The final ouster of the KANU party, which has ruled Kenya since independence in 1963, came with extraordinary ease as Mwai Kibaki of the National Rainbow Coalition won the presidential election with an overwhelming 63 percent of the vote. Fears among celebrating electors that the outgoing president Daniel arap Moi would unleash the army or police to hang on to power, did not materialize.
The charitable might say that the KANU party leadership had finally decided to honor the principles of democracy, which they had fudged and perverted for so long. The truth is probably less honorable. After 40 years in power, KANU leaders had simply run out of ideas and even the strength to battle on. And wiser heads among its leaders will have seen that it was probably the right moment to step out of the political limelight, with Kenya’s economic and social troubles piling ever higher. They may be counting on the fact that President Kibaki faces a mountainous task of rebuilding the country and the odds must be against him. KANU strategists may be calculating that now all they have to do is sit back and wait for power to fall back into their lap in a few years’ time.
There can be no doubt that Kibaki and his largely untried party, a sometimes uneasy coalition of opposition groupings, have much to do. Kibaki comes to power on a tidal wave of popular expectation and enthusiasm. He must move quickly to show his supporters that he is really capable of making more than cosmetic changes. He began wisely enough. While not holding back from criticizing his predecessors for their corruption and ineptitude, the new president used his inaugural speech to promise that there would be no witch hunt among corrupt government officials. He merely put all civil servants on notice that the bad old ways would no longer be tolerated. In this Kibaki is acting sensibly. So ingrained had corruption become in Kenyan public life that lowly paid government employees had to resort to graft to support their families. It is one thing, however, to say that such malpractice must now end. It will be quite another thing for a new government, made up largely of ministers and assistants entirely unversed in the ways of administration, to bring about the far-reaching changes necessary within the system.
The international community has a big role to play in Kenya’s economic transformation. Aid, which was withheld because it was deemed that the KANU government had become a sink of corruption, must now be quickly restored. It is also right to expect that the new administration will put in place proper accounting systems that will ensure that aid goes precisely where it is intended. This rigor must not, however, be used as an excuse for the likes of the United States and Britain, the former colonial power, to start exercising unjustifiable levels of influence upon the new government.
Like any other new and inexperienced party, Kibaki’s new administration will make some mistakes. It is important, however, that these errors arise from its own judgements and not those imposed from outside. The most important thing for the changes that come to Kenya is that they are generated by the Kenyans themselves. The very last thing the new president needs is a strict economic diet drawn up and imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
