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.
Plz, play politics at the same time play with our money. Fuata nyuki ujue mzinga iko wapi… Faruk Kibet tafuta hiyo nyani and it will tell you who the master is.
Kenyans deserve arap mashamba, you had a good president working hard to build the country and you rewarded him him divisive politics and 2007 PEV. And don’t say he stole election, they all did, it was a matter of who would beat the other in stealing