SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 2015
FROM LEFT: Former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi, former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, former PS Thuita Mwangi and former PS Bitange Ndemo. PHOTOS| FILE
Former President Daniel Moi understands what idleness and desertion can do to a retiree.
Thirteen years after leaving State House, Mr Moi still worries about what is going on in his farms, wracks his brain about the various institutions in which he is patron and minds the duties bestowed on him as the Chancellor of Kabarak University.
At almost 91 years, Mr Moi would now perhaps have withdrawn from all commitments to enjoy a quiet life. But he detests being idle, or “vegetating” as his long-time aide Lee Njiru puts it.
Both Mr Moi and Mr Njiru, 66, have deliberately decided to keep themselves busy as a way of adapting to the disappearance of some friends, the subtle ridicule by some members of society and the reality of “being forgotten” that comes with leaving a prominent public office.
It was a debate recently stirred by former Information Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo, a columnist with the Business Daily and a blogger with nation.co.ke, who wrote a post criticising the way Kenyans consider “useless” the people who have quit public jobs.
In the article, Prof Ndemo said that his phone, which would sometimes receive as many as 30 calls an hour, stopped ringing soon after he left office in 2013.
“My ‘friends’ had moved on. I found myself checking my phone to establish if I had inadvertently put it off. The phone was fine,” he wrote.
Mr Njiru, who headed the then Presidential Press Service for decades, told Lifestyle his experience chimed in with Prof Ndemo’s description after Mr Moi’s 24-year term ended in 2003.
“I lost a lot of friends but most of them are crawling back. However, after the experience, I now deal with them very cautiously,” he said.
In reference to those who leave top postions, he added: “After you retire, nobody needs you for anything. You should know that. But when you establish yourself, after some years, people will respect you again.”
Mr Njiru said that after retirement, prominent people tend to attract more critics for no apparent reason, including people wishing for their downfall.
“People can be very insolent. They won’t attack you directly but will say things without mentioning names,” he said.
Mr Njiru worked in the president’s communication team from 1977 during the reign of Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta and rose through the ranks to be inside the inner circle of Mr Moi, Jomo Kenyatta’s successor. He told Lifestyle that he was a co-passenger with the former president on their way home after Mwai Kibaki took over power in January 2003.
Now engaging in farming among other businesses, Mr Njiru wakes up early every morning to “take instructions from my boss”. From 5.30 am to 5 pm every day, he is at Mr Moi’s office at Nairobi’s Kabarnet Gardens and during weekends, he travels to Nakuru to attend to his farms.
To cope with the quietness that comes with his life, Prof Ndemo is now a lecturer because “you need to have some problems to solve” and he also engages in some research work, including material his column.
Mr Charles Njonjo, the first Attorney-General of independent Kenya, is also known to operate on a strict regime long after leaving the government. Business Daily writer Jackson Biko, after interviewing him in May, wrote that Mr Njonjo’s discipline was worth emulating.
“I asked him why he still comes to the office at 95 years of age. What motivates him to still work? He’s made more money than he or his three children will ever exhaust in his lifetime yet he wakes up in the morning and puts on a suit and a tie and he is driven to the office where he walks into the lifts and presses the fourth floor button and sits behind his massive desk,” Mr Biko wrote.
According to Mr Njiru, it is important to have a plan before retirement or leaving a high position in order to “disappoint” critics because the shock may be “dangerous”.
“You find yourself in an alien territory. What kills people during retirement is not the lack of money. It is the translocation shock,” he said.
His advice? Look up to God, and take care of your physical, mental and financial wellbeing. To him, nobody should lack a reason to take a shower every day and wear clean clothes. He added that it is a disgrace for an old man to be “seen urinating by the roadside, wearing slippers even when going out to meet someone and indulging in too much alcohol”.
“When you are about to retire, start a business — it could be a butchery or a small shop. Even if you make Sh200 a day, it will give you a reason to wake up, take a bath and go somewhere.”
In the post that triggered the debate, Prof Ndemo said that as a PS from 2005 to 2013, he had been receiving over 30 calls an hour and up to 200 emails a day but all that traffic dried considerably when he left office.
It was almost a similar experience for former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who told the congregation at a church service in May that some of his so-called friends had deserted him after he lost the recent election — even before his successor Muhammadu Buhari was sworn-in. Mr Jonathan was in Kenya on holiday earlier this month.
After the elections, his spokesman Reuben Abati, in a post on the website of Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper, said his phones are now “loudly silent”.
“By May 29, my phones had stopped ringing as they used to. They more or less became museum pieces; their silence reminding me of the four years of my life that proved so momentous. On one occasion, after a whole day of silence, I had to check if the phones were damaged!” said the post.
UNLIKE BEFORE
Mr Abati said the condition after quitting public service was a far cry from what used to happen when he was a spokesman, when “my wife complained about her sleep being disrupted by phones that never seemed to stop ringing.”
An incident this past Thursday involving former Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka, now a co-principal in the opposition Cord, was a pointer to the anguish that comes with leaving influential positions.
Mr Musyoka was spotted at the 9 West building in Westlands, where immigration firm VFS Global handles visa applications for Britain and Australia. A Nation reporter who saw him noted that although it wasn’t clear which country Mr Musyoka intended to visit, the process of getting the visa had evidently frustrated him.
Accompanied by a guide, Mr Musyoka kept moving back and forth, logging into computers at the self-service area and, at times, stepping out to make calls. He looked tired and frustrated as applicants who came after him completed the process and left.
The episode must have been a reality check for the Wiper party leader, who would not have gone through such a hustle when travelling abroad if he was still in power.
Television reporter Richard Chacha told Lifestyle that some people ceased considering him important after an April 2012 accident confined him to a wheelchair.
Some of his friends when he was an NTV political reporter and news editor, he said, not only stopped calling but also did not pick his calls.
“I guess they thought I was asking for favours or something,” he said.
Once a “most wanted” man when he was a regular at Parliament Buildings, Mr Chacha said he has lost quite a number of friends he had before the crash.
“You would even find some MPs queuing for me to interview them. They would come to me and ask if they could share their sentiments,” he said.
He, however, said that what gave him satisfaction was that there were friends who have stuck with him and that he had made new friends.
“I have come to know who my true friends are,” added Mr Chacha, now running a public relations company.
Prof Ndemo, who had interviewed over 150 people before writing the article, suggested the situation was due to the tendency of Kenyans to attach monetary value to friendships.
“The Kenyan culture is such that people attach value to friendship, but their friends value them for their money or influence … We make many of those close to us to seek material wealth that will give them sustainable relevance to people,” he wrote.
Interestingly, Mr Njiru told Lifestyle that most of the people who called him seeking to talk to the former President were usually after money, perhaps drawn by “Mzee’s (Mr Moi’s) legendary generosity”.
MONEY POWER
“People from all over Kenya and overseas ring me. They call for various reasons: medical assistance, school fees, money for business, money for politics — usually it is money. They may lie to you that they just want to greet him, but 99.9 per cent of the time they are looking for money,” said Mr Njiru.
He, however, acknowledged there were also a number of genuine people who simply come to greet Mr Moi on a goodwill mission.
Speaking on the issue of finances, the communication chief of the former Nigerian leader wrote: “The ones who won’t give up with the stream of phone calls and text messages are those who keep pestering me with requests for financial assistance. I am made to understand that there is something called ‘special handshake’ and that everyone who goes into government is supposed to exit with carton loads of cash.”
Prof Ndemo said some of the prominent personalities who called him to associate themselves with his article are the former anti-corruption czar Prof Patrick Lumumba, and former Foreign Affairs Permanent Secretary Thuita Mwangi.
The associate professor’s article sparked a flurry of reactions from Nation readers, some who said it is the actions of people when they are in power that inspire the way they are treated when they leave.
“The problem is [that] when someone gets a big job, he/she shuns the common man because of class and status. While the people ‘you left behind’ expect you to help them, it is good to try and keep the friends you had before because you will need them when your artificial status is expired,” opined Grace Wanjiru.
Another reader using the nickname Dingdong on the Disqus platform posted: “When we build power and become drunk with power, we create capitalist friends since [we] become capitalists ourselves. We communicate for purpose but not for fun. We try to ‘buy’ friendship with people who matter ...!”
The debate also raised the issue of abandonment in retirement. Ms Joyce Wanjiku Kairo, who runs a foundation to take care of the elderly, told Lifestyle that it is not just prominent people who face such challenges.
“The moment elderly people start feeling sorry for themselves, they withdraw from the community,” said Ms Kairo, the founder of Purity Elderly Care Foundation.
Ms Kairo has traversed various parts of the country, especially her Nyeri County backyard, to attend to the elderly. Her observation is that even a person’s own children can sometimes neglect them.
“You buy your parents phones and believe it is enough to call periodically and find out how they are faring. With M-Pesa, you no longer need to visit home. When an old person is sick and alone at home and all you do is send them money, they feel lonely and depression sets in,” she said.
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