When Uhuru Kenyatta visited Maralal town in North-Eastern Province five years ago, he went to his father’s old house, now a museum, and wrote in the visitors’ book: “Conceived in this house in the year 1961. A pleasure to be back using my own (sic) two feet”
This conscious act of retracing his footsteps reasserted the unconscious fact about Uhuru’s life: his personal story is foisted on Kenya’s political narrative and the complex legacy from his father, the founding President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta.
Maralal, where Uhuru’s life begins, represents the colonial oppression of the Kapenguria Six, and immortalises the six nationalists who were jailed there by British authorities in 1952 on largely trumped-up charges.
Nearly 60 years on, Uhuru’s pending cases at the International Criminal Court are seen as a re-enactment of his father’s tribulations. The father prevailed, the story goes, and emerged to lead the nation. Uhuru’s supporters believe he will similarly prevail to lead Kenya after next year’s General Election.
Jomo Kenyatta looms large in Uhuru’s life—34 years after his death. That analysis is mirrored in Uhuru’s website, uhuru.co.ke. Out of the dozen images published online, nearly half depict Uhuru with his famous father—from Uhuru’s infantry to his father’s State funeral.
That is as it should be, for no child can extricate itself from its roots. But things are far more complex for Uhuru: the legacy that his father bequeathed this country is also Uhuru’s personal burden. And Uhuru’s personal wealth from his father is usually seen as a dispossession of others.
Forbes magazine ranks Uhuru the richest man in Kenya on account of the massive land holdings, estimated at more than 500,000 acres that he stands to inherit. That’s besides other business interests from real estate to banking to dairy farming, whose net worth is estimated at about Sh50billion.
“The land was acquired by his father in the 1960s and 1970s when the British colonial government and the World Bank funded a settlement transfer fund scheme that enabled Government officials and wealthy Kenyans to acquire land from the British at very low prices,” Forbes writes.
Land remains the core grievance in pockets of conflict scattered across Kenya, and Jomo Kenyatta is often blamed for the mess. In 1980, while speaking in Mombasa, the doyen of opposition politics in Kenya, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, called Kenyatta a “land grabber.”
In some parts of the vast Taita Taveta, individuals like the Kenyattas and former MP Basil Criticos owned tracts that covered entire constituencies, and locals there were virtual tenants, rather than constituents.
The severity of the problem is underpinned by the fact that land is a core issue under Agenda Four of the National Accord—now being handled by the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission—plus an amalgam of other historical injustices.
That would obviously complicate Uhuru’s situation were he to ascend to State House. How can he be expected to promote land policy review when the stakes are so high for him?
Writing in the Daily Nation last December, former Subukia MP Koigi wa Wamwere sneered: “Looking at the presidential hopefuls, I see inheritors of stolen land and beneficiaries of recent graft masquerading as liberators. The more they have eaten, we are told, the safer we are with them.”
But history is not the only thing weighing down on Uhuru. He has no public service record to write home about, save for the brief interlude in 1979 when he reportedly served as a Kenya Commercial Bank teller at Kipande Branch, according to his timeline on uhuru.co.ke. His next public appointment came 20 years later, when he chaired the Kenya Tourist Board in 1999.
Uhuru’s foray into politics was in 1997 when he vied for Gatundu South parliamentary seat and lost. He was nominated to Parliament in 2001 and made Local Government Minister by Daniel arap Moi, who later propped him as his preferred successor in 2002 polls, in which Uhuru was trounced by Mwai Kibaki.
While public service is not the only yardstick for leadership, it is curious for someone to aspire for the highest office in the land, yet manifest little or no footprints in service of the public.
Also, Uhuru is yet to overcome the stigma of being Moi’s “project” that was imposed on the people for purposes of preserving the old order.
Uhuru’s brief tenure in the Cabinet has not been without event. His stint as Finance Minister was blighted by what he confessed as “typographical errors” in Budget Bill that overshot the supplementary budget by over Sh9b. He was cleared of wrongdoing by the Joint Finance and Budgetary Committee on the issue.
Uhuru was similarly criticised for refunding to the British government some Sh100m that they demanded following mismanagement of the Free Primary Education, before the matter could be fully investigated and a mechanism put in place to guarantee a full refund from the culprits.
“I have worked very hard to get to where I am,” Uhuru told Citizen TV recently, to discount claims that he is privileged. On his massive family wealth, he used the metaphor of housing to demonstrate his future intentions: “I may have a house but I’m committed to ensure that I have many other similar houses around me in order to ensure my house survives through the survival of everybody else’s.”
But that is he survives the integrity test pending in court on account of his ICC trial, and which some fear could complicate Kenya’s future diplomatic policy.
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