1990: Kenya’s experience in the mud of local and diplomatic politics

Two of champions of opposition politics in Kenya, Mr Kenneth Matiba (left) and Mr Charles Rubia. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • In the second and final part of our series, 1990: Seeds of Change, we examine the tribulations of lawyers who dared to stand up to the Kanu regime and the betrayal of international politics in their hour of need

On May 3, 1990, two momentous events occurred. Mr Kenneth Matiba and Mr Charles Rubia, both former Cabinet ministers and expellees of the ruling party, Kanu, called for the repeal of Section 2a of the constitution, dissolution of Parliament, and a referendum to decide Kenya’s future. It was Section 2a that guaranteed the ruling party legal monopoly of political power.

On the same day, Mr Smith Hempstone, the American ambassador to Kenya, said there was a strong tide flowing in the United States Congress to concentrate America’s economic assistance on nations that nourished democratic institutions, defended human rights, and practised multiparty politics.

Matiba and Rubia had called a press conference at Nairobi’s Stanley Hotel to make their demand. Hempstone was addressing Rotary Club members. 

Both statements raised the country’s political temperatures to boiling point.

President Moi was quick to brand the two politicians “tribalists and puppets of foreign masters.”

He singled out Matiba in particular as “a dictator for demanding the immediate dissolution of Parliament.” He said Kenya was a sovereign country that could not be dictated to by any other country.

Countrywide, Kanu politicians denounced the pair and Hempstone, accusing them of working together to cause chaos in the country.

Party headquarters released a statement signed by national organising secretary Kalonzo Musyoka, which said “national interests must never be dictated by external forces for Kenya is a sovereign State, a fact which is not negotiable and which cannot be compromised at any cost.”

He went on: “Kenya’s political system and democracy have evolved from Kenya’s own history and can only be perceived and characterised within the totality of the Kenyan context.”

Reacting defensively, the Kanu Murang’a branch said their people were “not ready to go back to the forests to fight another liberation war as they had already achieved what they wanted under Kanu.”

Both Matiba and Rubia were natives of Murang’a.

For his part, Attorney-General Mathew Muli denounced the two as “another misguided and ungrateful change-the-constitution group out to cause chaos in the country.” Kenya, he said, “was lucky to have such a stable government led by President Moi.”

Muli was alluding to 1976 when a cabal of politicians close to founding President Jomo Kenyatta’s court sought to bar Vice President Moi from assuming the presidency in the event of the president’s incapacitation or death through a constitutional amendment. They were unsuccessful.

Until this moment, Kanu’s harshest critics were two clergymen — Rev Dr Timothy Njoya and Bishop Henry Okullu — and an impressive assemblage of courageous lawyers who dutifully challenged it in court even when the odds of success in a cowed Judiciary were hopelessly arrayed against them. Dissident academics were either in prison or exile.

Detention veteran

So were politicians. Those still free preferred the safety of silence after being kicked out of the party.

Constitutional lawyer Gibson Kamau Kuria, a detention veteran who would later be escorted into a plane headed for US exile by Mr Hempstone himself, says: “Throughout the 1980s, Western countries were promoting the respect of human rights in the world which were most abused in one-party systems in Eastern Europe and Africa. Single party systems had communism as their theoretical model. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signified the collapse of this model. And the logical consequence of this was collapse of single party systems in Africa. That was why 1990 was a watershed year.”

Kuria recalls those heady days thus: “I had been acting for very unpopular clients. These included Edward Oyugi, Kamonji Wachira, Raila Odinga, Willie Mutunga, George Anyona, Wanyiri Kihoro, Mirugi Kariuki, and Mukaru Ng’ang’a.

These are people who played a key role in the restoration of political pluralism. Once, when undergoing severe interrogation at Nyayo House, a Special Branch officer asked me with extreme exasperation: ‘Why do you keep taking cases to court when you know very well you are going to lose?’ I told him there must be a market because I never lacked clients. He did not like that answer.”

TURNING POINT

Kuria’s chambers on the third floor of Chai House in Koinange Street were always a hive of activity. The turning point was June 21, 1990.

On that day, Raila Oginga came to consult him. When he left, two Special Branch officers were stationed at the lift, vetting whoever came to see him. “They did not leave that place until I left for exile on July 11, 1990.”

He was not the only one subjected to rough treatment. Other Special Branch officers were permanently stationed at the entrances to the chambers of Dr John Khaminwa and Mr Paul Muite for the same purpose. Clients dried up because of the harassment. But the lawyers were still not going to take it lying down.

Says Kuria: “One day, late in June, nine of us gathered here. It was Mohammed Ibrahim (now judge), Charles Nyachae, Kiraitu Murungi, Paul Buti, Riungu Raiji, Dr Khaminwa, Kathurima M’Inooti, and James K’Owade.

“The purpose of the meeting was to obtain a court order to remove the Special Branch officers from our chambers since it had become impossible to transact business with them hovering around. But during the meeting, a large team of the same officers descended on us. They ordered my partners, Kiraitu Murungi and Kathurima, to go back to their offices and the other lawyers to get out of the building. The meeting was simply broken up.”

THINGS GET HOTTER

Things were getting hotter by the day. On July 4, American Independence Day, some of these lawyers attended the garden party at the ambassador’s residence at Muthaiga. They were leaving the residence late in the afternoon when word came through that Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia had been arrested.

Four of the lawyers — Dr Khaminwa, Paul Muite, Dr Kuria, and Japheth Shamalla — went to Shamalla’s house in Riara Ridge to discuss what legal help they could offer the two politicians.

Their information was that the two had been taken to traffic headquarters in Nairobi.  They reasoned that according to the law, when somebody has been arrested, a relative has the right to obtain a habeas corpus, an order to produce the arrested person in court and explain the reasons for his arrest and detention.

KHAMINWA CAUTIONS

Recalls Dr Kuria: “Dr Khaminwa was very perceptive about the situation. He told Muite and me that if we showed up at the police station, we would be arrested as well. Muite was acting for both Matiba and Rubia. Khaminwa offered to go himself. It was extremely selfless of him. And as fate would have it, when he did go to try and free them, he was himself arrested and subsequently detained. That is what would have happened to us.”

When Khaminwa was taken, Kuria knew the game was up. “The net was closing,” he remembers with a rueful half smile. “Two days before Saba Saba, it had become clear that a crackdown on dissents had been launched. I had been through other crackdowns in the 1980s and I knew that Kenya was not a safe place to be.”

Under camouflage, he showed up at the US Embassy as the detention of Matiba, Rubia, Raila, and Khaminwa was announced. Smith Hempstone personally escorted him to the Jomo Kenyatta Airport and to the plane, leaving only after the doors were closed and the aircraft was on its way. Dr Kuria stayed in the US as a research scholar at Harvard Law School until after the repeal of Section 2a in December, 1991.

KANU

Hempstone’s frequent incursions into the government’s problems with its opponents stretched Kanu’s patience to the limit.

Joseph Kamotho, its voluble secretary general, disdainfully labelled Hempstone “the nyama choma ambassador” because of the American’s penchant for visiting Kariokor market to eat roast meat.

Indeed, diplomat Hempstone was never quite able to shed the journalist in him and his dalliances with Kenya’s nascent oppositionists espoused a camaraderie that didn’t belong to the realm of diplomatic etiquette. His memoirs on his Kenyan adventure was appropriately titled Rogue Ambassador.

In their grim life and death wrestling match with the Kanu dragon, campaigners for political pluralism in Kenya may have come to believe that the US commitment to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law as articulated by Smith Hempstone were sacrosanct American values. They were in for a rude shock.

WAR IN THE GULF

On August 2, 1990, war broke out in the Persian Gulf.

The US cobbled an alliance of mostly Western countries to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which he had seized claiming it as Iraq’s 19th province. All of a sudden, Kenya was re-evaluated in Washington.

Kiraitu Murungi, who also went into exile shortly before the Saba Saba riots broke out, records this sobering reality in his book, In The Mud of Politics: “Kenya suddenly disappeared from the news. US officials’ interest in Kenya’s democratisation waned. The US government’s stand on multiparty democracy became ambivalent. Ambassador Hempstone had clearly stated that US foreign assistance would only be given to those countries ‘which nourish democratic institutions, defend human rights, and practise multiparty politics.’

“Soon after the Gulf War was declared, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Herman Cohen, visited Nairobi and posed the question: ‘Who are we (the US) to say that this (multiparty democracy) is best for everybody?’

MEANINGFUL REFORMS

The US embassy later said that it had only demanded a responsible and transparent government and that ‘...meaningful reforms within Kanu would make us happy.’”

Kiraitu, who says he wept in the plane as he flew into exile, explains what had happened.

“We later came to learn that this change in policy was necessary because Kenya had allowed the US to use its military facilities for the Rapid Deployment Force during the Gulf War. Strategic security interests demanded that the rhetoric against Kenya be toned down. Kenya would receive any Americans victimised by Muslim fundamentalists in Sudan and Somalia.”

So Kanu enjoyed a US diplomatic reprieve until the hostilities ended in February, 1991. But by the end of that year, Kenya was a multiparty state, with the US pulling a lot of civil society purse strings.

Roy Gachuhi is Director, East Africa School of Journalism. [email protected]