Uhuru is not Jomo Kenyatta
Published on
By Dominic Odipo

When Edward Moore Kennedy first ran for the Senate from the state of Massachusetts in 1962, millions of Americans thought he was a big joker.

His only ‘qualifications’ appeared to be that his father, Ambassador Joseph P Kennedy, was a multi-millionaire; his brother John F Kennedy was President and another brother, Robert, was the Attorney-General.

Sarcastically, his principal opponent declared: “If your name was Edward Moore, your candidacy would be a joke.”

Kennedy went on to win that election and has been re-elected to the US Senate seven times since. Today, despite his struggle with brain cancer, he is one of the most respected and revered living American politicians.

When Uhuru Kenyatta first announced his bid for the Gatundu seat, my thoughts raced back to Ted Kennedy’s first senatorial campaign. The only thing that seemed to be going for him was his family name and wealth.

Even though Uhuru lost his first bid for the parliamentary seat, today we all know better: We know that he is a first-rate politician; one whom anyone running for national office ignores or takes on at their peril. The fact that Uhuru lost his bid for the presidency in 2002 does not detract from this. Actually, he did not lose that election — it was lost before he started running.

Would Mwai Kibaki be President if Uhuru had not backed him to the hilt? My guess is that, without Uhuru, Kibaki would not be in State House today. So, if Uhuru is not himself the king, he is certainly a king-maker, perhaps the real king-maker.

Inheritance

At the height of the debate about political inheritance, I argued every Kenyan has a right to run for any office, regardless of who his father might have been. To bar or discourage Uhuru from running for political office because his father was once President would amount to reverse discrimination, I felt, which is no less odious than the other kind.

The case can be argued for all other political inheritors, including PM Raila Odinga and Deputy PM Musalia Mudavadi.

If we discriminate against a person because their father was rich or rather well-placed in society, tomorrow we shall discriminate against another because their mother was a vegetable vendor or a chang’aa brewer.

But that, significantly, is the end of that argument. Defending Uhuru’s right to run for and hold any political office is not the same thing as defending his father’s political record. Uhuru is not his father. No doubt there are certain things President Kenyatta used to say and do that Uhuru never would.

I remember, in particular, the way Mzee addressed a crowd in 1969 during what was to be his last visit to Kisumu. He used unprintable language about some people’s mothers of the sort, I believe, Uhuru would never use in public.

When Uhuru says Kenyans should stop blaming him for the mistakes of his father, he is dead right. He is not his father.

But there is a thin line here which Uhuru needs to cross and, from the way he had been speaking in public lately, it is clear that he has already started crossing it. In stating that Kenyans should stop blaming him for his father’s mistakes (as he did in Kitui last week) is to acknowledge Mzee did make mistakes, whatever they might have been.

That alone, coming from the son, is a giant leap forward. From there, it is only another small step towards recognising that some of the problems the country is grappling with today might have arisen from mistakes the first President might have made. That is the vital first step towards solving those problems.

The second point that Uhuru needs to grasp is that when Kenyans who are reasonably well informed point out mistakes that might have been made by his father, they are not blaming Uhuru Kenyatta. They are merely pointing out some mistakes that Uhuru’s father might have made, some of them long before the younger Kenyatta was born.

Inheritance

When you stand on the shoulders of your father, you see many things. You see, first, that the father and yourself are different people. And then you see that, from that vantage point, you see a lot of things that your father, no matter how tall he might be, cannot see.

At the apogee of their power in the early 1960s, the Kennedy brothers knew very well that their father had made some horrendous political and other mistakes. They decided to draw a clear line between their father’s political views and their own. And then they went on to dominate US politics like no other family before or since.

That is the path Uhuru must take. Let him.

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.
dominicOdipo@yahoo.com

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Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 21:20:02 +0000
From: Nicholas Mireri
Subject: Uhuru & Kenyatta’s sins