The attainment of independence in 1963 and the crossing to the Government side by the KADU leaders some months before Kenya became a Republic on 12th December 1964 brought about a struggle for leadership succession, namely the struggle for the number two position.
Suffice it to mention, the Kenyan parliament was now divided into two camps, mainly the radicals led by Oginga Odinga (the then Vice President) and B. Kaggia, and moderates led by T. Mboya and supported by President Kenyatta.
Odinga and Mboya soon tarred each other with ideological brushes: Mboya was labeled pro-western and Odinga pro-eastern, an American stooge versus a Soviet agent. Mboya by then was the chairman of the International Confederation of Trade Unions (IFCTU) area Committee for Eastern, Central and Southern Africa and a member of its Executive Council in Brussels.
His Kenya Trade Union, the Kenya Federation of Labour, both appealed and used IFCTU financial aid to defeat its opponents. When appealing for such funds it was found politic to make use of Cold War (ideological war between Capitalist West and the Communist East) terminology and to argue that they were needed to defeat Communism.
The threat from Odinga was seen as being closely related to the Soviet Union where there were an unknown number of Kenyan students who had been sent before independence for military training. Events on April 8 1965 brought these fears into the open. At 3.00am, sixty troops and police arrived at Odinga’s vice presidential office and removed a number of boxes and took them to the armoury.
While the boxes almost certainly contained arms, it is not clear whether they were in the Vice president’s office by consent or secretly – although Odinga maintained that even Kenyatta himself knew of the arms. On 12 April 1965, the President made his first public intervention in the subversion scare when, after a strong personal attack on Kaggia, he warned those who planned subversion that they would not succeed. Other incidents were soon to follow.
On 14 April, 1965 the then Minister for Internal Security and Defence, Dr. Njoroge Mungai, told a press conference of a ‘small consignment’ of arms’ which was a gift from the Soviet Union and was expected to arrive very soon at Mombasa. The arms were to be used to modernize the Kenyan army and a few Russians were supposed to come to show how to assemble them. However, he added, ‘the Russians are not going to train our army.’
The ship carrying the arms arrived on 24 April 1965. On 28 April she began to unload a quantity of arms including armoured troop carriers and T-34 tanks. The President then summoned the Soviet Union Ambassador for an audience and no agreement was reached over the arms.
About ten minutes after the Ambassador left, Kenyatta announced that his government had decided to reject the arms on the grounds that they were all old and second hand. But, the reason could be that the arms were from a Communist country and would require some military training.
This might have allowed for the infiltration of Communist elements in the army. After May 1965 Odinga’s star began to wane appreciably. Mboya sought first to restrict him to the ideological front. As a minister for Economic Planning and Development he (Mboya), on 4 May 1965, introduced the Sessional Paper Number 10 on African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya.
This paper, which was to form the basis of the government’s economic and social policy, was essentially a formulation of capitalism. The radicals were unhappy with the document but it was stated in a way that it had the approval of the President.
After all the Communist inroads had been blocked and Odinga and his supporters extremely isolated, he (Odinga) in June 1965, made a public attack on Mboya and Ronald Ngala, accusing them of working for the British and went further to state that the American and British diplomats often tried to influence the President.
This implied attack on President Kenyatta proved counter-productive, and three days later, it was announced that Odinga had been dropped as head of the Kenyan delegation to the forth coming Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meeting in London. In July he was removed as Vice-chairman of the KANU Parliamentary group. A number of other snubs indicating Odinga’s fall from grace followed, culminating in the party conference at Limuru on 12 and 13 March 1966.
The conference adopted a new constitution abolishing Odinga’s post of National Vice-president and created eight provincial Vice- presidents directly responsible to the president. At the closing session, the President warned those whom he called ‘puppets without brains’ and exclaimed ‘let them go on and form a new party.
They should be told that we know their paymasters and we are picking them one by one.’ After the conference meeting, four Communist diplomats and two journalists were expelled from the country at twenty-four hours’ notice and no reasons were given. The radicals took the president’s advice, and a month later Odinga resigned from both the government and KANU and with a small band of followers crossed the floor to form the Kenya Peoples Union (KPU).
Political Struggles in Kenya
Odinga’s resignation on 14 April 1966 led directly to the re-establishment of a parliamentary opposition and with it a two-party system was restored. The new opposition party (KPU) members of parliament were allowed in the House for only one day.
On the same day that the defectors took their seats on the opposition benches, the government introduced a new constitutional amendment as a result of which they were forced to resign and seek a re-election. The little general elections followed in June 1967.
This general election, apart from reflecting personal and ideological differences, was also characterized by ethnic considerations. The choice before the voters was thus not only between Kenyatta and Odinga, but also in part between Kikuyu and Luo. Kenyatta came from the Kikuyu ethnic group and Odinga the Luo ethnic group.
The attitude assumed by Kenyatta and the KANU power elite was that of trying to alienate whoever in any way associated with KPU. The case of Kaggia was typical.
Kenyatta openly campaigned against Kaggia, portraying him as a worthless person, unable to avail himself of the opportunities offered by independence for self-improvement and a renegade who had deserted his own people’s party to join the Luos.
To Kenyatta KPU was a Luo party and to this effect, Kaggia was defeated in the elections. Mention should also be made that after the elections, KPU won nine parliamentary seats, six of the nine seats from central Nyanza, two from Machakos and one from Busia.
The removal of Odinga from the fold left the powerful clique around Kenyatta and Kenyatta himself with one more and extremely painful thorn in the flesh, namely Tom Mboya, the youthful Secretary-General of KANU and the Minister for Economic Planning who was the darling of the establishment forces both at home and in the West, and was thus regarded by such forces and other observers as their favourite successor to Kenyatta.
The argument goes that once Mboya had performed his most important function, namely to help Kenyatta and his henchmen to liquidate Odinga politically, he (Mboya) had outlived his usefulness and must himself be liquidated. Yet before he was assassinated in a Nairobi street in July 1969, he was to perform one more function. Once again acting to enhance his own chances, he was instrumental in making it possible for Odinga’s KPU to fight the 1967 Little General Election.
In the wake of Mboya’s murder, Kenya was gripped by a political crisis for a full half year, a crisis which was, to a large extent, brought on the Kenyatta’s inner circle by itself. It arose out of the myth of tribalism. We say the myth because, although the Kenyatta’s inner circle and its protégés made daily condemnations of tribalism in allocation of top jobs in the public service a close analysis reveals that, in fact, tribalism was far from being the main culprit.
If top jobs in the banks, in the ministry and in industries appeared to go to members of the Kikuyu tribe this was precisely what it was. If Kikuyus seemed to be landing most of the jobs in all sectors this was merely because they were members of the Kenyatta Family or their protégés – their being Kikuyu was quite incidental to it.
It was nepotism rather than tribalism, and the Kikuyu suffered from it as much as, even more than, the Luo, who claimed that the system was aimed against them as a tribe. For although the Family condemned tribalism, it is reported that they were not interested in the myth of tribalism being totally exploded.
They wished actively to use the belief created long ago by colonialism that the Luos were the Kikuyus principal enemies. While the colonialists fostered this tribal rift in the interests of divide and rule, the Family is reported to have adopted it in order to deflect popular attention from their own political and economic wrong-doings from which the ordinary Kikuyu suffered as much as, if not more than, anybody else.
Although the rivalry between Mboya and Odinga had had the effect of dividing the Luo community politically into two roughly equal parts – on the one hand, South Nyanza and on the other the then Central Nyanza – the day Mboya was murdered the myth of tribalism caused the entire Luo community to unite solidly behind Odinga, for they believed that the murderers of Mboya were enemies of the entire tribe.
It was an eventuality which those who had planned Mboya’s murder had perhaps not foreseen, for it threatened to make Odinga the leader of a whole Kenya united against the ‘Kikuyu’ in protest against what they claimed to be a Kikuyu-orchestrated murder of Mboya.
This threatened resurgence of Odinga had to be dealt with, especially since parliamentary General Elections were due later that year. And two months after Mboya’s assassination, the country was shocked by reports that minibuses and lorries marked ‘KANU PRIVATE’ were making nocturnal trips every day towards Gatundu, the home ground of Kenyatta.
These gruesome reports were followed by similarly frightening ones that the people of Central Province (the Kikuyu) were taking an oath of loyalty to the House of Mumbi. These two reports were immediately connected with one another. The vehicles were reported to be transporting Kikuyu tribesmen and women to places in Gatundu to partake of the oath, which consisted in part of drinking blood.
What disturbed many into condemning it as atavistic was that although many Kikuyus resisted the practice, they were coerced into drinking blood of facing execution. These activities led to a series of protests from leaders in all parts of Kenya, not just because people were taking the law into their hands, but, much more importantly, because they threatened to divide the country right down the middle.
Typical of the protests was that of Martin Shikuku, the then chief whip in parliament, who in September told the House that he had concrete evidence of beatings, coercion and other forms of brutality to force people into submitting to oath-taking.
During this time, there was fear that the Presidency might slip out of the hands of certain sons of Mumbi, namely the Family. There was much talk at that time that the anti-Kikuyu emotions that gripped all the other Kenyans following the murder of Mboya might be, made capital of by Odinga and the KPU might carry the victory at the polls. If that was the case then Odinga and his party must clearly be dealt with in some way or another, and very soon.
Sometime in September it was arranged that President Kenyatta would visit Nyanza and Western provinces the following month, a visit which was to prove catastrophic, but one which provided a welcome opportunity for dealing with Odinga. On October 25, upon arrival at Kisumu, the President was booed by a few people as he entered the Russian built Hospital where he was to address a public rally.
Stones were thrown at the direction of the President and the Presidential bodyguards opened fire on the spot, killing close to 20 people and wounding about 100 others. The government used the Kisumu tragedy as the occasion to ban KPU saying the party had organized the booing and hecklings and to lock up most of its leaders. The 1969 General Elections were thus a walkover for KANU.
References
Gertzel, C. The Politics of Independent Kenya 1963-8. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1970.
Karimi, J. and P. Ochieng’. The Kenyatta Succession. Nairobi: Transafrica, 1980.
Stevens, C. The Soviet Union and Black Africa. London: The MacMillan Press, 1976.
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