Like many other Kenyans, I have found the memoirs of former State House spokesman Lee Njiru – currently being serialised in a local daily – to be quite fascinating.
This memoir also serves to confirm something that would be obvious to any student of history. And this is that history is always cruel to men and women who rise to occupy high office and then seek to make their mark upon the world.
For example, President Uhuru Kenyatta currently finds himself loudly opposed by a number of influential politicians from his Central Kenya backyard. And a frequent accusation they make against him, ropes in his father, Kenya’s founding President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta.
Uhuru’s political opponents delight in presenting Mzee Jomo as the ultimate landgrabber. Someone who, at a time when personal wealth among indigenous Kenyans was largely defined by how much land you owned, ensured that his extended family was well provided for in this respect.
No mention of Jomo Kenyatta’s many years in exile or his determined agitation for Kenyan independence. All the focus is on how much land he allegedly grabbed.
Lee Njiru, as a man who owed his career to President Jomo Kenyatta and his successor Daniel Moi, is very guarded in his revelations about these two presidents. Basically, he seeks to emphasise only their good deeds.
But nothing can change the perception that has by now been widely accepted for most of the period since Moi retired from the presidency. And this is that the man was a brutal dictator, very much in the mould of the Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko (who renamed the country Zaire, but it has since gone back to its original name).
The image of Moi as not only a vicious dictator but also an incompetent ruler was only slightly reduced when his successor, Mwai Kibaki – for so long known as “the gentleman of Kenyan politics” – came face to face with the post-election violence of 2008.
Analysts then pointed out – once the dust had settled – that the forces unleashed in those weeks of sheer terror had existed all the way from colonial times. Inter-tribal rivalries and hatreds had been with us all along. But first Jomo Kenyatta and then Daniel Moi had found ways to keep a lid on such violent passions, and ensured that they did not boil over.
But, according to this version of those events, then came the bumbling Kibaki and with the most clumsily compromised elections ever, unleashed widespread and deadly violence on a scale that we all hope we will never see again.
No mention at all of Kibaki’s exceptional tolerance for human rights and freedom of expression; the rapid recovery of an economy long stuck in the doldrums; or the promulgation of a new constitution, and the advent of devolution during Kibaki’s tenure.
None of these.
Just a focus on how his presidency was disgraced by what some describe as “the darkest chapter in Kenya’s history” as the country veered towards civil war.
With all these previous presidents often being used as examples of the follies and excesses of those who wield power, can President Uhuru Kenyatta hope to escape a similar fate?
Every other day, in a speech at some “official launch” or other, he (or one of his Cabinet secretaries) reminds us that the current administration has built more roads than all the previous presidents combined. That the urban infrastructure in Kenya is the envy of much of Africa.
That the very delicate process of converting the colonial-era public housing estates into modern high-rise apartments (creating the opportunity for wider home ownership within the Kenyan middle class) has been one of the hallmarks of the Uhuru Kenyatta administration. And that there has been relative peace and stability for all the 10 years of his presidency.
Are these the things we will read about him once he has retired?
I don’t think so.
History is always very unkind to those who seek to create a legacy. And I am sure plenty will be found to suggest that his time in high office was a great disappointment – just as has happened to all those who preceded him to the presidency.
