From the day the National Accord was signed into Law, the name Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete found its way into the Kenyan political lexicon. Increasingly, Kikwete was a dominant player in the Kenyan political chessboard, bringing a swift end to the power struggle between the ODM leader Raila Amolo Odinga and PNU’s Mwai Kibaki. Both Kibaki and Raila are currently out of government (though Kibaki is still supra-president) and while Raila remains in active politics, Kibaki is nursing Lucy or playing golf or doing whatever he is doing. To be honest, this writer is not a great fan of Mavi ya Kuku because Mavi ya Kuku was never a president of this writer. But this is another day’s story. A sad story. A lot is going on in East Africa. I hear at EALA, Kenya’s parliamentarians staged a walkout, further frustrating Tanzania, a country which is increasingly facing south; thanks to the combined incredulity of President Uhuru Kenyatta, Uganda strongman Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s noble dictator Paul Kagame. Until Kikwete’s spat with Kagame over the Congo crisis, the powder keg of this part of the pangea, the political tectonics of the region put him at par with Yoweri Museveni, especially insofar as geopolitical balance of this restive region is concerned. Yoweri and Kagame are chips of the same bloc. Both came to power through the gun, and both are using the gun (primarily) and the ballot (secondarily) to hung on to power. But Kikwete is a different leader. Tanzania’s socialist history has maintained a highly cohesive country, with power seen as a true expression of the people. Jakaya Kikwete is no Museveni, Kagame, Yoweri or Uhuru. While Kenya’s political problem is the runaway ethnic greed and hegemony called tribalism, Rwanda is an emerging ‘muted democracy’ and Uganda has resigned to the gods and cows of Museveni. Tanzania, on the other hand, has neither of these. Meaning, the land of Julius Nyerere remains the only true example of a socialist democracy where the race to the top has not been ‘mafianised’ as is here at home. So there was a plot to try Uhuru in Tanzania, not the ICC at the Hague. Uhuru faces justice for mass murder, rape, forceful displacement of communities and other grisly crimes only imaginable in a vulture society such as the one his father, the dead Jomo Kenyatta, founded in 1963. But I digress again. Uhuru will not be tried in Tanzania. The Tanzanians do not wish to be glued on their national Television sets watching charred bodies of burned people in a church at Kiambaa in Eldore. The Tanzanians do not wish to watch the kind of public shame that we are used to where politicians go to Dar Es Salaam to sing the country’s national anthem draped in the country’s national flag. Jakaya has been told, and this is what our source at the Ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi informed us, to “severe any links with the kenyan facing crimes against humanity.” Chama Cha Mapinduzi was here last when ODM had its national convention in Kasarani where father of modern democracy was declared the party’s flag bearer. Ideologically, the Tanzanians have leaned more to the Odingas than the Kenyattas. In fact, it was during Jomo Kenyatta’s despotic stranglehold of the Kenyan state that Mwalimu Nyerere (now in heaven with the 24 elders) told his people that Kenya was a “man eat man society”. Senior Chama cha Mapinduzi officials who spoke with our source in Dodoma are said to have been uncomfortable with the Kenyan cases being tried in their peaceful, bloodless country. “We fought the Germans in the Maji Maji and we want them to feel guilty for posterity. I hear your MauMau went to seek money from the British. Have you not removed the guilt of colonialism from them?” posed one elderly Tanzanian whose disgust for the vulture capitalism in Kenya shows whenever he remembers the pictures of the post-election violence. “How could it happen?” he asks. Well, Mama Fatou Bensouda will this begin revealing how Uhuru and Ruto burned up the country. Tanzanians, those who talk about Kenya on the streets, are saying they do not want to be party to injustice. As the Hague cases begin at the ICC, AG Githu better forgets Uhuru and Ruto ever being tried in Nyerere’s land. Kikwete put him in power, but Tanzanians have rejected him! Hague pap!
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 09:40:01 +0000
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