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The Rise of a Party-State in Kenya: From "Harambee!" to "Nyayo!"

University of California Press

In December 1989, disagreement erupted between Kenya's president, Daniel arap Moi, and Professor Wangari Maathai, the leader of a Kenyan environmental group, and foreign donors. The subject of the row was a plan to construct a new sixty-story office tower to house the headquarters of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the country's only legal political party, and a party-run media center. The design called for a large statue of the president as the centerpiece of the building's decoration. Kenya had already moved to borrow $160 million to supplement $40 million in local loans, both steps in violation of agreements with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund stipulating only limited borrowingand borrowing only for productive purposes. Moi told Maathai and the foreign donors that they could take their complaints elsewhere.1

The plans were symbolic of a significant change in the character of Kenyan political life, a change that began to crystallize during the Moi era. Until Moi's efforts to modify the relationship between the party and the government, beginning in 1982, KANU had existed only as a loosely knit grouping of politicians. Under Moi's predecessor, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first independence leader, the party had tolerated some internal criticism and debate over its platform, albeit to a gradually diminishing degree. It had used its loyalty pledge rarely, and its ranks harbored a number of well-organized and enduring "factional" divisions, nearly "corporate" in character.2 The provincial administration, not the party,

was Kenyatta's chosen vehicle for securing compliance with government policies and stances.

Under Moi, the relationship between the party and the government began to change. The new president was increasingly ill at ease with the existence of alternative forms of political association and moved rapidly to curtail the ethnic and regional welfare societies that had long served as a springboard for political candidates. Following the proscription of these organizations in 1980, and the move to a de jure single-party system in 1982, Moi sought to eradicate factional divisions in KANU by creating internal disciplinary committees and proposing a system of party schools (never established) to instill rules of behavior and fidelity to the positions of the new government. He moved still further away from the Kenyatta political strategy of the 1960s by seeking a more active role in the selection of party officers and by supporting, off and on, a "youth wing" with watchdog or surveillance responsibilities. In short, between 1980 and the proposal for the office tower in 1989, the party acquired a new and far stronger role in the pursuit of political order, and its boundaries began to merge with those of the Office of the President, or "State House." The proposed building, with its statue of the president, would enshrine the new order in stone and steel.

Other changes accompanied the new relationship between party and government. Immediately after the declaration of a single-party system in 1982, the government put down a coup attempt by air force officers and their allies, who allegedly sought to secure greater participation or representation in public affairs. The real reasons for the coup attempt and its collapse are not known. The "August disturbances," as the government of Kenya later called them, generated significant presidential and popular uneasiness, however. Kenyans from widely different parts of the country and walks of life spoke of the need to proceed cautiously so as not to follow the paths of their neighbors in strife-torn Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

By the middle of the decade, the tenor of everyday Kenyan politics had changed in the view of the editor of the Weekly Review , Hilary Ng'weno. During the 1985 party elections in Kenya, Ng'weno apologized to his readers for his magazine's coverage of national events. He remarked that Kenyan political life, always complicated, had finally become opaque, a matter of personalities and one-on-one, closed-door negotiation instead of predictable public stands on issues and coherent, brokered alliances. Rumor and speculation were rife, inspired by the many levels of significance associated with words and actions in the absence of agreements that could stabilize meanings. Political language

acquired a new "code"; where previously politicians had spoken in Parliament and with each other of "who gets what," they increasingly substituted parable and metaphor. With constraints on political association, churches and other organizations with international connections became the refuge for dissenting voices and took a more active role in debate. Rates of participation in standard political activities, such as voting, diminished. Indeed, turnout in national elections had declined to 30 percent of eligible voters by 1983. With much of the rest of the continent, Kenya had come to share a "shrinking of the political arena."3 Although opposition among elites and some of the "popular classes" had not ceased, it had taken different forms, and, in most instances, it failed to stop presidential efforts to restrict political activity.

This book proposes one understanding of these complex political events and tries to demonstrate its utility in making sense of some of the situations that seem impenetrable even to so astute an observer as Hilary Ng'weno. It focuses on the shift in government-party relations and tries to explain the move from a single-party-dominant system in which KANU remained a loosely organized "debating society" with little policy influence toward a Kenyan "party-state" in which KANU increasingly became a vehicle for the Office of the President to control political opposition. It documents the sustained interest in democratic reforms among some segments of the political elite and tries to explain why it proved so difficult for these people to organize effectively to maintain space for political competition.

Within the universe of African politics, there is substantial variation in the degree to which single-party-dominant systems have become "party-states." Kenya long appeared to be an exception to trends detected in countries such as Ghana and Zaire. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was one of Africa's "relative successes" in the eyes of many Westerners. This reputation stemmed in large part from the country's agricultural performance, paralleled on the African continent only by South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Cte d'Ivoire, but it also derived from the perception that the country had retained key elements of the Westminster parliamentary system that had been adopted at independence. Although the Kenyatta era witnessed several political assassinations, detentions, and the proscription of the opposition Kenya People's Union (KPU), most analysts saw a qualitative difference between the political life that existed in Kenya and the systems of Ghana or Tanzania. Even when members of the KANU government periodically attempted to quash alternative political parties, debate continued between well-defined, semi-organized, and enduring factions within the ranks....