Last Saturday, in the columns of this newspaper, the former Attorney General, Charles Njonjo, responded to Koigi wa Wamwere's call for him to apologise for his role in the Kenyatta and Moi regimes by saying categorically: "I have nothing to apologise about." And I agree with Sir Charles – he was never on a mission to build anything other than a capitalist society in Kenya which needed an authoritarian state. And since then, he has not been persuaded that any other social system was possible. He once called Tanzania "a man-eat-nothing society" in reaction to Mwalimu's characterisation of Kenya as "a man-eat-man society".
The trouble, however, is that the project of capitalist development started crumbling with Njonjo's own failure to support the "change-the-constitution group" that preceded the death of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. This group felt strongly that "a strong member from the House of Mumbi" needed to take over from Moi – not Daniel Toroitich arap Moi, the then Vice President. Njonjo sided with Moi, and warned the change-the-constitution group that "imagining, encompassing and even speculating on the death of the President was tantamount to treason, punishable by death".
In the end it is the Njonjo version of change that triumphed. Moi then ruled the country for the next 24 years with very little to show for in terms of capitalist development. Our infrastructure atrophied, the productive forces remained underdeveloped and corruption and sleaze hit the roof as the noose of authoritarianism was tied tightly around the neck of all Kenyans who sought a democratic alternative to the authoritarian charade.
What Njonjo got wrong was there was really nothing wrong in 1978 about changing the constitution before Kenyatta died. What was wrong was the reason being given for changing the constitution which was selfish, tribal, opportunistic and prone to perpetuate an ethnic plutocracy of the type that Moi himself tried to create with disastrous results. Indeed, no sooner had Moi come to power than Njonjo himself realised something had gone wrong with Kenya's version of Presidential authoritarianism. A nationalist coalition had rationalised this type of authoritarianism soon after Independence in terms of its developmental credentials.
But the regime then went ahead to dismantle this same nationalist coalition in preference to a highly personal Presidential rule that reduced every capitalist entrepreneur to kneel before it, subjecting the market laws of capitalist accumulation to the demands and prerequisites of the Presidency. The age of "command capitalism" had arrived, and Moi rationalised it in terms of "following Kenyatta's footsteps". By the time Moi was through with us, state-run projects meant to improve the productive forces of the national economy lay in ruins almost everywhere – Kenren in Mombasa, the Nyayo car and Nyayo Bus Service in Nairobi, the Webuye Paper Mills in Western Kenya, etcetera.
These footsteps of "Presidential command economics" had already started emerging soon after 1969 when Tom Mboya was assassinated. I need to explain this further. In 1994 I was one of 14 African leaders who accompanied General Olusegun Obasanjo to Singapore for a small conference that was called "the Africa-Singapore Encounter". We were meant to share experiences and find out what Africa could learn from Singapore, and what Singapore could learn from Africa. In the end we ended up learning more from Singapore than the other way round. The late Lee Kwan Yew gave us an "off the cuff" lecture for two and a half hours, beginning from their days as Third World nationalists in Manchester in 1945 where Pan Africanism was born, and where he met both Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah.
It was amazing to realise that in 1964 Singapore was actually much more backward than Kenya. But they managed to "leapfrog into the future" by establishing what we may now refer to as a national authoritarian and developmental state before the end of the 60s. In this kind of state, while democratic political space is limited to the political technocratic and developmental elite, accountability and transparency in government is strictly adhered to, corruption is kept at bay and severely punished when it occurs, and equitable development based on promoting the basic needs of the people is the cardinal principle of public policy.
Constitutional liberalism flourished while in Kenya it was substantially stifled to the detriment of capitalist development. There was a conscious government initiative to ensure all ethnic communities had equitable access to economic opportunities, social services and public positions. Thus in Singapore we found a citizen was guaranteed food, education, health and housing right from birth. In return the citizen had to observe the rule of law, meet all civic responsibilities and maintain public cleanliness at all times. Capitalism developed as standards of living improved for all, inequalities kept minimal and nationhood solidified.
Kenya, on the other hand, took a completely different turn in 1969. Rather than initiate a process of integration of Kenya's ethnic communities through equitable development and access to economic opportunities, a process started where those who occupied state power turned their positions into avenues for individual capital accumulation. This was finally rationalised and reduced into law in 1972 through the Ndegwa Commission. It was argued that had Tom Mboya been alive, the Ndegwa Commission would not have happened. He was perhaps the face of social democratic politics in the Kenyatta regime.
During the encounter addressed by Lee Kwan Yew, I asked him why it was that Singapore was able "to leap into the future" while Kenya actually retrogressed. His answer was the following: "In 1969 while we in Singapore decided to go forward you in Kenya killed Tom Mboya."
What Charles Njonjo should have done before Kenyatta passed on was to support a change-the-constitution move that should have put Kenya on a political path towards constructing a national authoritarian developmental state rather than the retrogressive Presidential authoritarian regime that Kenyatta presided over by the time he died. Njonjo missed that opportunity, believing he would be able to influence Moi's Presidential authoritarian regime for some outcome he never lived to see. Declared a traitor by the regime he helped nurture, he has lived long enough to reflect on those years and tell the story as it was: nothing extenuate, as Shakespeare would have said.