Political Parties & Power Struggles

Kenya’s post-independence history is riddled with power struggles between the various political parties and organizations that have sprung up through the years, which have proven to be death traps for Kenya’s politicians. These struggles center around KANU, the Kenyan African National Union, which was the dominant organization for about 40 years starting with Kenyatta’s election as president of Kenya.

When Kenyatta was finally released from prison, he had already been elected the president of KANU, which was founded in 1960. This organization was a union of the Kikuyu and Luo peoples’ desire for a strong central government. A rival group called KADU, the Kenyan African Democratic Union, was founded in the same year by a number of smaller African groups, seeking a federal government that would offset the Kikuyu’s numeric advantage. These two parties, the only political ones in Kenya at the time, formed a coalition government in 1962 that dissolved the next year, when KANU carried the elections very successfully and basically obliterated KADU. This resulted in Kenyatta being elected president of Kenya, with Oginga Odinga as his vice president.

 

Odinga’s Fall

The first of the major power struggles was begun with the conflict between KANU and KADU, which ended in the dissolution of KADU – leaving KANU the only political party in Kenya. Disturbed by this undemocratic turn of events, Vice President Odinga was rather vocal about his dissatisfaction and as a result became alienated from his party and in 1966, under the suggestion of KANU’s other co-founder, Mboya, was removed from office by Kenyatta.

Abandoned by his party, Odinga formed the Kenya’s People Union (KPU) in an attempt to rebel against Kenyatta. This failed miserably and resulted in the KPU being banned and Odinga himself arrested for staging riots, spending 15 months in prison. Later, under Daniel arap Moi’s presidency, he was welcomed back to the KANU only to again spread dissent against both Kenyatta’s old government and Moi’s new government, which expressly banned any opposition parties, and he found himself exiled from the party once again.

This time, Odinga formed a party called the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD) to attract attention from abroad, successfully pressuring Moi into returning to a multiparty system. Unfortunately, in the elections, dissent within FORD itself divided the voters, and Moi ascended to presidency again. This was the end of Odinga’s career; he died known as Kenya’s “most persecuted politician.”

Mboya’s Fall

Though Mboya had advised Kenyatta to remove Odinga from office, soon he too realized that Kenyatta’s government was not the utopia many once believed it to be. Soon he began to criticize the government’s corruption and pro-Kikuyu, inequal policies. Mysteriously, he was assassinated in 1969 by a Kikuyu who reportedly had close ties to other Kikuyu within Kenyatta’s government. This assassination of the most prominent Luo official, immediately followed by the banning of Odinga’s KPU and his arrest, appeared to many as an anti-Luo movement headed by Kenyatta.

Integrating the Minorities

Perhaps to allay these fears, perhaps for his own reasons, Kenyatta chose Daniel arap Moi, a member of the Kalenjin minority, to be his vice president and successor. Though many Kikuyu wished to replace him with a Kikuyu president when Kenyatta’s health began to fail, current president Mwai Kibaki and ally Charles Njonjo backed him and reunited KANU, again making it a strong organization, this time with a Kalenjin at its head.

Moi and KANU

At first, Moi brought many different ethnic groups into official positions, but he also gradually stilted the government with more Kalenjin officials. KANU controlled the National Assembly in 1982, and used this to officially amend Kenya’s constitution, making it a one-party state. This one party, of course, was the traditionally strong KANU. After an attempted coup by the Luo was put down by the army, Moi consolidated his power by removing most Kikuyu and Luo military officials and replacing them with minority groups. These practices bought Moi’s government the reputation of severe repression of democracy due to its strict ban on opposition, even within the party.

Despite orchestrating the fall of former ally and KANU member Njonjo, Moi’s government stayed strong and virtually unchallenged until pressure from Odinga’s FORD and its connections forced the National Assembly to repeal its ban on opposition parties. In 1992 and 1998, Moi kept the presidency, but member defections led to his defeat in 2002 when Mwai Kibaki ran against him and won. That year Kibaki’s party, the National Rainbow Coalition, also carried parliamentary elections, thoroughly ousting KANU from its accustomed position of power and leading the way to more responsible leadership.