Perhaps I should write something about President Mwai Kibaki who is being laid to rest this weekend after his death aged 90 just over a week ago.
But then so much has already been written about the man, who the writers of the scurrilous Kanu Briefs in the early 1990s told us was baptised Emilio and confirmed as Stanley, that I am struggling to find something new to say.
Those who loved him have praised him to the high heavens while those who hated him have damned him to hell.
Those who tried to find a balance have had their say while those who didn’t care either way have spoken with their silence.
To borrow and adapt the words of South African journalist and thinker Eusebius Mckaiser after Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s death earlier this year:
“Within minutes of the announcement of Kibaki’s death, social media saw a proliferation of both complex, lengthy sets of reflections about his legacy and also, perhaps inevitably, reductive hot takes.
“There is no one Kibaki. How could there be? He lived a long, full and closely examined life — a life responding to social and political facts that themselves did not remain constant.”
I must admit that on the whole, I liked Mwai Kibaki. He was the kind of fellow I think I would have enjoyed having a beer with even though, if some of his close political allies from the Democratic Party days were to be believed, he had short arms and deep pockets.
I had always wondered what might have happened had he ascended to the presidency in 1997 when he was at the height of his powers and before that horrific December 2002 car accident and the subsequent stroke (or strokes depending on who you believed at the time) affected his health.
I have also always thought that those around him during the early days of his first term did him no favours by being so secretive about his health concerns.
I remember working at the BBC during that time and while my colleagues in the Kenyan news media appeared to have either willingly, or through “orders from above,” bought into the code of Omertà about the president’s health in early 2003, we in the the foreign press corps were actively pursuing the story.
Even some members of the Kibaki Cabinet who in later years would feel nothing about dishing the dirt on their buddies in the same cabinet, seemed to be toeing the line.
The closest we got to figuring out what was really going on was from Public Works minister Raila Odinga, who while he never actually said the word stroke in reference to the President, did once point to his head while speaking to the NYT’s Marc Lacey and said: “He had a problem here. But it's dissolved. He's speaking fine."
Isaiah Kabira, my former colleague from the days when the Kenya Times and KTN62 were part of the same stable, denied point blank that the President had suffered a stroke, insisting that he was just fine.
But in the following months, when Kibaki was speaking at a rally and could not remember Raila’s name instead referring to him as “yule” (that one) it was clear all was not well.
I remember in August that year President Kibaki attended his former Cabinet colleague Dr Gikonyo Kiano’s funeral and kept referring to him as Joshua even though Kano’s baptismal name was Julius.
This was clearly not the same man who some years before had been famous amongst parliamentary correspondents for being amongst a very small handful of Cabinet ministers who spoke extempore in debates, causing even his political rivals to applaud every time he spoke.
At the height of his powers I think Kibaki would have been a formidable president for Kenya, but unfortunately that was not to be.
Instead for the first term we got the heavily medicated version and in the second term we got the guy whose dodgy nighttime swearing-in triggered the beginnings of a civil war.
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