Ken Matiba a Hero, Nicolas Biwott too! --Ai Yawa!

[jakaswanga]

Everybody body is a hero winner baibe, that is no lie! ---Hot Chocolate!
You do the things you do baibe, you satisfy!
Never seen a better deal baibe, you exemplify!

KEN MATIBA IS A HERO, NICOLAS BIWOTT TOO! AI YAWA!

Uwinjo jodalawa, an to wich madiny ojoga pile. Moko gin AIDHA OR, you cannot have it both ways. That saying about eating your cake!

And this is one of them!

If the late Nicholas Biwott, former the total man, is truly a national hero as the ruling class admonished us to emulate, then Kenneth Matiba can not equally be so.

They lived at the same time on opposite sides of the same battle. Partisanship is required here in some truth telling!

Heroes need villains to complete the picture. Biwott is and was a villain. But, apparently in Kenya, official version that is, HANDSHAKE narrative that is, everybody is a hero. Everybody fought for Uhuru, there were no homeguards, no collaborators, possibly there were no colonists neither to fight against!

Ajabu history!

But that is not what I am telling your smart kids this week as I insist we CRITICALLY honour Kenneth Matiba. I am telling them if you take the cue from your politicians on who is a hero and who not, you are dumber than the dumbest you think you know!

Chapter six, the clause on integrity in the now-not-so-new, not intact 2010 constitution, and the fact that not even Osgoode smartie Miguna Miguna, no, Wily Mutunga as CJ, could wager a definition, is what I use to remember Kenneth Matiba, mildy.

He resigned from Moi's cabinet in protest at KANU's rigging plots, in Murang'a among other places. RIGGING! Fears of rigging, the same reason NASA boycotted last years' presidential re-run; the same reason there was an alternative oath on the 30th of January 2018, and why, today, the administrator of that oath, Miguna Miguna, is a non-Kenyan! RIGGING!

This rigging thing, must heads be cut off, played football with on the streets for it to become a thing of the past!? Now we hear this Kathing called Chebukati has had his guard withdrawn, May be they will Musando him and he better do an Akombe! Howbeit under his chairmanship Jubilee got its 98% electoral legitimacy!? Howbeit it all turned a pyrrhic victory, seeing that the president still needs a handshake from a treasonable character to save his legacy from the sewer!

The Chilobas' and the Chebukatis' are thus merely the latest simpleton mercenaries positioned to betray the peoples' will, for a choice cut of beef for their Judas' labours. Which should remind me too, to grin at ODM'ers who come from Nyanza: RIGGING. How did it come to pass, that a fella like William Oduol was defrauded of the Siaya governorships? The seat was handed to Cornel Rasanga on a platter, by a treacherous-hearted woman who was soon hunted down by the Erinyis/juogi to an early grave.

I insist you revisit the history of the great split between Jaramogi and Matiba, which handed DT Arap Moi his first multi-party win.

SUPREMO

As Mr Matiba rose, there was fear in Kanu that he was eclipsing many of the politicos.
Mr Matiba was always afraid that he would become the victim of rigging and in 1988 he complained rather loudly about rigging in Kanu elections.

It was this 1988 rigging in Kanu that spawned the fallout between Mr Moi and Mr Matiba and on December 9, 1989 when President Moi was about to receive guests for the Tenth anniversary of Nyayo era, Mr Matiba drafted a resignation letter and had it dropped at Office of the President.
It was a first for a Cabinet Minister who was protesting an attack by Mr Peter Oloo Aringo, then-Kanu chairman, and Mr James Njiru, the Minister for National Guidance.

LOOSING KENYA

–-The pitfalls of nationalist consciosness! Why the Jaramogi/Matiba ticket did not materialise! Why Kenyatta-I/Odinga-I failed; why Raila/Kibaki nearly then eventually failed, and why, now, Odinga-II/Kenyatta II aka the HANDSHAKE, based on the same consciousness, FALSE, must fail!

Paul Muite:

Road to multipartyism: How Matiba and Jaramogi split ruined opposition


Saturday July 6 2013

The late Martin Shikuku, Siaya Senator James Orengo and other Young Turks during the Saba Saba protests in early 90s. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP
In Summary
Senior Counsel Paul Muite was Kenneth Matiba’s lawyer during agitation for pluralism in Kenya. He tells ROY GACHUHI about the highs and lows of acting for the redoubtable politician
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By ROY GACHUHI

I first met Mr Kenneth Matiba at the offices of Waruhiu and Muite Advocates because he was a client of the law firm before he became my client. In fact, to be exact, he was then a client more of Sam Waruhiu, my then senior partner than my client. However, at Waruhiu and Muite, Waruhiu would be receiving the clients but the actual legal work as to whether the case would go to court or not, drawing the pleadings, going to court, most of it, it’s me who would do that.

And my recollection is that the first case that I did for Matiba was about defamation. He wanted to sue the then outgoing chairman of the Kenya Football Federation, Mr Dan Owino. Matiba won the elections and Owino made a statement that Ken considered defamatory and he was very forceful about it that he would go to court. I went to court and argued his case and he won.

But thereafter, I don’t know whether it was ever settled. In terms of impressions, my first was of a person who was very forceful. In fact when he was giving me instructions, I remember very clearly what he was saying: ‘I am only 44 years old!’ and so on and so forth. Anyway, I found him a likeable personality who reached out to people.

What impressed me about him from the word go was that here was a man who was part of the elite in terms of wealth around the Kenyatta Government and yet he did not have a superiority complex and the arrogance that one associated with the crowd around Kenyatta in those days. I interacted with many of them and I must say that I was personally never impressed with the arrogance, the short sightedness, the chauvinism, name it.
Matiba was the opposite. He reminded me of (the author and poet) Rudyard Kipling – dining with the kings but you don’t forget who you are – he really had a very common touch. Matiba related with people more or less as human beings. He never looked down on people, he was never condescending. He also did not despise poor people.

Let me be totally honest. (Former President Mwai) Kibaki reminded me of a person who lives in denial. He, too, came from a very poor family. But it is like he didn’t want anybody to remind him of that; he was living in denial. It’s like he would have wanted to be born in the homes of the chiefs – a very sharp contrast and I will come back to Kibaki later.

Matiba was the opposite; he was at peace with wealth. With Kibaki, if you were poor it was like you were somehow going to infect him with your poverty, if you see what I mean. He was an adopted son of the chiefs. Matiba would go with you and eat anywhere. Over time we became personal friends. I used to play squash with him and so on and so forth, and I’ll come to all that later. But that’s how I first met Ken Matiba.
After that case against Dan Owino, I would do a number of things for him. Thereafter he would bring me clients. He would bring me bits of legal jobs but I have to say that we were not the only law firm because I know that Daly and Figgis Advocates were also his lawyers but for any troublesome cases he would bring them to me.
Now, to come to the politics: we had already become close. And if you check, if you go back to the time that Moi became President, you will find that the most important political issue of that time was the change-the-constitution movement which sought to bar Moi from becoming president. It failed and Moi became President in August 1978.

But the group was still there as a force. Ken Matiba was, of course, in the change-the-constitution group.
He was pro-blocking Moi. In fact, the only Kikuyus who were on Moi’s side were Charles Njonjo and Julius Gikonyo Kiano. Matiba, with (George) Mwicigi in Murang’a were anti-Moi.

Somehow, Kibaki was not in that group – but that’s another story, let’s talk about Ken. The relevance of all this is that when the elections were called in 1979, Moi and Njonjo, and the system, used those elections to rig out all those who were pro-change-the-constitution.

They were propping up JJ Kamotho. Mwicigi was rigged out but Matiba, who was a man with tremendous resources and was also streetwise, outsmarted Dr Julius Gikonyo Kiano. Moi was relying on Kiano to do the rigging in Murang’a. After the 1982 attempted coup, Moi embarked on absolute repression in Kenya. The period after this was the worst in independent Kenya’s history, and it culminated in the notorious 1988 mlolongo elections.

All this time, I was interacting with Matiba but from a distance. At that time, we lawyers were going full throttle in our protests about the violation of human rights. In 1988, it is when the Kanu party elections were held after the parliamentary elections. It had been decided that Matiba had to be rigged out. But with his tremendous resources, he was able to beat back the provincial administration and the Special Branch in Murang’a and win.

In fact, Moi was so incensed at the result that he went to a public rally in Murang’a and sacked the DC on the spot. Matiba promptly gave the sacked official a job at Kenya Breweries. In the meantime, Moi perceived that Kiano, his point man in Murang’a, was a laid back man who was no match for Matiba. He settled on Kamotho to do his bidding.

Kamotho did a fabulous rigging job, brazenly and without any scruples. Matiba was rigged out of the party elections. When this happened, Matiba’s first port of call was my office at Electricity House. He told me straightaway: “I am going to resign. Even from the Cabinet, I am going to resign.”
And I encouraged him; I think he had a lot of frustrations also because the government was collapsing – economically, socially, and politically. I told him: “That’s a very good idea, Ken.” The other thing I must specify is that even at that time, Matiba had approached Kibaki with a view to their resigning together.

And I remember drafting a statement of how Kibaki was going to resign because he had been appointed Minister for Health after being dropped as Vice-President. At that time, resigning was an act close to treason. You waited to be sacked and, after being sacked, you thanked the President for it. But I remember the statement I drafted was very mild.

I know very well Matiba went to Kibaki with that statement. He had at first accepted to go along, but he later changed his mind and didn’t see Matiba again. So, Matiba left Kibaki alone and went to the side of the Opposition which was now being led by lawyers and clergymen like Henry Okullu, Timothy Njoya and David Gitari.

Now, I told Matiba: “Don’t make the mistake that my client Njonjo made with his resignation.” What mistake had Njonjo made with his resignation? When the ‘traitor’ issue (a campaign against the former Attorney-General) came up, Njonjo was in London. When he came back, he went to see Moi to ask him ‘what is going on?”

Moi told him ‘Charles, this is siasa. I have full confidence in you. Wacha hiyo (Ignore those things).’ Njonjo believed him. Immediately after that, they brought a motion of adjournment in Parliament to discuss ‘a matter of great national importance.’

That’s when the penny dropped. Njonjo knew that these were all Moi’s machinations. So he went and wrote two resignation letters, one resigning from the Cabinet and the other resigning as Member for Kikuyu.
The letter resigning as Member for Kikuyu he took to the Speaker of the National Assembly and the one resigning from the Cabinet was to be taken to the President. What followed then was that the Cabinet resignation letter was handed to Jeremiah Kiereini, then the Chief Secretary, by Njonjo himself.
Kiereini then delivered it to Moi. Moi read it and was shocked. He didn’t think Njonjo would have the courage to resign. He pulled a drawer and threw it in there. That same afternoon, he appointed a Commission of Inquiry to look into Njonjo’s activities. By then Njonjo was still in the Cabinet!

So I told Matiba: ‘Ken, don’t make the mistake of taking your resignation letter to Moi because he will not allow the public to know that you have resigned.’ So Ken asked me ‘what do we do?’ I told him ‘this is what you will do: write the resignation letter from the Cabinet, when you dispatch it to the Office of the President at Harambee House, give copies to the media.’

Matiba loved to laugh! When I gave him that idea, he laughed uproariously. He loved it. Then I walked with him from my office at Electricity House to his office at College House and we drafted his letter of resignation. We wrote the letter and he liked it very much. Then he summoned all the media.
As soon as he distributed copies of resignation letter to the media, he handed the President’s letter to a messenger to deliver to Harambee House. Armed with their letters, journalists went straight to GPO where President Moi was commissioning some buses. They asked him for his comment. He was staggered.

From the time Matiba resigned, he went full throttle into Opposition politics and with his wealth, his courage, his single-mindedness when he put his mind at something, he changed the political landscape. When I became chairman of the Law Society, we became even closer.

Along with Charles Rubia, Ken and I used to have many meetings in my house at Karen. They would come very early in the morning riding nondescript cars because the situation was very bad. We would not even meet in the sitting room; we held our meetings in one of the bedrooms. We had dinners with religious leaders quite often in the house of Philip Gachoka in Karen who was a very close friend of Matiba.

One other incident I remember very well was an intense discussion in my house. It centred around Jaramogi Oginga Odinga who was issuing statements on his own. We felt it would be better if a partnership was formed. After that, Joab Omino and Bishop Okullu had meetings with us. So, it was agreed that we must bring in Jaramogi and if we succeed in these reforms, Jaramogi would be the joint presidential candidate.
But of the many incidents that come to my mind, one of the most outstanding was when Matiba and Rubia held that press conference calling for a referendum to decide Kenya’s political future during which they called for multi-partyism. We drafted that statement with Gibson Kamau Kuria.

The only anecdote I want to add here is that when we gave them the statement and agreed that they were going to hold a press conference, I told them that it would be courteous to also give a copy to Ambassador Smith Hempstone of the US because he had been an ally and it wouldn’t be proper for him to read about it in the media. That was agreed to and I walked the short distance from Electricity House to the former US Embassy on Moi Avenue.

When Hempstone read the statement, he remarked: ‘How strange! This is exactly what I was talking about at the Rotary Club luncheon that I’ve just attended!” If you look at the Daily Nation of that day – May 4, 1990 – you will see the front page reports of Matiba and Rubia’s press conference and Hempstone’s luncheon.
To Moi and many people, it was all choreographed but I am telling you for a fact that it was nothing but sheer coincidence.

Let me now talk about his detention. When Matiba was detained I saw him as his lawyer four times. Twice I saw him at Nairobi Area Police Headquarters because the Provincial Police Officer for Nairobi was also in charge of detainees. I saw him in Naivasha and I saw him in Shimo-la-Tewa.
Matiba's health

Now, what I would like to emphasise is that the other person who would see him was his doctor, the late Dr Jim Nesbitt. It is a pity that you are writing this story when he has just died because I would have wanted him to corroborate what I want to tell you. Let me first tell you that you could not go and see a detainee all by yourself.

There would be about 20 people surrounding you. The show of might in a conference room! And that’s where Nesbitt also used to see him. When Matiba was going into detention, he had a mild case of hypertension. But it was completely under control. He was doing a lot of exercising. He was not given to drinking, he was healthy. Now, to be taken into detention you can imagine a person of his status. He’s been locked up – thinking about his businesses, the diet ...

When Nesbitt started seeing his patient in July shortly after his detention, he used to take him medicines to contain his blood pressure but the prisons authorities always flatly refused to allow him to hand them over to Matiba. So the blood pressure kept rising, the deliberate work of the authorities. And the person who was refusing was Dr Mwongera, the government doctor!

One early morning late in October, 1990, I found Dr Nesbitt seated in my secretary’s office. And I remember his exact words as we walked into my office with him. He told me: “Paul, I never discuss my patients with my wife Mary. But last night, I had to discuss your client’s condition with Mary and I am very worried. And that is why I have come to tell you.”

Nesbitt proceeded to describe the medical manifestations – the hair, the colour and all that and he told me Matiba’s blood pressure was completely out of control. He said ‘at best, he is going to have a stroke, and at worst, he is going to die.’ I remember sending a fax because that was the fastest means of communication those days to Amnesty International in London pleading for their intervention because he was going to die – I just reproduced what Nesbitt had told me.

I didn’t make much headway. And hardly six weeks later, Matiba suffered a stroke, exactly as Nesbitt had feared. Before he became impaired when he was released, I had several meetings with him as his lawyer, he told me with his mouth – his condition now may not allow him to remember now – but he told me that he suffered that stroke in the middle of the night in his cell in Kamiti.

And he knew it was a stroke. According to him as he told me this, he banged very hard on the door until two guards heard him and they came over. He requested them to support him one on each side under the arms. They spent the rest of the night walking him around the cell to keep the blood flowing. But in the morning, Dr Mwongera prescribed pain-killers.

It took another week or so of arguments, including arguments with the Attorney- General Amos Wako because they wanted to take him to the Armed Forces Memorial Hospital. Forces Memorial Hospital always said ‘even our own stroke cases, we don’t have the capacity to treat them. We refer them to Kenyatta National Hospital’. So in the end, Moi was persuaded to allow him to go to Nairobi Hospital. They put him there under a false name until the information leaked out. Eventually they lifted the detention order.

After his highly delicate brain operation in London, performed by the best surgeon in the business, Matiba became a different person. I will give you a good example. First, I can tell it is a fact that sitting in my own house in the presence of my wife, Matiba, Rubia and I had agreed that we would leave the presidential candidacy of Ford to Jaramogi.

I remember very well this meeting took place on a Sunday. We had agreed on that and it is a fact. And the two of them actually went to Jaramogi and told him the same. You know, they used to go to meet him in the Spectre offices at Agip House and then come to my office in Electricity House.

My recollection of what they told me in my office after their meeting with Jaramogi was that Jaramogi listened to them and then spoke in that shrill voice of his – he used to speak in a shrill voice – and he said: ‘I am not opposed to a partnership. But do you remember how our first marriage ended?’
He was referring to the Kikuyu-Luo marriage of 1963. ‘Now here again you are suggesting we become one team, what am I going to tell my people?’

That is when they explained to him at length that they had decided that he, Jaramogi, was going to be the candidate. They made that clear and they came and told me that that it is what they had told him and that was the agreement because that is what we had agreed to in my house.

And this for two reasons: one, to remove animosity between the two communities as a result of how he had been treated after independence. Secondly, Jaramogi had mellowed down, completely, and he was genuinely a nationalist. After Section 2A was repealed ending Kanu’s monopoly on power and after Matiba’s operation, Kikuyu leaders, people like Kimani wa Nyoike, made a bee-line to London to urge him to run.

Even Rubia. I remember him telling me that political pacts are not meant to be kept. Now, I myself went to London to see Matiba. And I tried to reason out with him. I told him: ‘All that which you have been told by those who are telling you, if you go along with them, FORD will split and Moi will come back. Two, hadn’t we sat in my house and agreed what we agreed? And you and Charles went and told Jaramogi? And you came to my office and reported your agreement to me? Number three, this is Kibaki.’

I was trying to reason out with him but from the word go I saw that this was not the Ken Matiba that I knew. He was a different person. Because Ken Matiba, even if he was strong-willed, he was very good in listening. Whenever he saw merit in something, he went along. But now I saw that this was another Matiba altogether.
First, I had travelled around the country with Jaramogi and I had seen how popular he was. But now here was Matiba who had been in the UK for a long time recuperating from his operation telling me: ‘Don’t you know, Paul, even those Luos, they will all vote for Ken Matiba, not for Jaramogi!’

But he was really being manipulated by the delegations of Kikuyus who went to see him. And all they were interested in was not him, but themselves.
But he became utterly intransigent. Then I made my last pitch.

How to end rigging in Kenya? time for all options on the table? don't fear to think it! it is already out there I tell ya! it is on everybody's mind. It has made Ruto loose his cool!

What is the name of the Chebukati who rigged out Matiba in Murang'a!? the Chebukati of the famous 2007 was of course Kivuitu, and the one for 2022!? coming soon!

[jakaswanga]

EXPLAINING KENNETH MATIBA

The living embarassment is now safely dead and finally ashed-to-ashes. But where did he come from, and is there more where he came from?

We have fallen over ourselves publicly in paying tribute to Kenneth Njindo Matiba. Because the same political and powerful business class, which catalysed his vegetative degeneration by denying him health care in detention, took centre stage in pouring tribute at how a great man Matiba was and is, there are a few loose ends which remain to be tied. Those loose ends are explosive charges, and thus our national insecurity, covered for by such a watershed of crocodile tears.

There were enough contradictions between factions of this ruling bourgeoisie, to, once Matiba had gone rogue and become dissident, clamouring for multi-party, have Ken Matiba erased from the top. They hounded him out of credit –---early recall of loans; exorcised him to bankrupted his business; rigged him from political office, persecuted his family and, finally, exiled him to KAMITI MAXIMUM DEEP, where they were glad to let him rot after suffering a stroke.

Yet Matiba easily looks to have been one of the foremost industrious individuals of that post independence constellation of young bureaucrats entering the vacuum (of colonial demise). This would suggest he was enough aware of his go-getter prowess, his indigenous business acumen, to contemplate a BILLIONARE FUTURE without pulling the CORRUPTION LEVERS OF STATE.
Howbeit Matiba resigns early from Jomo Kenyatta's post independence cabinet. Kenyatta is dumbfounded. He is dumbfounded because he, Jomo, has already identified the state as his private instrument of accumulation. Nor is he going anywhere until death doth him depart from the State. How then, could a clever uppity young man like Ken Matiba run away from the ready-made cookie jar, an open jar where he, as Mumbi insider, only had to CHOTA adlib and become billionare overnight!?

But perhaps herein we see the inklings of the difference in consciousness between one faction of the post-colonial elite which is COMPRADOR ---doomed to auxiliary roles, and the other faction or constituency which is potentially the NATIONALIST. (Capitalist nationalist independent: You know like those Mullahs of Iran: they are nationalist, they are capitalists, they are independent! and therefore terrorists to you and I! And so too, Putin and red pretender Xi-Jinpin. They both run radical capitalist regimes, necessarily state, but outside American diktat. That independence is asking for war! And that war could just come in the so-called Thucidides trap!)

FOONOTE HERE NEEDED: Colonialism is a process which arrested the development of a local independent capitalist class. It also curtailed the emergency of a non-subservient local industrial class. Colonialism hijacks the logical historical path of a people; its neo-successor which was not liberation proper, seeks to maintain the same dynamic, albeit more discreetly whenever possible. Recall: the settler arrangement stole the best agricultural and ranching lands, reduced natives to reserves of cheap to free labour, and, checking legal edicts, cut off finance to any black-owned business, cut off OWNERSHIP of land and any property from the natives. These sanctions (exclusion from private property and accumulation channels) effectively wipes off the emergence of an indigenous CAPITALIST class. It is an arrest.

Arrested development.

Those allowed credit, and a bit of rise, are those ready to betray their people in service to the colonial order. The NYAPARAS. The most dishonourable creeps. These and their wayward culture become entrenched in the national psyche of success. But men like Matiba come up to be made of other stuff. They want to trust on own ability, a MERITOCRATIC instinct may be, or just the overconfidence of a megalomaniac? But there it is, the comprador straight jacket which is the Kenyatta-to-Moi template to fabulous richness, sits ill on the self-aware and conscious Kenneth Njindo Matiba. It is the route to dissidence, to political fame and individual doom.

His erstwhile classmates gang against him, the way the settler elite ganged against the black capitalist class. They all but kill him. And flaunt the fact they got away scot free with it. No retribution. That impunity is important to detail too.

But it is important to underline, that what the mature national bourgeoisie wants, is the total local control of their national working force. They want to to exploit them, arrange and deploy them in the productive process as they see fit, even on behalf of foreign capital. Instinctively the national bourgeoisie do not want to be mere overseers in the employ of foreign masters, they do not want to be dictated to like the Nyapara comprador, subscribed to policies manufactured by the national bourgeoisie of foreign lands. There is a certain dignity involved in being averse to clientellism, puppetism, errand bureaucratism and thing of no own mind. This is why nations seek independence, and human beings go to war for dignity, tired of daily humiliation. This is why prostitution while the oldest profession, has failed to evolve into a honourable one. First thing a prostitute kills is her/his self dignity.

The colonised and the neo-colonised live life as a daily humiliation, thus in resistance do they claim self dignity. –--This means when the IMF, whose origins and purpose we know, arrive in town with a package which Henry Rotich and Patrick Njoroge, Kamau Thugge and Joseph Kinyua, Ouru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, go into conclave and promise to IMPLEMENT to the dot, whether the people want it or not, dignity is what they surrender. Independence your foot! A human puppet, or pawns, at the top of a land, is just that, evidence of subjugation. A continued arrest of local industriousness, yeah, freezing on local entrepreneurship.

That arrest translates in Africa to a decades long delay in industrialisation while Asia sped ahead. We are a comprador-stunted continent, narratives of rising not withstanding. Take a tour of government hospitals across Africa, see what is rising there? Stench of death? Neglect and rot!? Or –-if you are Kenyan--- you could just start by the famous National referral Hospital at the capital city near you! And talk to a for once honest Lillian Koros!

(That is: imagine a Kenneth Matiba at the height of his powers running KNH!? do you think Kibaki would be wheeled to South Africa, or Bomet Ruto go for a nose repair in South Africa!?)

Kenneth Matiba, and this is important, is proven to have brought an industrious competence and diligence to stuff he undertook, even outside politics. There is the case of KFF, well narrated by Raila Odinga at the funeral. And his launch of the ethnic-neutral Breweries FC, which soon showed the likes of Gor, Luo Union and Abaluhya dust.

COMPETENCE! like incompetence, is stuff very hard to hide. The faction which triumphed over Matiba is renowned for its incompetence. Their instinct is not to build the nation, but to loot her for individual gain. So we can go through the list of ECONOMIC GIANTS which all faltered under the comprador mentality of Kenyatta-to Moi parasitism. KENATCO, UCHUMI, KENYA RAILWAYS......

There is an exhaustive study on these elsewhere, including how looters like Stanley Githunguri (of the Lillian Towers fame) fed off the National Bank of Kenya. There is no shortage of documentation, even on how Biwott and Moi drained POSTA BANK. A dangerous detail is that most of these exhaustive studies have not been done by Kenyans, but by foreign scholars. For the mature bourgeoisie from abroad want precise information when they are going to invest in a sh!thole.

NB: Believe it or not, but when –-for instance--- Mark Zuckenberg of facebook comes to forage Kenya, and he is introduced to William Ruto as the future president, he wants to make his investment decisions not on Ruto's persuasive smile, but the factual data on the man: made during the YK'92 sacking of the state.

It turned out that much of YK activities included not so much campaigning for Kanu, but using strategic positioning to grab public land and loot state institutions — such as the National Social Security Fund, Postbank Credit, Agricultural Development Corporation, National Bank of Kenya and Agricultural Finance Corporation — under the guise of raising funds for President Moi’s re-election.

So it is that a lot of these Big Businesses from afar commission excellent studies on the economies they wish to exploit. Kenyans and their academic sheep can continue bleating their songs of praise for their skinners.

I therefore wish to imply young Kenneth Matiba was in the make of the likes of Zuckenberg. Young enterprising and capitalist. A ruthless investor who counts his money like a miser, looks at Eduard Ouko's reports on Kenya, and eats fish at Mama Oliech's with his own false smile.

NB: You should have watched Zuckenberg's face get a honest expression when, during the recent rush of Russophobia in DC, a congressman asked him a particularly nasty question; whether he had enriched himself by wh-oring his creation, facebook, to Vladimir Putin to bewitch the American electorate! (otherwise the question read: are you a deliberate traitor!)

YAP, Ken Matiba wasn't a traitor.

Which leaves me with something nasty to explain. –--His change of mind in which he no longer wished to be the VP with Jaramogi Odinga as the head of the ALL-FORD Ticket.

where did the competence go, the strategic depth hide!?

This one I need to take a deep breath first.

[jakaswanga]

Apr 28, 2018 8:54:49 GMT 3 jakaswanga said:

EXPLAINING KENNETH MATIBA

The living embarassment is now safely dead and finally ashed-to-ashes. But where did he come from, and is there more where he came from?
-----------

Which leaves me with something nasty to explain. –--His change of mind in which he no longer wished to be the VP with Jaramogi Odinga as the head of the ALL-FORD Ticket.

where did the competence go, the strategic depth hide!?

This one I need to take a deep breath first.

MATIBA AND JARAMOGI FORD BREAK UP AND HAND IT TO KANU-MOI

I kind of shuddered a bit, reading Paul Muite, all those years ago. I even thought he insinuated a psychiatric explanation. Chronic disease, stroke and a steady cocktail of pharma had altered the character of Ken Matiba, making him pliable and susceptible to the parochial seductions and the fitina from the comprador Nyumba people, I meant to read between the lines. His will weakened, his intellect sapped or drugged, his mind fuzzy and disoriented in the isolation of hospital wards, Ken became delusional, detached from reality.

But now here was Matiba who had been in the UK for a long time recuperating from his operation telling me: ‘Don’t you know, Paul, even those Luos, they will all vote for Ken Matiba, not for Jaramogi!’

Read more: jukwaa.proboards.com/thread/9649/matiba-hero-nicolas-biwott-yawa?page=1#ixzz5DwedF4UQ

If Muite is verbatim correct, and we disavow the psychiatric explanation, what do we have left!?



A relapse! A backward swing of the pendulum of consciousness. –--But how come!?

I suggest to look for answers in the pitfalls of nationalist consciousness. There are two operational levels of nationalism in contrived countries like ours. There is in this case of Ken, Gikuyu nationalism squaring off against all-Kenyan nationalism in his head. In the rule, Nationalist bourgeoisie consciousness in an amalgam (Multi-ethnic state like Kenya) can oscillate, and I mean patriotically oscillate, between the ethnic –--Kikuyu, Luo, Kalenjin, Luhya, Kamba, etc----- and the 'colonial project' Kenya. The contrived nation.

I will posit, it is not a concluded argument, that positive ethnic nationalism, where positive means progressive, translates automatically into positive Kenyan nationalism. It is thinkable, that progressive ethnic nationalism has no place for contrived colonial entities, neither now nor in its futuristic plans.

These are deep waters which need careful imports in argumentation.

But suffice is to say this –----ethnic meet colonial state----- is a grey intersection. There are easily conflicted loyalties and confused priorities. It is an area of great subterfuge, expediency and political pretence, where, only too easily, all-Kenyan patriotism is evoked but merely to conceal narrow, supremacist ethnic agendas. In the worst case, the African state, a historically illegitimate colonial project but a powerful, violent reality even if an aberration, is a stranded hippopotamus at the beach of history. The whole countryside breaks into a free for all melee, a cannibalistic feed.

No one loves her, but all need her. This necessity becomes her legitimacy and longevity.

Now, bed-ridden in far lands, the 'bourgeois' Matiba is not re-enforced dally by realities on the ground. Fed by select whisperers, faulty intelligence, the pitfalls of nationalist consciousness manifest themselves, and this one in particular: the unresolved tension between ethnic and Kenyan nationalism. It finally achieves a retrogressive resolution. This is short-term, ahistoric and outrightly traitorous in a sense, given the already spoken Jaramogi fear, thus. MUITE:

He- Jaramogi- said: '‘I am not opposed to a partnership. But do you remember how our first marriage ended?’

He was referring to the Kikuyu-Luo marriage of 1963. ‘Now here again you are suggesting we become one team, what am I going to tell my people?’'

That is when they explained to him at length that they had decided that he, Jaramogi, was going to be the candidate. They made that clear and they came and told me that it is what they had told him and that was the agreement because that is what we had agreed to in my house.

And this for two reasons: one, to remove animosity between the two communities as a result of how he had been treated after independence.

Read more: jukwaa.proboards.com/thread/9649/matiba-hero-nicolas-biwott-yawa?page=1#ixzz5DwixfcvJ

So at this crucial juncture, the Kenyan nationalism of Ken Matiba was swept aside by his Gikuyu loyalties. In his deluded blindness he failed to recognise Mwai Kibaki was the preferential candidate of the Mumbi Status quo, and these rather Moi than a potentially radical Gikuyu reformer. Ken Matiba walked into the trap and the Kenyan nationalist agenda suffered a famous defeat.

Power was handed to Arap Moi in what would have been an easy election win for FORD.

Between them –---Matiba, Kibaki and Jaramogi, they more than dwarfed KANU Arap Moi. But they all were the petty bourgeoisie, classically of a limited world view, and when push came to shove, they instinctively resolved Moi was the best president for their general class interest. And so it became.

That is the dark truth. Limited consciousness. The nationalist constituency of the bourgeoisie have not made up their minds yet: ethnic patriotism or Kenyan? And if both are to co-exist, what form of state that is stable!? What remains meanwhile is LIP-SERVICE TO Kenya, hodge-podge half measures and a run-away sacking of the central and devolved state.

POST SCRIPTUM

Competence can not be faked. And so I look at today's handshake between Uhuru and Raila, and more as they come thick and fast, as just the latest episode in confusion, but a clear indication the liberation of our productive forces is not yet on the agenda, let alone climbed to an option on the table for this elite. That leaves only the usual suspect who has no other option but its true destiny of liberation!

But we have to go through our motions. The pits wherein nationalist consciousness falls, are deep, and we are in and digging. And then there will be the long climb, out.