What if Moi did not rule Kenya?

October 10 would have been a public holiday if Kenyans had not decided in the August 4 referendum to erase 24 years of Moi’s misrule from their collective memory.

As a people, we should probably all bow our heads in shame for having wasted Kenya’s precious nation-building time by staying away from our places of work and trooping to public venues to celebrate what was called Moi Day.

I won’t be unkind to the people amongst us who hold that their man actually deserved to have a National Day named after him.

Indeed, Mr Moi did some good things and even passed off as a nice president sometimes.

He had a passion for building schools, went to church every Sunday, stepped out of his limousine to buy market women groceries and repeatedly sought to explain his not-so-apparent humility amid political provocation out of his love for women and children.

But this shouldn’t even be enough to earn him a mention in a patriotic song.

On his watch, officials looted the public granary and made millions of Kenyans poorer.

Kenya sank deeper into a police state, which detained and tortured its citizens.

And state-sponsored terror, baptised “tribal or land clashes”, killed or uprooted families from their homes in some parts of the country.

The mystery of Mr Moi, however, is how he became president in the first place.

History books seem to depict him as an insecure politician, who stood for nothing other than political resentment for the so-called “big tribes”, preferred independence delayed until Kenya was cut into ethnic pieces and imagined himself as the small king of the Rift Valley.

After the recent referendum, he has appeared to be hurting from the fact that there would no longer be an administrative unit of such a name.

History also casts Mr Moi as a political opportunist whose fortunes rose with his loyalty to Kenyatta, his being the constitutional heir apparent as VP and the scheming by the Kikuyu ethnic elite around Kenyatta known as Gatundu royal court to have the Constitution changed to stop Mr Moi.

Shariff Nassir, the late Cabinet minister, told Mr Moi’s biographer Andrew Morton that there might have been an outbreak of civil war had the anti-Moi plot succeeded.

Which just deepens the mystery: how could Kenyans contemplate war to save the career of a man whose presidency would gain notoriety for being Kenya’s wasted years?