Across the Sahel, young people are restless. So are soldiers. The region is in the grip of an unprecedented wave of coups d’état that have followed each other within a short period of time: within a year or so, five coups d’état have successively rocked Mali, Chad, Guinea, and Burkina Faso in widespread unrest that risks destabilizing the entire region again.

Since the mid-1990s, coups had become exceptional events that occurred mainly during moments of perceived chaos, with the aim to disrupt the normal constitutional dispensation in order to restore order. Increasingly however, they occur as a form of political intervention designed to correct regular politics that has fallen into a permanent state of crisis and repression.

This moment is a historical shift but also a harbinger of an uncharted future. Not only are the recent coups not contested, but they are also seen as an opening into a new politics of liberation. They could signal a return to a long period of tumult, equally they could also be an opening for a different kind of politics.

The ongoing instability lays bare the accumulated effects of decades of aggressive neoliberal reforms that have eroded the social fabric, the growing significance of a politicized, young generation of Africans that do not share the same political culture as their elders, and the massive failure of the war against terror in the Sahel that has produced neither security nor stability. It also points to some of the ways in which fierce geopolitical battles are likely to wreak havoc in the African continent as Western hegemonic influences declines in the region.

In this long-read for roape.net, I want to argue that the present dilemma has to be seen as an inflection point in both the democratization and decolonization process in West Africa and Africa more generally.

A democratic impasse

One cannot fully make sense of the recent coups d’état in Africa without a full understanding of concomitant popular uprisings that have been occurring on a regular albeit sporadic manner in different parts of the continent. The common impulse, from Mali to Sudan, from Guinea to Burkina Faso is a desire for change, meaningful change.

The much celebrated constitutional order has been discredited in a context where  constitutions are routinely violated, regulating mechanisms are often neutralized, and incumbent presidents consistently violate term-limits. For instance, Cote d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Ouattara and Guinea’s Alpha Condé both violated constitutionally locked term-limits to run for presidential elections. As the Nigerian writer Jibrin Ibrahim demonstrates, under the current nominal democracy, elected Presidents have also perpetrated coups of an electoral or constitutional nature. In Tunisia, the government of President Kaïs Saïed has taken a de facto authoritarian turn in July 2021. Through rule by decree, Saïed has tempered the constitutional and judicial structure and therefore neutralized any meaningful checks and balance.

In the 1990s, the demand for democratic opening was externally driven by development aid partners and Bretton Woods and other multilateral agencies. The democratic norm was being push through as African states were also being pressured to cut public expenditure in education, health and other social services. Yet the ongoing demand for democracy is internal in kind, it is a popular demand for a different kind of politics and a different kind of democratic participation and not a ‘performance’ on the basis of the Mo Ibrahim index or similar instruments.

Yet, overwhelming media attention of the military government’s standoff with the ‘international community’ muddies an understanding of very urgent crises that will not be resolved by another round of elections. As long as fundamental problems of economic sovereignty, of the state’s capacity to raise financial resources internally, to provide security and social services to its population are unresolved, rushing to elections will merely enable a change of guards to run the same derelict institutions. The democratic struggle is first and foremost a struggle for a political model that is responsive to people’s demands for basic public goods.

Popular uprisings are also an indictment of the failure of formal civil societies organizations that have either become too institutionalized if they are not entirely coopted by governments. Their ability to fully perform their responsibility as safeguards of people’s rights against state excesses has been hampered by an attachment to the orthodoxy of electoral liberalism. A major shortcoming has been its inability to harness into a cogent political project strident current popular demands for an alternative political order. The greatest insecurity that plagues Sahelian communities is linked to food security, and to limited human development.

It is clear to many careful observers of West African politics that something fundamentally different has been simmering over the past few years. The disconnect between governments and people has become more pronounced in the prolonged context of insecurity since 2012. The coronavirus pandemic has furthermore eroded public trust in governments’ ability to deliver public goods or foster greater democratic opening.

There is a question that lingers in everybody’s mind: has the specter of coups and countercoups returned to African politics? More specifically, is West Africa about to fall back into a vicious pattern of coups and countercoups without any seeming logic or order? The fear of a domino effect is real, and one cannot rule out the possibility of another elected government falling under another coup.

Linking coups and popular protests

The five most recent coups in Africa have been directly or indirectly prompted by popular protests of insurgent magnitude. This is significant.

Between April-August 2020, massive crowds gathered in Bamako and in major Malian cities to denounce endemic misrule, a series of corruption scandals involving specifically the purchase of military equipment amid insecurity across the country. The government of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita had also been marred by the accusation of massive fraud in the legislative elections of March 2020. Mali’s security situation had deteriorated drastically since 2015. The country fell into a state of chronic instability with burgeoning violence coming not only from jihadist forces, but also from government-backed militias and self-defense groups. Following months-long popular mobilization led by the M5 RFP coalition – the 5 June Mouvement and the Rally of Patriotic Forces – crowds literally escorted the military to the presidential palace. These are the circumstances that saw the takeover of the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) military council.

In Burkina Faso, days of uninterrupted public protest preceded the putsch last year. On 14 November, 2021, the country experienced the most brutal attack on security forces. Fifty-three gendarmes were killed in Inata. The public later learned with dismay that the exhausted gendarmes had been without food and supplies for days and could not withstand the ambush. Inata eventually sealed the fate of the president Roch Kaboré. This wasn’t the first recent coup in Burkina Faso. In 2014, months-long street protests culminated into the resignation of 27 year-reigning Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré fled to Cote d’Ivoire where the Ouattara government offered a safe haven against demands for his extradition to Burkina Faso to face justice in the trial on the murder of Thomas Sankara. The military transition that ensued enabled the organization of relatively free elections for the first time in post-independence Burkina Faso.

Although every coup is different and responds to specific circumstances, the same causes can be said to have produced similar effects in both Burkina and Mali. Further, there are embedded historical inequities within armies themselves that mirror existing and widespread social inequities. Coups today may no longer be anchored in revolutionary nationalist or Pan-Africanist politics but some of them, like in Burkina Faso, articulate certain popular demands for social justice and democratic renewal. In the speeches of Paul-Henri Damiba – the interim president and coup leader –  Sankara stands as an avatar of an aborted military-driven radical experiment. Army cadets are also politicized in a way that engraves the role of the military in ongoing struggles to reimagine social contracts across Africa. The fact that officers are fighting an internal battle that is also about repositioning a professional military hints at an enduring backdrop to recurrent coups.

It is important to note that public ‘demand’ for the disciplining authority of the military has often been a trojan horse that allows the military to ‘rise up to their responsibility’ as a now familiar, almost scripted ritual announcement that every new coup makes it a point to deliver.

In both Burkina Faso and Mali, transition military governments have initiated country-wide consultations (‘assises nationales’) to collect a wide-range of views from political formations and civil society on constitutional reform. To what extent the military’s move to act democratic-like is likely to lead to substantive change is a different question altogether. If the strategy is quite unprecedented for a military government, the reason for the shift is to be found in the growing importance of struggle on the ground – from popular forces from below.

In toppling civilian governments and ‘installing’ the military, protestors often aim to trigger a speedy change outside of the ballot box. Needless to say, this also heralds an uncertain future that gives no guarantee of success. Military coups are rarely transformative. Further, the military itself is a institution in its own terms that has its own logic of power accumulation. Obviously, if the military was the solution, neither Burkina Faso nor Mali would have gone through multiple coups. Mali has experienced five coups since independence while Burkina holds a record of  seven coups with a total of 47-years ruled under various military governments. At any rate, the gains of popular movements hang on a fragile thread that is constantly threated by the encroaching logic of external internal intervention especially in countries whose natural resources are highly coveted.

In 2019, Algerian and Sudanese decades-long regimes fell through popular pressure. Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Omar al-Bashir were deposed by public pressure. In contrast to Mali and Burkina Faso, Sudan has a robust, deep-rooted tradition of political activism led by well-organized leftist movements, especially student movements. Not only have the Sudanese “resistance committees” been able to force concessions from the military, they proactively forged ahead with a political charter for transition presented on 27 February, 2022. The Charter for the Establishment of the People’s Authority seeks to reverse decades-long military-led governance and restricted civic participation.

Two dilemmas are apparent in the trends mentioned above. On the one hand, it is nearly impossible to assess the extent to which popular protests express representative, legitimate, and uncoerced grievances. On another, to read military coups from a liberal institutional framework which demarcates the ‘civilian’ and the ‘military’ as distinct spheres of action has time and again proven reductive.  Such thinking does not allow us to consider solutions outside of injunctions to restore the normal ‘constitutional order’. Neither does it take into account the specificity of the formation of African military systems within a colonial context and their development in postcolonial states.

Contested regional leadership

The default reaction of the West African bloc ECOWAS and the African Union (AU) to the recent coups has been to distribute sanctions on account of ‘norms’ uncritically enforced in a bureaucratic and uncreative approach. The coup policy of both the African Union’s Lomé Declaration of 1999 and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ADC) is systematic sanctions against unconstitutional changes of government even when these are the outcome of compelling popular protests. However, the continental body has neither been consistent nor impartial in its approach. In Chad for instance, the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) determined that the country was under threat of destabilization from Libya and did not therefore enforce sanctions against the Transitional Military Council. Although the dislocation of Libya has had tremendous consequences in the subsequent destabilization of the Sahel, more specifically Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, the AU security assessment is all the more surprising as Chad has been relatively unaffected by the Libyan civil war. However, Chad remains France and the West’s staunchest ally in the Sahel in the fight against terrorism. For many observers, the AU buried its legitimacy in Chad by endorsing both a military coup and a dynastic takeover.

The AU is not the only discredited regional institution. ECOWAS has long been seen as a club of the malleable who speak with one tutored voice. Never before has ECOWAS been so disconnected from its populations. Having turned the other way over a series of constitutional coups which paved the way for military coups for instance in Guinea, ECOWAS has emerged as a discredited entity.

According to the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), the West African bloc violated its own statutory rules in imposing sanctions that fall outside of its normative instruments, most specifically the 2001 ECOWAS Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance. Besides, the region’s economies are already badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic and sanctions imposed on Mali have consequences for other ECOWAS members. For instance, Mali accounts for 20% of Senegal’s trade volume; most export goods destined to Mali transit through the port in Dakar.

Waning Western tutelage

One could almost speak of an anachronism between on the one hand the perception of post-colonial stagnation in which the Sahelian region is believed to be steeped and the way in which ‘partnership’ continues to be discussed as the framework of engagement that structures the Sahel’s relations with the former colonial power France. France specifically appears like a stubborn guest that stays on when the party is over.

At the request of the government of Mali fearful that Jihadists were advancing towards Bamako, France launched Operation Serval which led a swift ‘victory’ in early 2013. The succeeding Operation Barkhane – a 5000 strong force that constitutes the backbone of French counter-terrorist intervention in the Sahel, over the years fell into a predictable pattern. In other words, it became locked into its own narrow logic, merely responding to French understanding of its strategic security interests in the Sahel. Despite France announcing a drawdown of Barkhane, as a result of intense pressure in Mali itself, it categorically opposed Mali’s seeking support from other governments to help it restore stability across the country.

The government of Assimi Goïta  – who has been serving as interim president since May last year – has always shown suspicion regarding French ambivalence towards Tuareg’s desire of autonomy. After all, the French army command enforced a de-facto partition of Mali by preventing the national army from access to the Tuareg rebellion stronghold in Kidal and used its hegemony as leverage against the Bamako government. There is another reason for the French to seek to institute a buffer zone in Northern Mali. Kidal is about 300 km from Arlit where French giant ORAN (former AREVA) exploits uranium yellowcake. There are also important uranium reserves to the south of Arlit in addition to strategic minerals, arable land and water. The maintenance of military forces in Northern Mali therefore becomes the condition for continuing to supply its nuclear plants.

Furthermore, the Taoudeni Basin – from Mauritania to Algeria and north Mali – is a much-coveted oil basin as the world moves towards a period of depletion of oil resources. Mali itself has large limestone, salt and gold deposits in addition to oil, iron ore and bauxite minerals that are largely unexploited. Given all this, France puts tremendous pressure on WAEMU (West African Economic and Monetary Union) leaders to apply sanctions on Mali. Further, taking advantage of the rotating presidency of the EU, the French President has been lobbying other EU members for support. On 19 January  this year, at his inaugural speech as rotating President, Emmanuel Macron declared in no uncertain terms: “It is in Africa that global upheaval is partially being played out, and a part of the future of this [European] continent and its youth […] and our future”.

France is neither ready nor willing to deal with its former African colonies on equal footing. For a long time, it has relied upon clientelist relations to ensure sustained access to African minerals for an unfair price. The maintenance of compliant regimes was always the condition for unimpeded access and control.

The ongoing geopolitical struggle with Russia in fact comes down to this: the argument about delayed elections and democratic governance in reality masks strategic and security interests that France is keen to protect at any cost. Declining western hegemony in the region goes hand to hand with intensified competition for access and control over Africa’s mineral and natural resources. Whereas the security crisis is real across Mali and the Sahel, the crisis that emerged out of disagreement over the presence of French troops and so-called Russian mercenaries has been engineered. Despite much noise about famed Wagner Group, there is little factual information about its presence or operations in Mali. Even so, there is nothing unusual about states using mercenary units for ‘special operations’. One recalls that France itself developed the Foreign Legion – a traditional pathway for citizenship for individual adventurers hired to serve unorthodox French operations around the world, in Africa in particular.

The ongoing stand-off between the West and Russia over the occupation of Ukraine throws into stark relief the importance of Russia’s growing presence in Africa. Russia supplies weapons and military equipment to 30 African countries. Russia is said to be the largest supplier of weapons to Africa of the past few years.

It would be a mistake to see in the thousands of young Africans occupying the streets of Bamako, Kayes and Ouahigouya or blocking French military convoys anarchic crowds that are neither rooted in a solid political culture nor hold a clear vision of what they are yearning for. It would equally be a mistake to see in the popular protests against French military presence in the Sahel as some kind of reactionary resentment of the subaltern or a revanchist postcolonial fury. Underlying the protesters’ outburst is a widespread pursuit of a sovereignty most imagine to have been lacking in their countries since the time of independence. Young people’s demand for ‘meaningful sovereignty’ is explicitly framed against a postcolonial condition that maintains their countries under neocolonial control. Theirs is a struggle for a second independence.

A foundering war

The Sahel was poised to become the new cauldron of the war on terrorism following the France and NATO-led armed intervention in Libya in 2011 and the latter’s subsequent disintegration. The securitarian logic pursued by Sahelian states and intervention forces had two predictable consequences. Firstly, as armed groups and militias proliferated in response to perceived arbitrary injustice in relation to both the state and jihadist groups, the state could label any peripheral or dissenting group ‘terrorist’ and thus give itself license to kill legitimately. Secondly, the fabric of state-society relations has deteriorated in the process as the fight against terrorism came to trump all other economic and social objectives.

Counterterrorist policies have in the main reinforced the repressive capacities of Sahelian states. As many a report have shown, more civilians have died in the hands of Sahelian states and Operation Barkhane than they have under terrorist violence. Yet, the overwhelming majority of so-called militants in the various insurgent groups operating in the Sahel are Malians and Burkinabè nationals from villages and communities known to their neighbors. They need to be engaged through dialogue and concertation.

Dwindling resources under the accelerating effects of climate change have led to deteriorating standards of living and compounded conflicts amongst communities over access to scarce resources. The Sahel faces frequent droughts and food shortages. Embattled and impoverished populations are leaving villages and those that can afford it have fled further afield into neighboring countries if they are not risking their lives in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. Further, at a time when Sahelian states have also become the enforcers of EU border policies, some youth are treated like trespassers and criminals in their own states.

In their unqualified commitment to the fight against ‘terrorism’, it would seem that Sahelian countries have delivered more insecurity than they have delivered jobs and economic security for their populations. Ordinary people are having a hard time understanding why after almost 10 years of intervention, a 13000 soldiers strong UN mission, a 5000 strong Barkhane force, including French-led European Takuba Task Force, and G5Sahel, the security situation has deteriorated rather than it has improved. The G5Sahel is a 2017 French initiative to coordinate the fight against Jihadist among five Sahelian countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. It has been a dismal failure. A UN report explains the joint operation’s slow progress and the absence of tangible security gains as the result of a narrow military outlook, divergent priorities amongst concerned countries and a fraught relation with civilians.

If Afghanistan is anything to go by, military intervention campaigns are rarely transformative enterprises.

Interventions have become ritualized forms of action in which external actors use the cover of ‘peace’ ‘security’ and ‘order’ to justify intervention by itself. It produces discursive tropes that validate militarization as a new-age normative crusade of human rights, democratization and liberation of economic activity. Since the 1990s, states have been reduced to enforcers of Bretton Woods injunctions to liberalize if they are not busy enforcing ‘partner countries’ security policies.

People may not understand the intricacy of decision-making processes that have led to the present fiasco, but they perceive the relative inefficiency of the billions of dollars that have been spent on the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), the Barkhane Operation – which cost around 1 billion euros per year – and other international forces while Sahelian armies remain underfunded, underequipped, lacking the technological resources to collect reliable intelligence. One recalls that the March 2012 coup and that of August 2020 were both prompted by widespread public dissatisfaction with the blatant inefficacy of the Malian army fighting the Tuareg rebels and Jihadists. The Malian army was then ill-equipped -and they still are – to fight the jihadists. The public perceives that something is fundamentally wrong. What is peacekeeping in a country that is in active conflict? Failing to impose peace, what is MINUSMA exactly doing in Mali?

A historical shift?

We may just be at the cusp of a revolution of a new kind, one that first and foremost opposes different generations whose experience of, and outlook over the postcolonial present barely overlap. The generational shift affects both the political and the military elites.

There is in fact more to the recent coups in Mali and Burkina Faso than meet the eye. It would be absurd to pose the problem in terms of a choice to be made between military regimes vs. liberal democracy. The coups themselves are not the ultimate objective. The military is called upon to break a deadlock, to upend the status quo as neutral arbiters. Some of the protestors in Burkina Faso made that much clear in stating their determination to occupy the streets again should the military government fail to deliver on promises. However, coups potentially provide an opening for a necessary debate on a serious social project, something that has not been a preoccupation of previous governments since the time of the revolutionary Thomas Sankara.

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This article was first published by ROAPE.

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.”