Jomo’s incidental Kanu membership and how a shaky start set itself up for failure

Old and near deserted, Kanu marks its 58th birthday Monday without fanfare. The only reminder of its halcyon days is perhaps Jogoo House and Jogoo Road, named after Kanu’s insignia of a cockerel. The rest is history which triggers vicarious nostalgia.

Forgotten is the role played by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga in the subsequent rise of Kanu and why the desire to destroy him turned the party into a monster that finally cannibalised itself. But in the party wars, Mr Odinga was not a saint either.

It was at Dr Julius Gikonyo Kiano’s house in Riruta, Nairobi, that a meeting had been called for all elected leaders in 1960 with the aim of launching one national party. The meeting, called by Mr Odinga, had agreed that they would register what was to be known as Uhuru Party for tactical reasons. With the fear that the colonial government might not register a nationwide party, they had agreed that they would later change its name to Kanu (Kenya African National Union).

SHUT OUT MBOYA

Interestingly, Mr Odinga did not invite Tom Mboya to this meeting which was also attended by James Gichuru, Arthur Ochwanda, Dr Kiano and Argwings-Kodhek and he only came to learn about the meeting when a journalist took to him a photocopy of the signed agreement.

“Has Dr Kiano signed?” asked Mr Mboya.

After realising that Dr Kiano was number one on the list, Mr Mboya knew that all his allies had deserted him.

“The meaning of Odinga’s plan was patent: It was to shut Mboya out from any position of leadership in the main organ of Kenya nationalism,” wrote Mboya’s biographer David Goldsworthy.

And that is how Kanu was born —in acrimony and backstabbing. For how long the party would survive as a nationalist party depended on how Mboya, Odinga and the Kiambu group perceived power.

ORIGINAL DRAFT

Although some quarters credit Mwai Kibaki as the one who drafted the Kanu constitution, the original draft was done by Mr Odinga’s personal assistant, the late Ojino Okew, who, however, did not see the emergence of the independence party. Okew, who has a backyard street in Kisumu named in his honour, died in a road accident on the day that his draft constitution was adopted, albeit with a few changes, during a meeting that was convened in Kiambu.

The reason the May 1960 meeting, which saw the birth of Kanu, was held in Limuru was because of fear that the rivalry between Mboya’s Nairobi People’s Convention Party and Argwings-Kodhek’s Nairobi African District Congress would turn bloody. The two had outsmarted everyone else on Nairobi politics and Mr Odinga’s fear was on Mboya whom he felt was a stooge of the Americans. As he would later write in his autobiography, Mboya “was interested in his own ascendancy to power” by using his “unlimited supplies of foreign money”.

TACTICAL BLUNDER

Mr Mboya knew that if his NPCP party skipped the Kiambu meeting, he would be roasted by Mr Odinga. But Mr Odinga made a tactical blunder that rescued Mr Mboya from a possible doom. Two days to the conference, he released a list of Uhuru Party officials which had Ronald Ngala, Jeremiah Nyagah and Gichuru. Shortly after the list was released both Ngala and Nyagah denounced it while Mr Gichuru said he had been misled by Mr Odinga. They had signed on the assumption that Mr Mboya would be included.

According to Mboya’s biographer this was “an important breakthrough for Mboya; at least a few of the conspirators were having second thoughts about the wisdom of trying to keep him out.”

“By the time of the Kiambu conference, however, Mboya’s supporters had convinced him that he would lose support if he isolated himself from the national party and so he came to the conference,” Mr Odinga wrote.

The importance of this political episode was that it would shape Kanu going forward and the alliances that emerged would later inform the country’s politics.

ODINGA LINKS

The battle of supremacy between the two had reached a crescendo during the Lancaster Conference when Mboya — with the help of the Americans — brought in eminent black lawyer Thurgood Marshall to ostensibly advise Kanu. But this was a unilateral decision, according to Mboya’s biographer, and that was the reason Mr Odinga sought a second adviser, the self-exiled Mbiyu Koinange, to “provide symbolic representation of Kenyatta himself (and) counter the authorities’ and settlers’ determination to keep Kenyatta offstage.

What we know today from declassified British Cabinet papers was that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had agreed that Kenyatta should never rise to become Kenya’s leader and it was felt that eyes were either on Mr Mboya or Mr Gichuru.

The British had a problem with Mr Odinga because of his links to the Eastern bloc. The Mi5 had intercepted tens of Mr Odinga’s letters which are now in file KV2/40 at the British archives. Mr Odinga describes the 1960s period as “difficulty” in his autobiography because of “concerted world press campaign to elevate Tom Mboya to the unchallenged leadership of Kenya Africans.”

INTERNAL WRANGLES

Shortly after he was released, Kenyatta was reluctant to join Kanu because of these internal wrangles. Actually, minutes of the Kanu Governing Council meeting held on Saturday, October 28, 1961, at Parliament Buildings indicate that Kenyatta was taken to task over his reluctance to declare support for Kanu during a meeting with only one agenda: “To discuss Kenyatta’s position”.

One delegate Onyango Ayodo — who became the first MP for Kasipul Kabondo — warned that Kanu leaders were “dangerous and tricky and would destroy him if he was not careful and aware of what he was taking over”.

But Kanu survived these wrangles and won the elections with two distinct Pro-West and Pro-East factions, the later coalescing around Odinga and Bildad Kaggia.

 The entry of Kenyatta into Kanu eclipsed everything else and soon all that mattered was Jomo Kenyatta — especially after he managed to destroy the opposition, Kenya African Democratic Union of Ngala and Daniel arap Moi.

Kanu had very weak structures and no control over policy matters. The Kanu Parliamentary Group meetings were the rubber-stamps of executive decisions taken at the Office of the President and at State House.

KIAMBU ELITE

Jennifer Widener, who wrote The Rise of One Party State in Kenya, argued that the weakening of Kanu was deliberate. “Kenyatta tried to rig electoral competition so as to force elites to bargain and compromise with one another” within the party.  The idea was for Kenyatta to keep loyalty within Kanu and maintain his hold on politics.

But this did not survive for long. While Mboya had been elected the Kanu secretary-general, there were machinations by the Kiambu elite to clip Mr Odinga’s wings as Vice-President. Kanu was no longer holding conferences and Mr Odinga was being excluded from decision-making, even at the Cabinet level. There were also manoeuvres to remove him as the vice-chairman of Kanu Parliamentary Group.

Meanwhile, Mr Mboya was being used by the Kiambu elite to organise branch coups which were quickly registered by Attorney-General Charles Njonjo’s office, which handled the societies registry.

And as Kenyatta’s health started deteriorating in the mid 60s, a meeting was called in Kiambu to dilute the powers of Kanu vice-president. Mr Moi and Mr Mboya handpicked delegates for this conference and Mr Odinga saw the plot and left to form his own Kenya People’s Union (KPU). 

RUN AMOK

With his ouster, a reckless Kanu ran amok and it culminated in the assassination of Tom Mboya in July 1969, proscription of KPU and detention of its members, and the assassination of JM Kariuki, the socialite millionaire and government critic.

To silence it critics, Kanu supported the emergence of detention without trial and most of its critics in Parliament — Koigi Wamwere, Martin Shikuku, and Jean-Marie Seroney — were jailed in a bid to intimidate alternative voices within the august House.

This trend would continue into President Moi’s leadership and although he strengthened the party, it was turned into a notorious weapon.

Kanu, during the Nyayo era, was used to silence any of the critics of the Nyayo “philosophy” and as power went into its head, it had a disciplinary committee in the lines of Soviet’s Communist Party.

As pressure started building and underground movements emerged in 1980s, Kanu decided to become de jure, the only party in Kenya. A new section 2 (a) was inserted in the Constitution which recognised Kanu as the only political party.

FREEDOM

To remove that clause took 10 years of bitter wars, detentions, deaths and campaigns as Kanu demigods fought to maintain the status quo. But the amendment of section 2 (a) did not harm Kanu as a party since the structures of the single party remained in place. President Moi managed to win two elections and it was not until 2002 that Kanu finally lost power.

But most of the political parties that took advantage of the newfound freedom were crafted in Kanu’s image and likeness.

Had Senator Gideon Moi not stuck to the party, perhaps as an honour to his father, Daniel arap Moi, chances are that the party would be dead by now. For all intents and purposes, the great- grandfather of Kenya’s political parties has withered with time and is now on life support.

DEEP ROT

For a party that inspired millions of people and challenged the colonial institution to surrender, it is sad that Kanu became a victim of its success as hubris and deep rot.

With only eight elected MPs, Kanu, in terms of elected members, plays in the league of Mandeleo Chap Chap, Economic Freedom Party and Ford-Kenya. But its offshoots and clones have continued to metamorphose — albeit with different names but heavily borrowing from the original Kanu manifesto.

When it reigned, Kanu managed to sneak its emblem of a cockerel into the coat of arms and had its official colours included in the national flag, albeit with a slight change to incorporate the opposition Kadu, then led by Ronald Ngala.

OFFSHOOTS

It is interesting that 58 years later, Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee Party — the most popular of the Kanu offshoots — and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement, whose base is still the former KPU, are once again speaking the same language after a bitter rivalry.

Happy Birthday to Kanu!

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