The Mt Kenya Times 
By Njonjo Mue
[1999 was a busy year for Kenyans in South Africa as they continued to do their best to expose the human rights abuses of the Moi regime back home and to amplify the voices of pro-democracy activists to influence international public opinion in order to bring pressure to bear for change.
The two letters reproduced below, which Njonjo wrote at the time, will serve as a window into the momentous events that he and his compatriots were living through as they did their best to appeal to President Mbeki and President Moi to join them on the right side of history.
On 6th June 1999, Thabo Mbeki was sworn in as the second democratically elected president of South Africa, taking over from Nelson Mandela who had stepped down after serving only one term.
In his capacity as Convenor of the Kenya Democratic Initiative in South Africa (KENDISA), Njonjo wrote a letter to the incoming President objecting to the invitation of President Daniel Arap Moi to attend the swearing in ceremony, and urging President Mbeki to use his influence to call for a halt to the human rights abuses of the Kenya Government and to help hasten the coming of a new democratic order in Kenya. ]
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Njonjo Mue
The Kenya Democratic
Initiative in South Africa
P.O. Box 30942
Braamfontein
Johannesburg
16th June 1999
President Thabo Mbeki
Office of the President
Union Buildings
Pretoria
Dear President Mbeki,
HASTEN THE DAWN OF DEMOCRACY IN KENYA
Please receive our warmest congratulations on your election as South Africa’s second democratically elected President. Your overwhelming victory is a sign of the faith that the people of South Africa have in your leadership and an extension of the mandate that they gave the African National Congress in 1994 to continue leading the transformation of South Africa into a modern democratic state and creating a new legacy of freedom and democracy.
We also wish to take this opportunity to commend the people of South Africa for peacefully organizing and conducting a successful election and in so doing for continuing to entrench democracy and the rule of law at home and showing an example to the rest of the continent.
The challenges you and your government face in the next five years are daunting. But we trust that under your able leadership, the people of South Africa will continue to do what they have done so well in the last five years – to act together, as the ANC election manifesto bids them, further to give birth to a South Africa of freedom, prosperity and security for all, committed to act together to solve the national problems that confront all South Africans.
As Africans, we rejoice in the strides that South Africans have made since they ended apartheid minority rule five years ago and we join you in looking forward to a future full of hope for this country and for the continent of Africa. As Kenyans residing here, we express our gratitude for the hospitality that has been extended to us by our fellow Africans.
Kenya and South Africa share a common history of struggle against colonial rule. President Mandela has gone on record as saying how our own struggle against colonialism inspired the ANC in the 1950s, and how the Mau Mau Freedom Fighters provided part of the inspiration for the formation of Umkonto we Sizwe.
And although Kenya was not one of the frontline states, some of South Africa’s exiles during the days of apartheid found a welcoming home in our country. We imagine that it is in light of these shared historical ties that President Daniel Arap Moi has been invited to attend your inauguration.
However, we find it ironical that President Moi can be present at what is, in effect, a celebration of democracy and respect for human rights less than a week after his government violently disrupted Kenyans who were peacefully demonstrating in Nairobi. Their only crime was to ask for a people-driven process of much needed constitution reform – a process that will ensure that the people shall govern.
Mr. President, we remind you that the ANC election manifesto places a high stake on the African Renaissance and emphasizes South African’s role in bringing it about. It says in part:
“Our challenge is to promote peace and development, to foster democratic systems of government, respect for human rights, and an end to corruption throughout the continent.”
But while the days of dictatorship are decidedly over for South Africa, the Kenyan government, under President Moi, seems committed to swim against the current and to march against the spirit of the African Renaissance. The following are but a few examples of how the Kenyan government has failed its people:
Basic rights:
President Moi’s government continues to abuse basic rights of citizens at will and trample the people’s legitimate aspirations at whim. This was most recently demonstrated by last week’s events in Nairobi. Kenyan citizens cannot express their views without inviting brute violence from the police.
Ironically, the same police force that is so efficient in disrupting peaceful demonstrations is unable to guarantee security to the majority of Kenyans, especially those that are suspected of holding views contrary to those of the establishment. Torture in police cells is endemic. The labour movement – so instrumental to the liberation of South Africa – is virtually dead in Kenya, as the government will not let it operate and organize independently.
Corruption:
President Moi has over the decades presided over one of the most corrupt systems on the globe. State coffers have been looted bare by people in government and their close associates.
In the last week alone, the official report of the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee has revealed the theft of millions of shillings from the taxpayer by people in power. The Vice President and a senior Cabinet Minister in Moi’s government have been implicated in a Kshs 850 Million (85 Million Rands) scam, while the President’s son is alleged in the same report to have imported six luxury cars without paying duty.
Impunity is the name of the game as year after year the Auditor-General reveals massive corruption implicating individuals whom, in spite of overwhelming evidence, the state does not prosecute, because they form an integral part of the ruling cabal.
In the meantime, the state in unable to provide basic services such as medical care to the most needy, education and security. The number of people who die in hospitals for lack of medicine and facilities, and in preventable accidents on roads that have not been repaired for years as the money has disappeared into private accounts, is fast approaching genocidal proportions.
Constitutional reforms:
Virtually every sector in Kenya is facing imminent collapse, yet the government refuses to listen to any voice but its own deafening self-adulation. After a long struggle for meaningful liberation that will enable the people to govern through a new democratic constitution, the Kenyan government has recently thwarted genuine efforts at making such as a constitution a reality.
Ignoring a national outcry, President Moi now insists on using a Parliament which is neither wholly legitimate nor truly representative to rubberstamp a document of his own making whose only aim will be to perpetuate the 36 year reign of the ruling party in power.
Mr. President, Kenya has many problems – their name is legion! South Africa too has its own problems, and one might well legitimately ask why we should burden you and your new administration with our problems while there is so much that needs your attention at home. We seek to involve you in the affairs of our country for three main reasons:
First, you will agree that, as Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
The problems in Kenya are causing a major exodus of desperate people seeking a better future and many are ending up in South Africa. It is in the interest of South Africa to help Kenya to resolve the issues facing us and thereby make our country habitable again.
We would respectfully remind you of your words in your address to the United Nations University in Tokyo, Japan, on 9 April 1998, where you said:
“Such are the political imperatives of the African Renaissance which are inspired both by our painful history of recent decades and the recognition of the fact that none of our countries is an island which can isolate itself from the rest, and that none of us can truly succeed if the rest fail.”
Second, while the problems facing Kenya may be similar to those of South Africa, the distinction should always be made that South Africa’s problems are a legacy of apartheid which the people have together embarked upon dismantling. Kenya’s problems on the other hand are a creation of a handful of selfish and corrupt individuals who have entrenched themselves in power and seem to be on a crusade to impoverish the rest of the citizenry and deny them their basic human dignity.
In your speech in Tokyo, you committed to fighting neo-colonialism in Africa to ensure that the people did indeed get to govern themselves. You said that the exit of Mobutu Sese Seko from the African stage represented the death of neo-colonialism on our continent.
But we hasten to point out that African kleptocracy did not die with Mobutu, for there are still some leaders with mobutu-esque tendencies who preside over the hopeless impoverishment of their own people.
The African Renaissance shall not dawn on our continent as long as enlightened African leaders continue to turn a blind eye on their wayward brethren and the consequent suffering of millions of their fellow Africans.
Third, the recent South African elections are a glowing testimony to a young constitutional order that is working for its entire people. South Africa is blessed with one of the most liberal constitutions in the world and one that the South African people themselves drafted in a truly participatory process through the Constitutional Assembly.
These lessons in constitution-making are still fresh in the minds of South Africans and can be shared with Kenyans as we seek a way out of the quagmire into which we have sunk.
In this regard, our plea to you is easily captured by paraphrasing your own plea to your Japanese audience, with reference to the Meiji Restoration, in your speech of April 1998:
We are moved by the conviction that the last five years of South African history and the transformation from the troubled days of apartheid to the point, today, where you have a vibrant, modern, democratic state, has a multiplicity of lessons for us Kenyans, which we cannot afford to ignore or, worse still, not know. If we as students are badly informed and badly governed as we are, you have a responsibility to be our teachers. The people of Kenya are ready to learn, even if their leaders are not.
Mr. Mbeki, as we share in the joy of South Africans today when you are inaugurated as their new President; and as we join in marking Youth Day – a day when so many fell in order that the people might govern – we humbly seek to remind you that elsewhere on this continent, life is a daily struggle that is quickly becoming a meaningless search for meaning.
We ask for the intervention of your government in a multiplicity of fora to help us hasten the day when our own “dark days of despair shall give way to our season of hope.”
We thank you for your kind attention and take this opportunity to convey to Your Excellency the assurances of our highest consideration.
Yours faithfully,
Njonjo Mue
For The Kenya Democratic
Initiative in South Africa
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LETTER TO PRESIDENT MOI
By Njonjo Mue
[At the dawn of the new millennium, Kenya had sunk to an all time low. It was faced by seemingly terminal decay and intractable problems that seemed to overwhelm the body- politic.
At the centre of it all was Daniel Arap Moi, in his 21st year of largely dictatorial rule during which his government seemed hell-bent to block any form of democratic advances. Despite the Constitution setting a 10 year presidential term limit, Moi gave no indication of preparing to leave and indeed went around the country saying that no one could fit into his shoes.
Njonjo Mue wrote the following letter to the President from Johannesburg where he was working at the time, warning him of the anger and frustration of Kenya’s young people and urging him to leave the stage so that Kenyans with a real stake in the future of their country could take charge of the affairs of their land.]
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Njonjo Mue
P.O. Box 30942
Braamfontein 2017
Johannesburg
Republic of South Africa
22 December 1999
H.E. Daniel Arap Moi
President of the Republic of Kenya
Office of the President
Harambee Avenue
Nairobi
Kenya
Dear Mr. President,
I write to you, at the dawn of a new century, on a multiplicity of national issues that are undoubtedly already well known to you, but which we dare not turn away from, as long as they remain unaddressed.
I am a Kenyan citizen who, at 32 years of age, has a real stake in the future of our country and, though not mandated to speak for anyone but myself, I can confidently assert that my concerns are shared by the majority of Kenyans of my generation.
Sir, one does not need a college degree to see that our country, under your leadership, is getting into the 21st Century in very poor shape indeed: The economy has all but collapsed, social services for the poor are non-existent, poverty is endemic, corruption is still out of control, the education system has failed, the infrastructure is a shambles, the agricultural sector is struggling, and HIV/AIDS threatens to annihilate our nation, relentlessly wiping out the most productive age group in our country.
In all this, your government has woefully failed to provide the leadership that is so desperately needed to turn our country around and to avert an inevitable humanitarian catastrophe. Instead, the political elite has turned its whole attention to a constitutional reform process that has been sabotaged by you and your supporters at every turn.
You are due to retire from office in three years time and yet you continue to undermine the structures that should guarantee a smooth, peaceful and democratic transition after your exit. You subject the country to a dangerous guessing game and behave like a monarch who is reluctant to step down. Moreover, you have threatened to personally handpick your successor, as though 30 million Kenyans are incapable of determining their own destiny after you are gone.
Such prevarication on your part is draining national energies that would be better expended sorting out the mess that your government has created over decades of misrule and corruption. Your government continues to obstruct any good-faith efforts to build a truly democratic and united Kenya, even as you traverse the country paying lip service to these values.
You have gone on record as saying that you wish to leave a legacy of a prosperous, united Kenya at peace with itself. But how can this be when you have made tribalism the hallmark of your administration?
After the damage that you have done to our national psyche through decades of diabolical divide and rule tactics, just what magic wand are you now planning to wave to undo in two years the effects of thirty years of merciless pillage and reckless plunder of our beloved native land?
Thankfully, despite your years of dividing Kenyans along tribal lines, a new generation recognizes the need to remain united. And though you have thrived on confounding us by those things that divide us – tribe, class, history and anything else that can weaken the people’s resolve and enable you to rule and reign even from beyond the grave – young Kenyans have chosen to start defining those things that unite us as a nation.
We are prepared to stand up to the new challenges that face us as Kenyans and as Africans, not by denying our rich cultural diversity, but by harnessing it to create one nation out of many communities. We shall not promote a form of unity while actively denying its substance, an art that has hitherto been perfected by you.
I wish to warn you, sir, that young Kenyans are a very angry and extremely disillusioned lot today. They have watched your government snatch their future from them and trample it underfoot with impunity. We are excluded from any real decision-making processes as you bid us wait our turn to assume leadership.
But we fear that, at the rate at which the current political elite is going, by the time ‘our turn’ comes, there shall not be much of a country to talk about. Young people are tired of being treated like children who can play no meaningful role in national matters except to be youth wingers and praise singers to old guard politicians who are well past their prime.
Kenya is not lacking in the ideas or the human resources needed to confront the myriad problems that our country faces today. But you and your government have proved wholly incapable of offering any workable solutions. The best service you can render your country now is to gracefully get out of the way and let the people with a real stake in the future of our country guide it into the next century.
And it would be a great act of patriotism, Mr. President, if you stopped trying to fool the world that without you, Kenya would crumble. For we shall go on; we shall survive, indeed we shall thrive; and we shall reclaim our pride of place among the family of nations.
That is a given! The only variable in question is the amount of effort it will take to get our beautiful country back on track. This will depend largely on whether you and your clique of court jesters and praise singers can still your deafening self-adulation long enough to be able to hear the still, silent voice of the vast majority of Kenyans. Their unequivocal demand is that it is time for you to go.
Can you hear their voices, Mr. President? Will you heed their rising voices? They are the voices of a new generation of Kenyans, which, to quote Nelson Mandela, “are emerging to answer new historical challenges; the voices of men and women who exist in all communities and across all cadres of our society, and who will define themselves as leaders in their capacity to identify the issues that unite us as a nation.”
They are the voices of real patriots who will raise the banner of Kenya and bid us to confidently follow as we march together, proud and united, into the next millennium, as one nation under God.
Yours sincerely,
Njonjo Mue
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