How Vice-President Dr Josephat Karanja was humbled

In March 1994, I was assigned to cover the burial of Dr Josephat Karanja at Ruiru, off the Thika Super Highway. Our driver delayed in picking us up back to the office at the end of the ceremony and our photographer and I found ourselves alone in the compound after everybody else, including Dr Karanja’s immediate family, had left.

In the meantime, I preoccupied myself with watching the grave of the departed man. I was struck by the irony of life, rather death, for that matter.

Only a few minutes ago, the place had been teeming with a mass of humanity who had come to bury Dr Karanja. But now the place was deserted.

His lifeless body lay alone six feet under a heap of soil, his only company a wooden cross with the inscription: “Dr Josephat Karanja: 1931-1994”. It occurred to me that we are all passers-by in this world. Then we go. Don’t ask me where.

RETURNED FAVOUR

Here is the story of Dr Karanja. His appointment to the job was a typical President Moi game of shuffling ethnic cards. He had sacked a Vice-President from Mount Kenya region, Mr Mwai Kibaki.

So he’d to replace him with another from the same region. But there was also a personal angle to it. Mr Moi was returning a favour extended to him by Dr Karanja years earlier when the latter was Kenya’s High Commissioner to Britain.

It was the time when Mr Moi was Vice-President and some people close to President Jomo Kenyatta were determined that Mr Moi must not rise to the high office. Subsequently, they had quietly instructed Kenyan envoys abroad to mistreat Mr Moi whenever he was in the foreign capitals they served.

Dr Karanja defied them and ensured Mr Moi received all courtesies befitting a VP whenever he was in London. Dr Karanja would pay a price for it when the leader of the anti-Moi camp, Dr Njoroge Mungai, was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs. His first self-assignment was to have Dr Karanja recalled home to be replaced by his own brother, Mr Ng’ethe Njoroge, at the Court of Saint James. Not to worry, Dr Karanja’s friends in high places got him a new job as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nairobi.

PERSONAL FAVOURS

Personal favours aside, Dr Karanja was just the kind of man President Moi would have wished to be his deputy, at least at the time of his appointment.

For 10 years, Mr Moi had a vice-president he never liked but merely tolerated the same way discordant couples live with one another just for convenience, not love, whatever love is.

Not that there was anything personal between Mr Moi and his deputy. It is just that they were temperamentally and by background worlds apart. Mr Franklin Bett, who served as Comptroller/Controller of Moi State House, and later as Cabinet minister in the Kibaki government, once told me about the difference between the two men. Mr Moi is a political animal with inbuilt fighter instincts, Mr Bett told me.

On the other hand, Mr Kibaki is a bureaucrat who accidentally found himself in politics. “One is a born politician. The other was a man in politics”, Mr Bett said as he elaborated: “If you went to Mr Moi with complicated issues like policy, economy and such, he would listen with bored yawns. But wait until you spill some political gossip and the man will sit up and urge you to keep talking forever.”

What of Mr Kibaki? Mr Bett told me that talking politics with him got him bored very fast. “If you insisted, he either quietly walked out on you, very likely telling himself that you were mavi ya kuku (chicken droppings).”  Nyayo juu! What is that?

AUTHORITARIAN RULE

But it is former cabinet minister  Dr Munyua Waiyaki who gave me a more graphic description of why Mr Moi was very much at home with Dr Karanja but never with Mr Kibaki.

He told me Dr Karanja was a “sycophant more than willing to bow to the king”. To the contrary, he told me, Mr Kibaki thought sycophancy was “beneath his dignity”. He told me that Mr Kibaki was the only person who refused to pin on his coat lapel the Kanu badge, which was mandatory at the height of Mr Moi’s one-party authoritarian rule.

Dr Waiyaki told me that Mr Kibaki once told him that he would rather get sacked from his job as Moi’s deputy but “never pin a badge with the portrait of another man on his lapel”. To the contrary, Dr Waiyaki told me, Dr Karanja “was the type that jumped without asking how high as long as it is the king who had said jump.”

Dr Waiyaki had another gem that illustrates how Mr Moi and Mr Kibaki had different ways of looking at things.

ENTER DR KARANJA

When Mr Moi became President, he said he would rule following “Nyayo” (footsteps) of his predecessor President Kenyatta. Later Mr Moi changed to say “Nyayo” was a “philosophy” and hired some university dons to do a book to describe the said philosophy.

Dr Waiyaki recalled sitting next to Mr Kibaki in a plane returning home from a trip abroad and the whispering in his ear: “Daktari, tell me, first we were told this “Nyayo” thing is footsteps of a dead man. Now we hear it is a philosophy. So which part of it is the footsteps and which one is the philosophy?”

Now you can see why sacking Mr Kibaki was good riddance for Mr Moi. Dr Karanja was just what the doctor had prescribed for him. He was more royal than the king, greater Catholic than the Pope. Using his eloquence and mastery of English, the latter had choice words for whoever criticised any misbehaviour by the Big Man.

When the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) and the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) talked against a decision to remove security of tenure of High Court Judges, Dr Karanja dismissed the two organisations as “anachronistic” and “irritating irrelevance”.  Later he told a church congregation that after Jesus Christ, he only “believed in His Excellency the President.”

KNEEL BEFORE ME

Dr Waiyaki told me that the strange sycophancy very likely put blinkers in Dr Karanja’s eyes and made him believe he was, in reality, the second after the boss. So he got drank with power he never had.

***

Early in 1989, President Moi was on a trip to the French capital Paris. Lying to himself he was the acting President in the absence of the Big Man, one morning Dr Karanja summoned to his office a highly placed security man and asked for a brief on the security situation in the country.

Those were the kind of things that got Mr Moi to hit the roof. On his return two days later, the President said at the JKIA: “There are some people who think Moi is not in charge whenever I am not in the country. They are  mistaken. Moi is the President whether inside or outside the country!” The die was cast. Dr Karanja’s goose was cooked to be feasted on in a matter of weeks.

MYSTERIOUS MECHANIC

Out of the blue, a curious specimen emerged in the country’s political theatre. In came a short man with a long tongue called Simeon Kuria Kanyingi. He said he was a mechanic and worked as deputy director of motor vehicle inspection.

He said there was one man he didn’t name who had been moving around demanding that people “kneel-before-him” because he was some sort of a president. By the way, in those days politicians would kneel down when consulting His Excellency at public rallies!

BOMBSHELL

After Mr Kanyingi dropped his bombshell, a stampede ensued as politicians outdid one another in condemning the yet un-named “kneel-before-me” politician. Then in April 1989, Embakasi MP David Mwenje, the only man who put the fear of God in the man called Ferdinand Waititu Baba Yao, stated in Parliament that the “kneel-before-me” politician was actually Vice-President Dr Karanja.

I vividly remember watching Dr Karanja on television seated alone at the far end of the front bench as MPs competed to condemn and shame him.

When given a chance to reply, he summarised it as a “sad day when common decency had been thrown out of the window”. Then he walked out a lonely, abandoned man to write his resignation letter. I was to remember that day again when I stood next to his grave that chilly afternoon in March 1994.

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