Power jigsaw: How an invisible government operated in Moi era

Getting to interview former head of civil service and secretary to the cabinet Prof Philip Mbithi is an exercise in patience. It also helps if you are religious, more so of the weird hue.

That is what I discovered when I went to interview him at his Konza Ranch on the Nairobi-Mombasa highway years ago, in the company of Machakos Nation Correspondent Bob Odalo (God rest his soul in eternal peace).

On knocking at his door, the professor personally ushered us in without talking or shaking our hands. Instead he gestured us to follow him to his study room where he quickly called in his wife.

“Finally here they are!” he told his spouse looking at us in the eyes: “These are the two visitors I told you I was shown in the dream. Now that they have arrived, we must pray for them.” The professor said a lengthy prayer which he concluded with incantations in strange tongues. “Now I can shake hands with you”, he said as he headed to our direction. I interpreted the prayer was meant to cast away any evil spirits my colleague and I could have taken to his house. The ritual didn’t end there.

PROPHET OF GOD

The one-time University of Nairobi vice-chancellor, now a self-declared prophet of God, grabbed his box-guitar and belted for us two self-composed hymns.

The music was largely out of key, and the words incomprehensible. Then followed a lengthy sermon, quoting from a huge file with hand-written notes on his “prophecies”.

I was almost giving up on the  prospect of interviewing him, when he abruptly ended his monologue and said: “Now I am done with you. I know you’ll go and write Prof Mbithi has gone mad again.

That is your problem. I have done my part. Now ask your questions.”

***

I thanked him for his prayers and told him my colleague and I would henceforth try to keep to the narrow and the straight. Then I turned to the business that had taken me to his home.

“Professor, how did you end up in the Moi government; how was it being the topmost civil servant, and how did it end?”

He was the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Nairobi when President Moi called him one morning in the late 1980s and told him he wanted to appoint him the Head of the Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet with immediate effect.

NO OBJECTION

“Of course, I had no objection”, Prof Mbithi recalled. “In any case, the Head of State wasn’t calling to seek my permission but to inform me.”

The only few questions the professor asked were on what was expected of him; whom he would be reporting to, and how much latitude he had in his new job.

“You will be directly answerable to me”, the President told him in a tone of finality. “You’re not to receive orders from anybody else except myself.

“I will be telling all Cabinet ministers in your presence that henceforth they discuss all government matters with you at Harambee House. It will be them to come to your office, not the other way.”

The President also told Prof Mbithi that he wanted him to concentrate on his job and not entertain politicians and “their little gossips”.

“Let them know you’re a professional civil servant not a politician”, the President told him.

GOOD HONEY-MOON

Prof Mbithi told me he had a good honey-moon. The President gave him as much room to know and feel he was the boss. But it was all a show, he would discover.

The first sign that something was rotten in Denmark came when then chairman of the Kenya Co-operative Creameries (KCC), Mark Too, went to see Prof Mbithi with a request that the government bails out the milk-processing company, which had been privatised after it had been looted dry when it was a State corporation.

Prof Mbithi told Mark Too that it might be difficult to justify public funding of the KCC now that it was a private company.

However, he directed that KCC liaise with the Agriculture ministry and a Cabinet Paper be written for discussion at that level.

The Cabinet Paper came and the KCC request was unanimously declined by a Cabinet meeting chaired by the President.

But a few days later, Prof Mbithi received a call at about 11 in the night. Only one person called on that phone, at that particular hour.

MARK TOO

“Your Excellency Sir”, Prof Mbithi said when he picked up the phone. “Professor, this isn’t Mzee (the President). It is Mark Too. I am here with Mzee and he is angry that you’re refusing to help KCC against his wishes. He has told me to tell you that you be in your office at 7 in the morning and resolve the issue with your people.”

That night Prof Mbithi didn’t sleep and was in his office by seven in the morning. He found the PS for Treasury and the PS for Agriculture waiting for him with a bail-out proposal for KCC, which he was supposed to approve. He needed not ask who had sent them to him.

***

The next episode came when an unannounced guest in the name of Machakos Kanu branch chairman Mulu Mutisya dropped by his office at Harambee House without appointment.

The professor declined to see him. Later in the day, the President requested Prof Mbithi to be at State House the following morning.

At State House, the professor was kept waiting for an hour only to discover the person the President had been talking to was Mulu Mutisya.

MACHAKOS POLITICIAN

When Prof Mbitihi mentioned to the President that the Machakos politician had been to see him the previous day, but he didn’t meet him as he had come without appointment, the President replied: “Professor, how can you ignore Mzee Mutisya, he is the man who told me to give you the big job you have!”

On yet another bizarre occasion, top officials at the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) were implicated in a scandal where the government had been swindled out of billions in duty evasion.

The President summoned Prof Mbithi, Internal Security PS, and the Director of the CID to State House and demanded immediate arrest and prosecution of the culprits. It was done.

Unknown to Prof Mbithi, the invisible government had a second take on Moi and the President changed his mind. In the middle of the night, an angry President woke up Prof Mbithi: “You people misled me. I want those KPA people released and flown back to Mombasa by tomorrow morning!”

AUDIT QUERIES

Yet on another occasion, a well-wired head of a state corporation defied orders to answer to audit queries by the Auditor-General. Prof Mbithi thought it the height of impunity and said as much in a reprimand letter to the big-headed official. At midnight, the professor received a call from the President demanding to know why he was “harassing my people”. The President ordered the reprimand letter to the parastatal fat-cat withdrawn.

***

On his last day in government, Prof Mbithi got to feel the full weight of the invisible powers that be when, after discussing the expected reshuffle in government with the President in the morning, he tuned his radio at one o’clock to hear his name first in the list, and where he had been demoted to be Kenya’s representative to the EAC headquarters in Arusha. When he called the President on the usual direct line, the phone was answered at some hair salon in Kenyatta Market!

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