Charles Njonjo, the first Attorney General of independent Kenya, died earlier this year at the age of 101. Writers of obituary essays have rendered competing verdicts on his life. The activist John Githongo warmly remembered Njonjo as a “steadfast friend and a man of his word”. The politician Miguna Miguna, by contrast, gave a dark valedictory: “Rot in hell, Charles Njonjo”, he wrote. “You represent all the problems Kenyans want and must rid themselves of”.

Njonjo saw himself as a stalwart defender of Kenyans’ liberties. In his day, he was a prolific contributor to political conversation: his speeches from the floor of Parliament were said to be second only to Tom Mboya’s in their length. His favourite theme was the relationship between law and liberty. On one memorable occasion, he lectured parliamentarians for an hour and 45 minutes, insisting that preventative detention—the incarceration of people pre-judged as dangerous to the political order—was entirely constitutional. The legal and administrative regime that he defined and defended was meant to guard the security and prosperity of Kenya’s wealthy and entitled upper classes. It was a regime that was paranoid about dissent, scornful of the poor, and focused on the security of property. It was a regime where—in the name of the common good—many categories of people found themselves incarcerated.

That is why it is worth inquiring again into Charles Njonjo’s life. It is not to humanize a man who disregarded the humanity of so many people. It is that, in unpacking the human history behind Kenya’s political institutions, we can see—and also challenge—the logics that uphold injustice in our contemporary times.

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Charles Njonjo’s father, Josiah Njonjo, was a divisional chief under Kenya’s colonial government and one of the founders of the Kikuyu Association, an early political party. He was by no means a pliable tool of British colonial policy. When in 1933 the government appointed a commission to investigate Gikuyu people’s complaints over the loss of their hereditary lands, Chief Josiah testified at length about the injustices that had attended the onset of colonial rule. British settlers had appropriated “land which was ours and on which they now plant coffee and make themselves rich at the expense of the Kikuyu owners”, he said. African farmers taking their cattle from one part of the Gikuyu reserve to another were forced to pass through European farms, risking fines and imprisonment. He asked the government to rectify the injustice:

Seeing that both we and the Europeans are children and subjects of the King, surely it is only fair that all the children should be given equal justice? We are as loyal as the Europeans and are as prepared to work for the sake of Her Majesty as the Europeans are.

Chief Josiah’s appeal was framed within the logic of conservative loyalism. He sought to level out the racial hierarchy that structured colonial Kenya’s politics, insisting that Africans, like white settlers, deserved justice from the British crown.

It is not surprising that Chief Josiah’s son would become a lawyer. In the late 1940s, Charles Njonjo was in England, studying at Exeter and the London School of Economics, where he chaired the East African Students’ Union. He applied for a post in the colonial civil service, but insisted that the terms of his employment should match those offered to Europeans. When Kenya’s government refused, an indignant Njonjo entered Gray’s Inn to study law. By the early 1950s, he was living with a young Harry Nkumbula—later a leading Zambian nationalist—in a London flat provided by the Communist Party. According to British intelligence, he was friendly with the Caribbean activist George Padmore, and was involved in Fenner Brockway’s Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism. He returned to Kenya in January 1955 to take up his first government post: as temporary Assistant Registrar General. British intelligence operatives thought him possessed of an “anti-European outlook” and “potentially very dangerous”. He was popular among African students in London because of his “personality and pleasant manners”, but capable of “cool, calculated reasoning to achieve his ends”. When he landed in Nairobi, he was found to have in his luggage a prohibited publication: George Padmore’s Africa: Britain’s Third Empire, a vituperative critique of Britain’s colonial project in Africa.

Njonjo applied for a post in the colonial civil service, but insisted that the terms of his employment should match those offered to Europeans.

Here is one way to see Charles Njonjo. Formed by his father’s conservative loyalism and by his own experiences with colonial racism, he spent his career wielding the tools of English culture and identity to demand recognition, respect, and authority from European and American brokers of power. By 1963, he was Kenya’s Attorney General, the first African to hold the post. He was famously fastidious in his manner, appearing always in a three-piece Saville Row-tailored pinstripe suit, with a watch chain looped across his waistcoat and a red carnation in his buttonhole. He complained on the floor of Kenya’s Parliament about politicians who “dressed like shamba men [garden boys]”. It was “disgraceful”, he said. He attended the ceremonies in London marking the 750th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, and told the Kenyan press that “the Magna Carta is part of our tradition, too”. He was patron of the East African Library Association, and once told an audience that “libraries are sacred spaces and librarians are very holy people”.

At a time when most African states were hastily placing Africans in the topmost positions of the civil service and the military, Njonjo insisted that British policemen, soldiers and civil servants were essential. “Should we lower our standards . . . just because a man has a black face?”, he asked. He scorned cultural nationalists’ efforts to make Swahili Kenya’s national language. Kenyans should not be ashamed of speaking English, he told parliamentarians, because it was “not an Englishman’s language but an international means of communication”. Swahili was a concoction of Arabic phrases, with an inadequate vocabulary. To speak Swahili on the floor of Parliament would “make this House like that of Babel, because nobody would understand whatever the other said”. He insisted that Kenyans should “avoid as much as possibly an attempt which would make us narrow in our outlook”.

It is for this reason, perhaps, that Njonjo was a consistent defender of Kenyan women’s liberties. He derided the nationalist impulse to calcify public culture in the name of traditional morality. In neighbouring Tanzania and in Uganda, governments were adopting laws prohibiting the wearing of miniskirts and wigs. It was, according to activists, a way of defending African women’s morals against foreign influences. Charles Njonjo derided this cultural defensiveness. When in 1966 a parliamentarian introduced a motion to bar women from wearing slacks and tights, using lipstick, or straightening their hair, Njonjo took the floor and pointed out that the mover was wearing headgear that was inconsistent with traditional attire. Women should be allowed to exercise the “right to choose their own fashions and makeup and men should not interfere”, he averred. In 1972, politicians called for a ban on lurid films from Kenya’s cinemas. Njonjo insisted that parliamentarians “must respect the intelligence of our people. Kenyans should be intelligent enough to judge for themselves”.

American diplomats found Charles Njonjo to be “svelte, dapper, articulate, informed, and totally incongruous in the black African context”. Njonjo saw himself as a legatee of the Anglophone tradition of legal and political reasoning. It was a source of moral authority, an instrument that he could wield against other Kenyans—and against Europeans and Americans, too. When the American newspaper magnate Katharine Graham—publisher of the Washington Post and Newsweek—was late for a meeting, Njonjo scolded her for her lack of punctuality, then brusquely turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

The Kenya that Njonjo sought to create was meant to be—in his words—the “greatest living example of democracy, justice and peace”. But there was no space for the poor. They were disreputable, a danger to the public good. In 1968, Njonjo pushed through a new law giving authorities the power to remove prostitutes and beggars from cities and send them to work for their parents on the land. He called beggars “lazy people who think they can enrich themselves at the expense of others”. Under Njonjo’s tenure, punishments for crimes of property were disproportionately harsh. In August 1963—a few months before Kenya’s independence—Njonjo warned “thugs” that assault and theft would be punished with “the severest sentence”, including public flogging. He insisted, “Kenya must get back to the stage where people can leave their homes and property without worry and where they will feel secure”. A few years later Njonjo again waxed nostalgic about an imaginary past, telling parliamentarians, “Kenya should go back to the old way of life where a person could leave his house unlocked and not be worried that thieves would break into it”.

Njonjo saw himself as a legatee of the Anglophone tradition of legal and political reasoning.

Here was the political theory that lay beneath the growth of Kenya’s security state. Over the course of his nearly twenty years in public service, Njonjo insisted that “a strong popular government must be ready at all times and in all circumstances to protect the security of the state and the liberties of the people”. The incarceration of dissidents, detention without trial, the expansion of prisons—all of this was, for Njonjo, a means of guaranteeing Kenyans’ freedom. The “liberty of individuals could only be protected by protecting the state”, he told parliament in 1966, while defending a new law allowing for the long-term detention of criminals. The “law means nothing if it were not to ensure liberty, but liberty could only exist when protected by law and legal process”, he said in 1971. Law and liberty “stand hand in hand, as equal partners in the fight against their common foes of anarchy and oppression”. In 1977, while defending the detention of dissidents by government, he warned, “Kenya’s freedom could disappear overnight if adequate public security was not provided”.

It was, among other things, a rationale for expanding the power of Kenya’s president. When in 1968 opposition activists pressed for the creation of a new post—a Prime Minister, who would control and advise President Kenyatta—Njonjo called the proposal “misconceived, meaningless and pitiful”. Eight years later, Njonjo warned Kenyans that it was a “criminal offence” for anyone to “compass, imagine, devise, or intend the death or deposition of the President”. The mandatory sentence for any such offence was death.

A great many people lost their lives and their freedom in those years. A great many people spent years in prison as a guarantee for the security and liberty of Kenya’s rich and propertied classes. Some of the detainees were well known. Raila Odinga—now a leading contender in Kenya’s presidential elections—was detained from 1983 to 1988, from 1988 to 1989, and from 1990 to 1991. Amnesty International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience. Martin Shikuku, Kenya’s most consistent parliamentary critic of government corruption, spent three years in prison. The famous novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o was detained in December 1977 for “activities and utterances which are dangerous to the good government of Kenya”. Other people suffered anonymously. They were caught up in a carceral system that was geared to the punishment and confinement of the poor. When in 1969 Kenya’s courts sentenced a 19-year-old man to ten years in prison for snatching a bag from a pedestrian, Attorney General Njonjo defended the sentence, arguing, “Young offenders who commit cold and calculated crimes deserve severe and long term punishments”.

That, then, is another way to see the late Njonjo: as a ruthless defender of entrenched inequality, an architect of a legal and political system that advantaged the wealthy and criminalized the lives of the poor. In the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Kenyans had been tried and convicted of offenses committed during the course of the anti-colonial Mau Mau insurgency. After independence, many Kenyans expected—naturally—that their records would be wiped clear, that the new government would ignore or vacate convictions given under colonial jurisdiction. For Attorney General Njonjo there were no clean slates. He promised that “previous convictions of a political nature incurred by people in the fight for independence” would be ignored by independent Kenya’s magistrates. But earlier convictions were, however, always admissible as evidence in a court proceeding. “Theft under the colonial Government is still theft today”, he said.

The most cutting criticism of Charles Njonjo’s life came from the novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose satirical novel Matigari ma Njirũũngi was published—in the Gikuyu language—in 1986, six years after his release from detention. The novel features Matigari, a Mau Mau warrior who comes out of the forest to confront the injustices of post-colonial Kenya. In a pivotal scene the “Minister of Truth and Justice”—clad in a pinstripe suit, with a red carnation on the lapel and a white handkerchief in the breast pocket—confronts a restive crowd of workers and students. Having already arrested and detained their leaders, the Minister assures them that “without the rule of law—truth and justice—there is no government, no nation, no civilization”. There follows a self-revealing sermon about the law:

Niĩ ngĩrĩire wathoinĩ, ngarũmio na ngarũmia watho, ngathoomithio na ngoomithio watho, na ũmũũthĩ ũyũ nĩ niĩ mũigi, mũigĩrĩri, na mũgitĩri watho.

I was brought up in the law. I abide by the law, and the law abides in me. I have been taught the law, and I staunchly believe in it. I am the guardian of the law today. I make the law, and I ensure that it is kept.

In the Gikuyu original, the Minister mashes up the different functions of legal practice. The words slide together. There is no space, grammatically or vocabularically, for judicial independence. There is no separation of powers, no function of the law that is distinguishable from the person of the Minister himself. Ngugi’s satire reveals Charles Njonjo’s definition of the law to be tautologically self-interested, self-defining, and self-elevating.

Njonjo’s downfall, when it came, was swift. On 1 July 1983, he announced that he was resigning his position as Minister for Constitutional Affairs. He was accused of scheming, in the company of Kenya Air Force men, to oust President Daniel arap Moi. President Moi appointed a Commission of Inquiry to go into Njonjo’s affairs, and over the course of 109 days, Kenyans were transfixed as a parade of witnesses opened up Njonjo’s dirty laundry for public inspection. On average Kenya’s leading newspaper, the Daily Nation, dedicated six and a half pages per day to the hearings; and over the course of several months the newspaper published over a million words about Charles Njonjo’s private life. Sales rose dramatically: where the newspaper had been selling 150,000 copies per day, during the Njonjo inquiry it sold 200,000 copies.

Njonjo warned Kenyans that it was a “criminal offence” for anyone to “compass, imagine, devise, or intend the death or deposition of the President”.

Much of the evidence seems to have been introduced with the sole purpose of embarrassing Njonjo. The panel spent several days in January 1984 discussing the excess baggage that Njonjo shipped from London to Kenya on Kenya Airways. The baggage—which arrived in the airport every few weeks—weighed 240 kilograms on average. There were suitcases and boxes full of oranges, clothing and toys. There were regular shipments of Ribena. Njonjo never paid customs duties on any of it; neither did he pay the shipping costs to Kenya Airways. Four months later the panel listened to witnesses describe how Njonjo had funnelled money from the Association of the Disabled in Kenya to support the Kikuyu Constituency Development Fund. “Njonjo Diverted Disabled’s Money” was the newspaper headline.

There was more serious evidence too. Witnesses described how Njonjo had made plans with mercenaries from Israel and South Africa, planning a coup timed for early August 1982. Based on this and other evidence the judges ruled—in December 1984—that Charles Njonjo had set in motion “intrigues deliberately designed to undermine the position of the Head of State, his image, as well as usurp the power of the constitutionally established government”. President Moi pardoned him on the very day the verdict was announced. Njonjo duly repaid the funds that had been usurped from the Association of the Disabled, and thereafter he largely disappeared from public life.

The political and legal system that Njonjo built, however, has endured. In a recent article, the journalist Patrick Gathara has argued that contemporary Kenya’s prisons “carry the DNA of their forebears”. Today over 50,000 people are detained in Kenya’s prisons, crowded into buildings that are meant to house 14,000 at most. According to a 2015 report, Kenya has incarcerated more of its citizens than any other country in eastern Africa, outside Rwanda and Ethiopia. Today Kenya’s elite lives behind barbed wire fences, while—under the guise of counter-terrorism—Kenya’s police target poor and marginal residents of Nairobi. As Gathara argues, this is a legacy of colonial government. It is also a legacy of Charles Njonjo. In working to protect Kenyans’ liberties, he made the incarceration and punishment of the poor seem to be a moral necessity.

On February 23, 2022, President Uhuru Kenyatta, retreated to Sagana State Lodge 150km north of Nairobi located in the heartland of Kikuyu country, in Nyeri County. This was the fourth time (the mainstream media refer to it as the third), the president was headed to the lodge that gives succour to his indulgence in ethnic and regional politics.

It comes barely a year from when he was last there to prostrate his desperation and frustrations on regional politics gone rogue and his inability to reign-in on a recalcitrant deputy president. His great efforts at appeasing the Kikuyus are not helped by a political base that has turned its back on his counsel. To his utter dismay and fury, however much he has besmirched his deputy president to the Kikuyus, they have upheld their middle finger, against his wishes, six months to the general election.

On January 29, 2021, he summoned all the Members of County Assemblies (MCAs) from Mt Kenya region and sweet-talked them into supporting the Building Bridges Initiative BBI bill. Since inviting his biggest opponent, Raila Odinga, onto the steps of Harambee House, which houses the Office of the President, for a rapprochement, on March 9, 2018 and which birthed the initiative immediately afterwards, BBI has become his obsession. Just like it is Raila’s.

Speaking in Kikuyu language, on this day, he harangued less on the iniquities of his Deputy President William Ruto. “I never said I will not support William Ruto. Yes, I said kumi kumi, yangu kumi iliisha lini? True, I said 10 years for me and 10 for Ruto, but has my 10 years ended? This “10 years for me and 10 for Ruto,” a statement made by President Uhuru in 2013, has returned to hound him, as he vigorously fights to extricate himself from his eponymous deputy.

In September 2013, in Eldoret town, which is 300km northwest of Nairobi and Ruto’s hometown, a much leaner President Uhuru, atop a vehicle said; “They (the opposition) will (have to) wait for 20 years, kwa sababu miaka kumi ya Ruto iko (because Ruto’s 10 years are intact). At Afraha Stadium in Nakuru town, just before the March 4, 2013 general elections, Uhuru Kenyatta is also reported to have told the gathering that he would rule for 10 years and ensure that his running mate Ruto, also does his 10 years, if they assume office.

The MCAs acquiesced to his demands, after extorting a KSh4 million car loan from him. Then, as on February 23, the Sagana State Lodge rendezvous was an ethnic affair, but clothed as a national event, complete with an official State House imprimatur: the press releases (of course in English language) are communicated by the President’s official spokesperson. The event is covered by all media as a public occasion, yet the president speaks in his mother tongue, confines himself to partisan politics, reducing himself to politics of ethnic jingoism and sectarianism.

How are such meetings conducted in mother tongue supposed to be covered by the press? By relying on the translation provided by State House media corp? By the respective media houses employing Kikuyu language translators? By media houses transporting to Sagana, only journalists who are Kikuyu language savvy? Or perhaps the tacit message from the Sagana meetings organisers has always been, the event ought to be reported solely by Kikuyu media houses?

The January 29, 2021 Sagana meeting came hot on the heels of “a state of the nation” address to the Kikuyu people from State House, Nairobi on January 18 by President Uhuru in Kikuyu language. The event was broadcast live by Kikuyu language radio stations punctuated as it was, by the president’s exhortations and lamentations to a rebellious base at odds with his current view of politics.

Whichever the case, these Sagana meetings always elicit mixed and jaundiced feelings from Kenyans, who legitimately question the rationale behind a president engaging in tribal affairs, which are made to look like national events. The President’s cohorts have obnoxiously sometimes come up with excuses explaining away this obvious anomaly.

Far from being national events, the meetings are also premised with a lot of (presumed) anger and vitriol by the host. President Uhuru has lately been reminding Kenyans that he stands for peace, love, unity and harmony, especially, after he shook hands with Raila. But his actions in these meetings belie these values. Furious that many of the Central Kenya MPs are not kowtowing to his politics, he locked 41 MPs from the January 29 meeting. He, of course, also locks out his deputy president, but will discuss him nonetheless.

The tone of these meetings is always laced with stupefaction: The President groans and moans about a deputy president, who until not-to-long-ago, was dubbed “my brother William.” He rails practically against every one, who doesn’t seem to agree with him politically. Everyone is at fault apart from himself. He was angry with the MPs, because they dared address him through a missive which found its way to the press.

One of the issues that the MPs drew his attention to and which must have irked him even further, was reminding him that, “for eight years between 2011–2018, you consistently and persistently cautioned us that Raila Odinga was Kenya’s foremost problem and pleaded with us to send him home for the country to move forward. The successful effort you made to persuade the people to render Raila Odinga unacceptable in Mt Kenya cannot be undone in your life time.”

Magnanimity is not a word that sits comfortably with the president, who easily results to recrimination and subterfuge. President Daniel arap Moi, President Uhuru’s political father, mentor and Moi’s protégé, at the height of his power, used to remind anyone who cared to listen that politics is like wooing a woman – you use every wile in your possession to win her over without getting snooty or woolly. In January, 2021, working himself into a frenzy of real or imagined anger, he lamented and then lampooned the MPs, calling them loafers and losers.

Barely 12 months after January 2021 Sagana meeting, in which the President professed to not ever saying “I will not support Ruto,” he demanded from the rented crowd at Sagana in February, 2022 that they promise not to consider Ruto as an heir apparent, because, among other things, he is a thief. He has corrupted the clergy, who have equally corrupted the laity. He is dishonest, he is a ne’er-do-well and he’s a man of dubious distinction. He described him as being less forthright and whose scruples were wanting. In just a year’s time, the president after observing, “I didn’t say I won’t support Ruto,” was now telling the Kikuyu people to not elect Ruto, because he was “too risky for the country.”

The chief purpose of the 2022 Sagana retreat was to reveal to the mountain people the raison d’etre of his parting ways with “brother William.” Hence, the meeting was intended to show them the sign, the way to the Shangri La that is awaiting them, on August 9. Instead, the occasion became another of the president’s pent-up lamentations on his ostracised deputy.

Though, in a departure from the other meetings, this time around, he ferried along one of his State House aficionados to showcase, through a power-point presentation, his developments to Mt Kenya region. A carrot to say: look, I’ve done all these for you; you should now hearken to my voice, without question.

The accusations levelled against Ruto by his boss might as well be so. But which begs the simple questions: when did the President realise William Ruto was dangerous for the country? What did he do about it? Apart from endless lamentations?

As the Mt Kenya people wait to be spoken to yet again from Sagana State Lodge by President Uhuru in the lead-up to the August 9, 2022 elections, a once ardent supporter of President Uhuru, but now turned harsh critic opined that in 2013 the president reminded Kenyans that the ICC case was ‘a personal challenge.’ “He should also consider his feud with his deputy as a personal challenge and keep us out of it.”

The critic also reminded me that the road infrastructure developments his government has been undertaking in the larger Mt Kenya region, are neither a favour nor something to blackmail the Kikuyu vote with. “The roads have been built with debt, money that all Kenyans will pay painfully, his family won’t. The roads are a right, not a donation from the Kenyatta family…we’ll vote for whom we want. Period.”

At the height of the global Coronavirus pandemic in the last quarter of 2022, I met a friend at a senior members’ social club in Kiambu County. The exclusive club still open, meant that the society’s upper crust continued to socialise without worrying about police harassment, over not keeping the distance as they enjoyed their favourite juice.

Politics is always at the lips of most Kenyans. As we ate and drank, the group I was seated with naturally turned to political talk. “I’ll never forget what my Nanyuki British landowner told me in 2013,” reminisced a businessman. “You guys have elected a monarch, you’ll live to rue the day. We’ve lived with a monarch for the last 1000 years and we’ve been unable to dislodge it.”

The monarch he was referring to was Uhuru Kenyatta, then the The National Alliance (TNA) presidential candidate, who had magnetised his base (the Kikuyu nation) to emotionally vote for him in the March 2013 presidential elections. Candidate Uhuru had been fingered as one of the infamous “Ocampo Six”, the well-known public officials who the International Criminal Court (ICC) claimed were the most culpable in the 2007 post-election violence. The six were: Uhuru Kenyatta, former head of civil service secretary to the cabinet Francis Muthaura, former Police Commissioner Major-General Hussein Ali, William Ruto, vernacular radio talk show host Joshua arap Sang and former cabinet minister Henry Kosgey.

Irony and politics oftentimes go hand-in-hand: it was not lost on some of us on the irony of the supposedly British landowner’s remarks. The expansive Nanyuki plateau, 200km north of Nairobi city in Laikipia County, is the playground for many foreigners, majority of them of British descent, who own huge tracts of land, acquired with the help of a retreating British empire, after World War (II).

Six months to the August 9, 2022 presidential elections, President Uhuru’s billboards are all over the Nairobi city’s conurbation, his huge beaming portrait staring you in the face. Today’s African big man’s desire to be loved and pervade both the private and public space of his subjects, is not any different from his post-independence predecessors, who ruled in the single party era and who considered themselves presidents-for-life.

In the new constitutional dispensation of two-term limits, now commonplace in many African polities, this big man’s syndrome, seems to have found new meaning and avenue. The post-independence presidents made sure their portraits were everywhere – on the country’s currency notes and coins, in business premises, churches, government offices, schools and homes.

The African big man suffers from the tragedy of longevity in office: once made president, they create a career out of the presidency, surrounds himself (it’s hardly a she), with acolytes, hangers-on, layabouts, loyalists, praise-singers, yes-men and a few yes-women. Look around on the continent – you cannot fail to spot them: Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo Brazzaville, Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, Paul Biya of Cameroon, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Robert Mugabe who died in 2019.

In Africa, 60 years of age, in presidential terms, is considered to be a toddler – in a continent where presidents have been known to collapse in office

In Africa, 60 years of age, in presidential terms, is considered to be a toddler – in a continent where presidents have been known to collapse in office, whose health status is a top government secret – they are always sneaked out of their countries in the dead of the night, for treatment abroad and who cannot be in a meeting and not be in “meditation” the entire period, irrespective of the time. President Uhuru will be 61 years by October, 2022, when the country will have held its seventh multi-party presidential election and the third after the promulgation of the new constitution in August 2010.

In the 1970s–1980s, when Organisation of African Unity (OAU) reigned supreme, the African despots would meet annually in some designated capital city, to compare notes, but most significantly, to congratulate each other for surviving yet another year. It was a presidential club, where most of these presidents-for-life would be glad to stamp their presence and hope to see each other in another year, that is, if they weren’t deposed by the military junta, who more often than not, killed them.

The military coups of the 1970s and 1980s have since been replaced by “democratic coups” of the post-1990s multiparty era, where the incumbent presidents have perfected the art of rigging the votes and subverting electoral processes. They have been doing these by manipulating the voter registration data, shutting down the social media, tampering with the biometric machines that count the votes, orchestrating power blackouts and refusing to open computer servers indefinitely. Hijacking opponents on their way to present their nomination papers and stuffing ballot boxes is today considered both archaic and absurd.

The recent West Africa military coup d’états are a tragic replay of what used to be normal occurrence of Africa of yester-years.

The presence of President Uhuru’s billboards is spawning silent murmurs from Kenyans: what do these billboards portend? Why does Uhuru need to remind us of his presidency, six months to his exit? At the club, there seemed to be a consensus that President Uhuru did not behave like a president who wanted to leave after his constitutionally mandated two-terms are over. “I’m persuaded the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), is more than meets the eye. It’s a project geared to secure a post-presidency position for Uhuru after 2022,” said one elderly man. I later learnt he was one of the county’s BBI representative.

The BBI came about after President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, his most stringent nemesis in two successive electoral contests – 2013 and 2017, seemingly buried their hatchet and shook hands on March 9, 2018. The initiative was the immediate aftermath of the détente.

I’m persuaded the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) … is a project geared to secure a post-presidency position for Uhuru after 2022

There’s no smoke without fire. This talk about President Uhuru’s ostensibly not being keen to leave office after August 2022 general election, has been apparently stoked by his yes-men and praise-singers, including himself.

Addressing his base from Sagana State Lodge in September 2019, where the President retreats to, when he wants to connect emotionally and linguistically with the Kikuyu people – the President finds refuge speaking in his mother tongue – President Uhuru reportedly quipped: “I do not know the contents of BBI report, yet I hear people claiming Uhuru Kenyatta wants to become the Prime Minister of Kenya. I wouldn’t mind being in leadership in such a post.”

Three months after this rather odious statement from the President, his acolyte and former Jubilee Party vice-chairman, David Murathe reiterated in November that President Uhuru would stay on as prime minister. Said Murathe to Citizen TV: “Uhuru is going nowhere. . .there is going to be new formations. . .they can even agree with the former prime minister (Raila Odinga) (for him) to run for the presidency of this country. . .the leader of the party with the majority seats as per the BBI recommendations forms the government and if Uhuru is the party leader, he’ll form that government.”

In September 2020, in an interview with the weekly Sunday Nation newspaper, Francis Atwoli, the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (COTU) boss, revealed that once the constitution is changed, President Uhuru would be eligible to apply for another term. Atwoli, who has a penchant for hiring Congolese crooners to sing his praises, was referring to BBI, which, if it’s passed by the Supreme Court, will elicit a constitutional change through a referendum.

“Uhuru Kenyatta can use the envisioned change to remain president beyond 2022. Why are people pretending that they don’t know (Daniel arap) Moi after the constitutional change of 1991 remained in power for another term?” growled Atwoli. That aside, the flamboyant trade unionist, who, oftentimes will be spotted bedecked in jewellery chains and bracelets, has on several occasions intimated that President Uhuru is too young at 60 years to retire. Charity Ngilu the Kitui County governor recently joined the chorus, claimed President Uhuru was too young for his wisdom to go to waste.

Two months after Atwoli, one of President Uhuru’s now most vocal yes-man, made his remarks known, Raphael Tuju, the immediate former secretary general of Jubilee Party, said in November: “I want to state that there is consensus especially from those of us holding senior positions in the party that it still needs Uhuru’s passion to bring this country together.”

The cantankerous Atwoli was at it again: as ODM endorsed Raila on February 26, 2022 as its August 9 presidential flagbearer, the trade unionist bellowed yet again that President Uhuru was a youth, that BBI was on half-time and that once Raila forms the government after August, it will be revived and a position created to accommodate Uhuru Kenyatta.

As recent as February 10, 2022, Deputy President Ruto claimed rather boldly that his real competitor was hiding behind the Orange Democratic Party (ODM) leader. Raila is the leader of ODM and the apparent insinuation is President Uhuru is shadowing Raila, as he prepares to take on Ruto on August 9. But could this be true?