In April 1997, I had my first and rather nasty encounter with then opposition leader Mwai Kibaki.
The venue was the renowned Limuru Conference Centre, now Jumuia Conference and Country Home, in Kiambu county.
Let me state from the outset it is not the fallen former President who was on the offensive. I was the cause of it all, and intentionally so.
In 1995, I had been invited by Bishop Prof Zablon Nthamburi of the Methodist Church to represent students in the National Convention Planning Committee. The NCPC had been cobbled together by such premier human rights organisations and lobby groups as Kenya Human Rights Commission, International Commission of Jurists and Citizens’ Coalition for Constitutional Change, and the Law Society of Kenya.
As chairman of the Students Union of Egerton University, I had raised the bar of student activism to levels that had hitherto been associated only with the University of Nairobi.
Leadership of the Students Union of Nairobi University had been dissolved and authorities had banned the student community from engaging in any form of an all-encompassing association. District groupings held sway.
After reluctantly giving in to unyielding pressure for multipartism, and securing victory against a splintered opposition in the 1992 general election, President Daniel Moi’s government did not seem to have appreciated the fact that to the school community, multipartism was synonymous with political pluralism that went beyond mere proliferation of more parties other than the gargantuan Kanu.
As far as we were concerned, multipartism, or political pluralism, as we preferred to interpret it, amounted to recognition and affirmation of diversity. Not just within the fragmenting political formations that cropped up on a daily basis after the repeal of Section 2A of the Constitution, but also permitted simultaneity of different convictions, ideas and interests from non-political actors alike.
Taking advantage of the emerging political environment, we quickly embarked on an outreach beyond our respective universities to mobilize students from other institutions towards formation of an umbrella Kenya Universities Students’ Organization.
Ahead of the Limuru parley, this group of dare-devil student activists teamed up to form the Youth Agenda and the National Youth Movement.
To set the agenda, the organisations held a three-day preparatory conference at the Sportsview Hotel in Kasarani in February 1997. By the time delegates converged in Limuru in April, the youth movement had traversed the country disseminating and validating a collective standpoint.
Those who attended included representatives of political formations, lobbies, students unions and representatives of the National Council of the Status of Women. Kanu did not turn up even though it had been invited.
There had been countrywide disappointment with the performance of the opposition in the 1992 general election. Kanu emerged victorious at the presidential and legislative assembly levels. It did not help matters that Kibaki’s political opponents had branded him General Kiguoya, a coward who had likened the push to remove Section 2A of the Constitution to pave the way for multipartism to being as impossible as trying to cut down a Mugumo (fig) tree with a razorblade.
It is against this backdrop that I took Kibaki head-on at the Limuru Conference Centre.
The youth had singled out his coming into the fray in the eve of the 1992 elections as a major contributing factor to the devastating and humbling loss that Kanu handed the opposition.
“Can you tell us here and now, which police station or prison cell you have ever been held in ever since the Second Liberation struggle began?” I asked as I turned to look at the direction he was sitting.
Kibaki did not seem bothered by my protestations. He looked at me nonchalantly, as he turned to chat with his bosom friend, Matere Keriri.
In 2002, I found myself in a panel with Matere at a radio talk show. He had come to expound on Kibaki’s pledge to introduce free primary education ahead of the 2002 elections. I had been part of Elimu Yetu Coalition, a lobby group that championed free basic education in keeping with the World Declaration on Education for All made in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990. Matere could still remember the Limuru clash with such clarity as if had just happened.
I told Matere that the Limuru episode reminds me of another encounter I had had earlier with a herd of elephants along Nyahururu – Maralal road. Their lead had such a thick skin that it decided to stand on the road in defiance of our presence as others crossed, and only crossed at its pace completely unfazed by our spirited attempts to scare it away.
In meetings I interacted with Kibaki during the agitation for a new constitution, he never proposed anything radical. On devolution, he never came across as one who believed in the far-reaching decentralisation of power and resources in the manner that devolution has taken in the 2010 Constitution.
Kibaki and his troops always advocated what they used to describe as “strengthened local authorities”. He was a reformist in the cast of a centrist, supporting a balance of social equality and a degree of social hierarchy, while opposing political changes which would result in a significant shift of society strongly to either the left or the right.
It is this centrist positioning in the ideological spectrum that made him the mugumo tree whose critics could not cut down with a razorblade. Instead, he was able to unite the centre-right and centre-left in Narc in 2002 and hand Kanu a defeat Kenyans had never imagined could happen under the watch of Moi, the self-declared professor of Kenyan politics.
Suba Churchill is the Executive Director of Kenya National Civil Society Centre
