When Mwai Kibaki was elected in December 2002 as Kenya's third president, many Kenyans celebrated the demise of Kanu and the Kanu Way. By the time Kenyans were slaughtering each other in December 2007, whatever illusions about the death of the Kanu Way had been exposed for the fiction they were. The Kanu Way and its evil win Nyayoism were alive and thriving. Graft defined the very firmament of the State. As Kenya stares at the shambles of the past thirteen years on this Saba Saba, it can celebrate political freedom and mourn deeply the impunity and graft that seems to have become a permanent part of public life.
In 1990, the most pressing problems were the absolute negation of the civil and political rights of Kenyans and the deeply embedded networks of corruption that had drained the national treasury dry. Twenty five years later, we have resolved the one and elided the other. Corruption has thrived and expanded to areas that are quite surprising.
In 1990, the leadership of the church in Kenya contributed to the discourse on the freedoms of the people. There were Muslims who spoke with passion about the rights of all Kenyans in the political arena. Today a great many of the leaders of the church in Kenya have become as perfidious and avaricious as the political classes who have become a pest. A great number of Muslim clerics have become the praise-singers for the illiberal purveyors of revanchist and unreconstructed tenets of faith. Twenty five years between the two Saba Saba dates and the only difference is that political pluralism is a fact of life.
Life was hard in 1990. For the vast majority of Kenyans, life remains hard in 2015. Poverty stalks a majority of Kenyans. Shockingly, the Ministry of Health announces that it has spent 500 billion shillings fighting an outbreak of cholera but Kenyans keep dying. Mwai Kibaki expanded access to primary education to millions of children, but the quality of education remains a hit-or-miss affair depending on where you are born. We were united, after a fashion, in 1990 when we demanded political change. We were united, in 2002, when we rejected Baba Moi's project. Today we are united, after a fashion, in shock at the depths to which all our leaders - political, faith-based, business, whatever - will sink in order to make a fast shilling at our expense.
Saba Saba is important if only to remind us that the men and women who led the anti-Nyayo protests and suffered the teargas and police rungus of Baba Moi's henchmen have feet of clay and that bar the likes of David Gitari and Timothy Njoya, all of them betrayed us. That betrayal should anger us. The revival of Nyayoism should enrage us. The insidious hollowing out of our Bill of Rights should drive us to action. That we cannot because of the remarkable resilience of the Nyayoist philosophy of tribal vote-bank politics is an indication that Kenya needs a new breed of anti-Nyayo protesters. Kanu, the party, may be a cocktail-circuit punchline. Kanu, the idea, lives.
The twin evils of 1990 ensure that all the economic blue prints we have published since then have been mockeries because there was never any real intention to implement them. If you doubt this assessment, if you think I am too harsh, if you think that I am just being anti-Kenya, ask yourself why the 500 billion shillings we have spent to fight the cholera outbreak has not been enough and why are Kenyans dying of cholera in the Twenty-first Century. Saba Saba, the idea, remains as relevant today as it was twenty five years ago.
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