Metamorphosis of ex-Attorney General, from oppressor to believer of change

June 1982: On the morning of June 18, 1982, a young woman came to Union Towers in Nairobi, the offices of Viva magazine, where I was the editor, and asked to see me about an urgent matter.

She told me that she had come as she loved the magazine. As the secretary to a senior police official, she had overheard him being told by Attorney-General Charles Njonjo the need to postpone my arrest.

The recent arrest of Senior Counsel John Khaminwa and some other lawyers had raised British and American concerns, so it was best to wait before detaining a senior journalist.

I believed the secretary. I had already been interrogated by the Special Branch (now the National Intelligence Service) a week earlier, and before that I had received a blunt letter from Mr Njonjo condemning Viva’s content and asking me to remove him from our mailing list.

He had copied the letter to Jeremiah Kiereini, Head of the Civil Service (including the police). The previous year, I had also become the first journalist in independent Kenya to be hauled to court (along with the great and very vocal Wangari Maathai whom we had interviewed). So I fled the country that night.

I was, of course, one of hundreds who fell afoul of Mr Njonjo’s virtually absolute power, derived directly from President Jomo Kenyatta — and continued into the first few years of President Daniel arap Moi.

Like me, most Kenyans saw Mr Njonjo as the implacable obstacle to building a more democratic, equitable, non-aligned and pro-Africa nation.

At a time when there were many oppressors in our dictatorial rule, he stood out as the most powerful, whose single-minded goal was political “stability” at all costs through maintaining the status quo. He achieved it through the exercise of raw state and police power.

July 2013: Let’s now fast-forward to 31 years later, to July 11, 2013. A requiem mass was being held at the Holy Family Basilica in Nairobi for Chelagat Mutai, a fiery MP in the 1970s who had, among other things, campaigned against land grabbing by the powerful in the Rift Valley.

She was prosecuted and jailed by Attorney-General Njonjo in 1976 for inciting squatters to invade a sisal farm and had subsequently fled into exile in Tanzania in 1981. By the time of her death, she was no longer widely known by Kenyans.

As I wrote in my Sunday Nation column then, those who came to pay tribute to Chelagat at the Mass in 2013, “were stunned to see Charles Njonjo alight from a car and join them.

When Mr Njonjo spoke during the service, he told the congregants that he ‘had fought Chelagat very hard those days but I have come today to honour the fearless young woman who mobilised so many people for her causes, the landless in particular”.

Mr Njonjo had, in fact, just picked me up from my home to go visit Chelagat at Kenyatta National Hospital the previous Sunday morning, when her brother called to say she had passed on.

May 2004: Upon my return home from exile, I had been astounded to discover that Mr Njonjo was undergoing a transformation whose roots I never came to fathom.

Despite our past antagonism, he had sought me out, and over a few meetings I found that the once-imperious, arrogant kingmaker and counsellor to two Presidents and western ambassadors had shed all his earlier trappings, except his dignity and sternness, and had added a real wit and joviality to his bow!

He had developed a behind-the-scenes, low-visibility change agenda for Kenya. He asked if I could occasionally assist him in this on the communication front, which I agreed to after making clear I would not accept any payment.

Most fascinating to me, however, was his systematically pursuing, with great humility and without fanfare some of the champions of our second liberation whom he had brought down during his heyday.

I was pleased I was able to help him with some of those I had been close to, such as Chelagat, Abuya Abuya and Waruru Kanja. What impressed me most was that Mr Njonjo was seeking out those who were no longer prominent and who offered no political benefit to him. More publicly, Mr Njonjo had also been able to develop a close relationship with Mr Raila Odinga and his cohorts Anyang’ Nyong’o and James Orengo, plus Koigi wa Wamwere and a few others — all of whom had earlier been persecuted by him.

One of Mr Njonjo’s clearest goals in this nearly two-decade long incarnation was to help build a more inclusive Kenya, including in particular the need to elect a non-Kikuyu President. His dream, of course, was that it might be Mr Odinga. He did not live to see that dream come true, but his early public backing of Raila was instrumental in making Central Kenya support more acceptable for a leader of the Luo Nyanza region they had previously denigrated. That paved the way for much of the Central Kenya leadership, and most pivotally President Uhuru Kenyatta himself, to recognise the value that Raila’s presidency could offer after decades of their devout opposition.

Assessing the Njonjo legacy objectively

Njonjo has now departed at the age of 101. But despite a full four decades having passed since he was humiliatingly shunted aside from his pre-eminent perch of power in 1982, and despite having held no prominent public office after that, his passing is nevertheless commanding widespread comment. Hardly surprising — he was unquestionably the defining architect, under Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, of the new Kenyan state, an order that astonishingly continues until this day, for better or worse. He exercised and supervised power with decisive, razor-sharp and ruthless clarity, winning support through the direct connections he established with key power brokers and bureaucrats and delivering on what they needed. While that was made possible by his closeness to Mzee Kenyatta, it required exceptional skill and organisation.

That enabled Njonjo to stay on top of the critical inner workings of the entire state that not even Mwai Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta were able to muster as Presidents. That network of strategically placed supporters enabled Njonjo to thwart, through meticulous advance planning, a powerful oligarchic Kikuyu group from preventing vice-president Moi from becoming acting President upon Mzee Kenyattta’s death in August 1978, as the constitution required. A peaceful transition to a new regime, which was never considered automatic, was achieved thanks primarily to Njonjo.

Still, it is not surprising that many of those commenting on Njonjo now are focusing primarily on the fertile list of negatives of his first two decades in power. His extremely conservative, anti-change policies were anathema to most Kenyans. Politically, he was opposed to some of the fundamental premises on which our freedom fighters had fought for decades. He also unabashedly promoted an Anglo-centric ideology which was abhorrent to most people as it rode roughshod over Kenyan culture and values. The ever-incisive Sunday Nation columnist Philip Ochieng captured it perfectly by labeling Njonjo “Afro-Saxon”, the world’s first.

For many nationalists, progressives and Muslims, Njonjo’s close alliance with Israel and his promotion of contact with white South Africans and their apartheid regime at a time when virtually all of Africa was in boycott with both states was not merely wrong but also threatened Kenya’s security. Regressive as these positions were, everyone is of course entitled to their views, especially if openly declared, as Njonjo’s always were.

But what was unacceptable were some outrageous views Njonjo articulated about fellow Kenyans that will forever stain his legacy. The best known of these were his saying he would not shake hands with Luos (because cholera was widespread in Nyanza) or fly in a plane piloted by a black African.

So while a focus on this aspect of Njonjo’s regrettable legacy is entirely understandable, it does a grave disservice to Kenyans if analysts and scholars do not try to develop a fuller and more objective understanding of how one of our most powerful leaders was able to rise – even if it is only to see how we can avoid a repeat phenomenon. We cannot blind ourselves to what is important in the real world.

Njonjo derived his power primarily from the total trust President Jomo Kenyatta placed in him. He repaid that by being highly organised and effective and could be relied on to deliver what the two presidents — Mzee Kenyatta and Moi — wanted. The extremely close ties he enjoyed with the British and the Israelis, which were buttressed by Mzee Kenyatta’s heavy reliance on him, also won Njonjo additional support from the president, as this provided another layer of protection and stability for the presidency.

Njonjo’s ability to stand by and deliver what he promised earned him the loyalty of his colleagues in the civil service. During the famed early 1980s Kibaki-Njonjo rivalry, in which most of us supported Kibaki, I was shocked to discover some people from vice-president Kibaki’s Othaya backyard had come to Njonjo with a petition for help, as they felt he would deliver but with the vice-president one could not be certain, the group said.

Among Njonjo’s other achievements was his having been the successful advocate for the vice presidencies of both Moi and Kibaki. That was no mean feat, considering they both ended up becoming President.

Njonjo was also a strong advocate of women’s rights and was instrumental in pushing through a controversial historic Succession Act in 1981, which did away with many traditional biases, including preventing women from acquiring their husband’s property.

Finally, I should mention that when I left Kenya quietly in December 2013 because of political harassment, I was deeply touched that Njonjo insisted on hosting a small lunch for me, a few hours before I flew out. He also invited Raila, James Orengo, Fidel Odinga and his close ally Stanley Githunguri. (Anyang’ Nyong’o for whom Njonjo had a great deal of affection, was out of the country).

What was most notable for me was seeing how candidly Njonjo spoke with the others. Let me conclude by saying anyone assessing the Njonjo legacy must place a heavy premium on the astonishing transformation that marked his last two decades. I believe devoutly that in countries such as Kenya, we need broad-based coalitions for human security and stability. In that context there is much to gain and little to lose in embracing leaders such as Charles Njonjo. Our humanity also cries out for such reconciliation.

Mr Salim Lone, a former Spokesperson for the United Nations and Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga, now lives in New Jersey, US