Uhuru Kenyatta showed he is a statesman, not a mere politician

From every angle you look, Uhuru Kenyatta made history with aplomb. The Kenyan leader voluntarily walked out of power and stepped lively into precincts where — knowing Europe’s racial arrogance — he might have been arrested.

No matter how fleeting it was — mere hours — the President’s action amounted to abdication (in favour of Deputy President William Ruto).

Yet few onlookers appreciated not only this fact but also its historic nature. For, in recent decades, no head of any African state has relinquished power so voluntarily.

The mere manner of it — President Kenyatta’s trust of political power into other hands even for a moment — should have quashed the idle talk one often hears in Nairobi about insoluble ethnic distrust being characteristic of the ruling confederacy led by Mr Kenyatta (Kikuyu) and Mr Ruto (Kalenjin).

Indeed, the way President Kenyatta carried himself throughout the week was a study in contrast with, for instance, Daniel arap Moi, Mr Kenyatta’s own predecessorial sponsor.

It would never have occurred to President Moi thus to trust any of his political lieutenants with power even for half a second.

Whenever Moi travelled abroad for any length of time, he made no announcement as to whether, in his absence, anybody would be ACTING AS PRESIDENT.

Yet the question of a power vacuum never arose. Apparently, in his absence, Moi left the reins of rule in the hands of non-politicians, probably security agents.

When two political lieutenants, Justice minister Charles Njonjo and Vice-President Josephat Karanja, merely seemed to him to be growing horns — when he saw them as trespassing into his power redoubt — Moi personally planned the perpendicular trajectory of disgrace into which the two proceeded to plunge headlong.

ROWDY MPS

The manner in which young Uhuru Kenyatta carried himself last week and all the way into The Hague also revealed a mind entrenched in the 21st-century.

Debonair, self-confident, sophisticated suave, with it, youthful, he might have charmed even his most dedicated detractors in Kenya’s opposition movement.

It was marred only by the infantile disorder with which Kenya’s MPs conducted themselves in the streets of that Dutch city.

Nobody with an educated and just mind can blame on Uhuru Kenyatta the disgrace with which certain sycophants from Kenya’s permanently inaugust legislative House behaved in Europe.

Such conduct could only deepen the ordinary Caucasian person’s stereotypes about black human beings.

In a generally anti-African ethos with such deep historical roots, only good parliamentary conduct — as opposed to the infantile disorder of many a Sonko Mbuvi — could have contributed to the defence of President Kenyatta at least in the psychology of the man in the street.

But no proud Kenyan will have held any truck with our MPs as they thoughtlessly misbehaved around the homes of an auburn-skinned race which has only recently colonised us and whose upbringing and education has never, in the first place, been geared to respecting black people.

The behaviour in Holland of what might claim to be Kenya’s social cream was appallingly below any standard.

It can only help convince the man in the Dutch street that Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are, indeed, guilty of all the charges facing them in a criminal court based in a European metropolis and chaired by a Caucasian.

The MPs’ unruliness could only harden the Caucasian world’s long-held stereotypes about black Africans.

It could only “confirm” the lawlessness with which our two leaders are charged in a court based in a state which has only recently committed a hundred times greater human rights crimes when Holland colonised large sections of Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas.

But, as I say, our President relinquished power in order to free our state from charges that are purely personal. That is our saving grace. It is what lifts Uhuru Kenyatta from a mere politician to the much higher rung of a statesman.

[email protected]