Opinion
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta Has Demonstrated That He is a Statesman, Not a Mere Politician
By Philip Ochieng
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta (l) with his deputy William Ruto. PHOTO/Billy Mutai
– The Kenyan President relinquished power in order to free the country from charges that are purely personal.
From every angle you look, Uhuru Kenyatta made history this past week. The Kenyan leader relinquished power and stepped lively into precincts where – knowing Europe’s racial arrogance – he might have been arrested.
No matter how fleeting it was, mere hours, the President’s action amounted to abdication – in favor of the country’s deputy President, William Ruto.
Yet few onlookers appreciated not only this fact but also its historic nature. For, in recent decades, no head of any African state has relinquished power so voluntarily.
The mere manner of it, President Kenyatta’s trust of political power into other hands even for a moment, should have quashed the idle talk one often hears in the country’s capital Nairobi about insoluble ethnic distrust being characteristic of the ruling confederacy led by Kenyatta – an ethnic Kikuyu and Ruto – an ethnic Kalenjin.
Indeed, the way Kenyatta carried himself throughout the week was a study in contrast with, for instance, Daniel arap Moi – Kenya’s second president and in turn Kenyatta’s own predecessorial sponsor.
It would never have occurred to Moi thus to trust any of his political lieutenants with power even for half a second. Whenever Moi travelled abroad for any length of time, he made no announcement as to whether, in his absence, anybody would be acting as President.
Yet the question of a power vacuum never arose. Apparently, in his absence, Moi left the reins of rule in the hands of non-politicians, probably security agents.
The manner and dignity in which young Uhuru Kenyatta carried himself last week and all the way into The Hague also revealed a mind entrenched in the 21st century.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is based in the Netherlands – a state which has only recently committed a hundred times greater human rights crimes when it colonized large sections of Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas.
Debonair, self-confident, sophisticated suave, with it, youthful, he might have charmed even his most dedicated detractors in Kenya’s opposition movement.
But, as I say, Uhuru Kenyatta relinquished power in order to free the country from charges that are purely personal. That is our saving grace. It is what lifts Kenyatta from a mere politician to the much higher rung of a statesman.
Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist and African political commentator based in Nairobi, Kenya. The original version of this article was published in the Daily Nation