Daniel arap Moi

Daniel arap Moi: The Placeholder Who Stayed Twenty-Four Years

When Jomo Kenyatta died in August 1978, the political class in Nairobi treated his vice-president as an interim arrangement. He came from the Tugen, a small sub-group of the Kalenjin; he had no power base in the Kikuyu establishment; a faction had tried to change the constitution to stop him succeeding at all, and he briefly retreated to the Rift Valley until he was assured it was safe to come back. "Nobody thought he was going to last long in power," the historian Lydia Muthuma observed. "He became president to fill in a gap." He filled it until December 2002.

The Herd Boy from Baringo

He was born on 2 September 1924 in Kuriengwo village, Sacho division, in Baringo, and named Toroitich arap Moi — Toroitich meaning "welcome home the cattle." His father Kimoi arap Chebii died in 1928, when the boy was four; his elder brother Tuitoek raised him. In 1934 he was enrolled at an Africa Inland Mission school, first at Kabartonjo and later Kapsabet, where he became a Christian and took the name Daniel. He remained a member of the AIM church for the rest of his life.

Denied a place at the elite Alliance High School by the colonial administration, he went instead to Tambach Teachers Training College from 1945 to 1947 and later to Kagumo. He taught from 1946 to 1955, ending as a headmaster in Keiyo District. It is the least glamorous CV in modern African politics and, in the event, an excellent apprenticeship: a schoolmaster learns patience, hierarchy and the uses of an audience that cannot leave the room.

The Loser Who Won

In 1955 he was elected to the Legislative Council for the Rift Valley, replacing John ole Tameno, and re-elected in 1957. In 1960 he co-founded the Kenya African Democratic Union with Ronald Ngala — the federalist party of Kenya's smaller ethnic communities, set up expressly against Kenyatta's centralising KANU. He became Minister of Education in the pre-independence government in 1961 and entered parliament for Baringo North at independence in December 1963.

KADU lost the argument comprehensively. In 1964 it dissolved itself into KANU. Most leaders of a defeated party disappear; Moi was brought into the cabinet, made Minister for Home Affairs, and in 1967 appointed Kenyatta's third vice-president. He held the office for eleven years and the Baringo seat until 2002. The lesson he had absorbed — that survival beats victory — would define the next four decades.

Filling the Gap

He was sworn in unopposed on 14 October 1978 promising an open, democratic government. He toured the country and met ordinary Kenyans directly, a conspicuous break from Kenyatta's remote, closed-door manner, and he was widely seen as a unifying figure. He gave the presidency a slogan, *Nyayo* — "footsteps" — signalling that he would follow his predecessor's path.

After the Coup

On 1 August 1982 airmen led by Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka, backed by university students, attempted to overthrow him. The army put it down within a day; at least 159 people were killed, and Ochuka and his co-conspirators were hanged in what remain Kenya's last judicial executions.

Everything after that was consolidation. KANU was written into the constitution as the sole legal party under Section 2(A). Marxism was banned from the universities; secret police infiltrated academic circles and drove members into exile; writers, lecturers and opposition figures were detained. Nyayo House in Nairobi held basement torture chambers, whose existence was documented publicly only in 2003, after Moi had left office. Kenya's Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission later found that those who opposed him "were routinely detained and tortured," that the judiciary "became an accomplice in the perpetuation of violations," and that parliament "was transformed into a puppet." The murder of Foreign Minister Robert Ouko in 1990 has never been satisfactorily explained. The 1988 election was conducted by *mlolongo* — voters queueing publicly behind their candidate's agent, which made a secret ballot impossible by design.

Multiparty, on His Terms

By the early 1990s the Cold War was over, commodity prices had collapsed, and donors led by the American ambassador Smith Hempstone were withholding aid. Police killed more than twenty people at a pro-reform demonstration. At the KANU conference at Kasarani in December 1991, Moi announced he would repeal Section 2(A). After fierce argument, the motion passed unanimously.

It was the shrewdest move of his career. Legal opposition arrived, and immediately fragmented. Moi won the 1992 election with 36.3 per cent of the vote and the 1997 election with 40.4 per cent — never anything close to a majority, and on both occasions the beneficiary of a divided field. Independent observers judged neither contest free or fair, and both were accompanied by political and ethnic violence.

The money went the way of the politics. The Goldenberg scheme, which paid export subsidies on gold Kenya does not possess — smuggled in from Congo — cost the country over ten per cent of a year's GDP; a Treasury permanent secretary testified in 2003 that Moi had personally ordered a payment to Goldenberg in 1991 contrary to law. In 2006 an international arbitration panel found he had taken a $2 million bribe from a Pakistani businessman for airport duty-free concessions. A confidential report published by WikiLeaks in 2007 traced hundreds of millions of pounds routed through shell companies and front men into nearly thirty countries. By the time he left, Kenya's economy was in negative growth.

Barred from a third term, he chose Uhuru Kenyatta as his successor. Kenyan voters rejected him by two to one in December 2002. At the handover, one of the largest crowds Nairobi had ever seen turned out and was openly hostile to the departing president.

Why Daniel Is Called a Genius

The word, applied to Moi, can mean only one thing: an exceptional instinct for political survival. A member of a minority community, a defeated opposition leader absorbed into the ruling party, a vice-president written off as a stopgap, he governed Kenya for twenty-four years and left at a moment of his own constitutional choosing rather than by coup or death — a distinction few of his African contemporaries managed. Kasarani in December 1991 was the masterstroke: he read correctly that legalising opposition would splinter it, and that a fragmented field would let him win two national elections on 36 and 40 per cent. He also had a lifelong commitment to schooling, founding Kabarak High School and Kabarak University among others, and Kibaki later invoked his "vast experience and knowledge of African affairs" in naming him peace envoy to Sudan.

The counter-case is overwhelming. Survival was the whole of the achievement; there is no body of thought, no institution built for anyone but himself, no economic record to defend. He presided over torture chambers beneath a government building in his own capital, over the detention and exile of Kenya's writers and academics, over an election conducted by public queue, and over a state Kenya's own reconciliation commission found had turned its courts and parliament into instruments of abuse. Goldenberg alone cost more than a tenth of national output. He handed his successor an economy in contraction and a hostile crowd. Cunning of that order is not intelligence in any sense worth honouring; it is intelligence applied to a single small question — how do I stay — for twenty-four years.

Legacy

Moi died at The Nairobi Hospital on 4 February 2020, officially aged ninety-five. He was buried at his Kabarak farm beside his estranged wife Lena, after a state funeral at Nyayo Stadium. His name is on an airport, a university, a teaching hospital, an air base and a national stadium — the standard furniture of a long presidency. What actually outlasted him is more ambiguous: a country that learned, expensively, how a one-party state is built and how it can be dismantled, and a political generation, including a Kenyatta and his own son Gideon, that grew up entirely inside the system he made.

Achievements

• Educated at Kapsabet High School
• Worked as politician and minister