere else in Africa.
The Sydney Morning Herald – Wednesday, August 4, 1982 (Page 7)
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