By: Crispy Kaheru
We are both privileged and unprivileged to live in these interesting times where electoral politics seems to be taking the angle of an elitist pass time for a cabal of a wealthy few.

As at October 2010 when the Electoral Commission opened for nomination of directly elected MP candidates, Uganda had a population of about 34 million people with 50% of this population being above 18 years. Mathematically, this means that well about 17 or so million citizens qualified by age as potential candidates to run for elective offices.

However, out of such an enormous figure, only about 1,700 individuals offered themselves to run for the available 380 parliamentary seats. This represents only 0.01% of the potential candidates and about 0.001% of the total population.

Various reasons may have contributed to this glut. According to a friend who ran for an MP position in the Western region, one requires about three hundred million shillings to run a descent successful campaign. To many Ugandans, these figures are surreal.

Little wonder therefore that electoral politics has recently been regarded to as a game the rich play with poor people’s minds and money. During the Kampala mayoral race, one of the candidates confessed on radio how she had spent three hundred million shillings daily for all her campaign period. Whether this was a slip of the tongue or not, it left many impoverished listeners with a sense of deep confusion and despair. Due to such occurrences, the threshold of a good leader still remains widely contested; are they those who have a lot of wealth or good character? Is leadership about content or appearances? If indeed democracy runs on financial might alone, then it is a hoax and if this hoax reduces large swathes of citizens to electoral voyeurs, then it is definitely a fraud.

Against this background one would have the audacity to ask, whether crude capitalism hijacked the essence of electoral democracy leaving money the master over moral; conscience and virtue. How then do we as a nation move on with deeper humanistic convictions; principles and values? Strong structures world over have not been constructed by money but by conscience. Money and its value must be made to remain an enabler and not the core.

Very interestingly though, it’s all not lost, in previous elections, we have seen some out of the ordinary scenarios where the marginalized have competed with the wealthy and the marginalized persons have won. Parliament as it is today is over 60% youth which indicates a clear investment in future leadership. The question that arises is therefore one of quality not wealth or age bracket. The activism and vibrancy in parliament seems to be youth driven. Probably this silver lining dispels the growing adage that electoral politics is a game of those who are ready to invest in colossal sums. This further reinforces the fact that it is more to do with content, beliefs and conviction.

The duty is on us to repossess our country’s political glory. The challenge calls for daring actions to re-humanize our politics. Electoral politics should not be about demarcation, exclusivity, classification and conspiracy but should be something that fosters inclusivity, transparency, accountability and respectful.

This is an example of the CIA Meddling in African Affairs during the cold-war era
| Other CIA activities in Africa |

By Douglas Okwatch

Fresh details of a conspiracy that could have provided a motive for the assassination of Cabinet Minister Thomas Joseph Mboya have emerged ahead of the 39th year since his death.

Kenyatta
The CIA appears to have recruited the flamboyant minister and former trade unionist in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta, who the American spy agency labelled as “unsafe.”

Declassified information in an undated issue of Ramparts, an American political and literary magazine published in the 1960s and early 1970s, accessed by The Standard at the Kenya National Archives, shows an elaborate conspiracy by CIA to prop up Mboya and isolate Kenyatta.

Ramparts closed shop in 1975. Whether this scheme sowed seeds of suspicion and mistrust between Kenyatta and Mboya, who at the time of his assassination was the Economic Planning minister and Kamukunji MP, is a matter for further investigation.

The revelations come four months after Mboya’s widow, Pamela, wrote to Mr Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general who also chaired talks that ended political violence in Kenya early in the year, asking that the matter be investigated afresh by a truth commission.

“The assassination of my husband, like others after him, is a matter that has remained shrouded in mystery and speculation, and which has been avoided by successive regimes in this country,” she wrote.

Trail of Questions

In a telephone conversation with this writer last month, Mrs Mboya promised to “drop the bombshell” in an interview. But she later changed her mind. Her last word was that she would spill the beans at an “appropriate time.”

Questions also abound on whether the convicted assassin, Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, was actually executed. The testimony of the assassin’s own brother and anecdotal evidence that he has been seen by a retired military officer, among other claims, pile on the doubts of his execution.

Mboya
Secret letters, also declassified, further show that Mboya had a particularly tumultuous relationship with Mr Mbiyu Koinange, a minister and power broker of the Kenyatta presidency.

In one instance, Koinange wrote an emotional letter to Kenyatta to defend himself against allegations of disloyalty by Mboya.

“Sir, you know my loyalty to you personally, to our Kanu party; of my long loyalty to Kenya and latterly my loyalty to our new independent Council of Ministers.”

“My loyalty is beyond doubt, therefore, my Prime Minister. I frankly feel that there is no need for me to reply to Mr Mboya’s letter.”

“It is unfortunate, ill-timed, egoistic and, if I may say so, an irresponsible letter which is skilfully designed by one of my colleagues to endanger the good working spirit among us.”

Koinange was then Minister of State in the Office of the President and one of the most powerful figures in the Government. He died in September 1981.

The secret letters in our possession cover the period between 1961 and 1966. Desperate to extricate himself from the tag of traitor, Mboya, in a letter on March 11, 1961, pleaded with Kenyatta, who was languishing in a Lodwar jail: “I’d hate to appear a hero at your expense.”

He attached copies of various statements he had made in meetings with the Governor for Kenyatta’s perusal. The move appeared to capture his own internal consciousness that Kenyatta may have begun to perceive him as a threat.

The letters also reveal how the CIA used Kenyatta to finish Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, his Vice-President, politically by amending the Constitution to his office of all powers.

Traitor or nationalist?

Ramparts reported that: “The CIA programme in Kenya could be summed up as one of selective liberation. The chief beneficiary was Tom Mboya who, in 1953, became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour.”

Koinange
Both a credible nationalist and an economic conservative, Mboya who was popularly known as ‘TJ’, was ideal for CIA’s purpose. The main nationalist hero and eventual chief of state, Kenyatta, was not considered “sufficiently safe” owing to his initial deep socialist leanings, the dossier said.

Ramparts quotes Mboya as saying: “Those proven codes of conduct in the African societies, which have over the ages conferred dignity on our people and afforded them security regardless of their station in life.

“I refer to the universal charity, which characterises our societies, and I refer to the African thought processes and cosmological ideas, which regard men, not as a social means, but as an end and entity in society.”

This powerful quote not only captures Mboya’s own prescription of African socialism, which endeared him to the West and made the CIA view his policy as safe, but it also paints the picture of an articulate, sophisticated and ambitious political thinker.

Soon after, Mboya joined the CIA jet set, travelling around the world from Oxford in the UK to Calcutta in India on funds from such conduits as the Africa Bureau and from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

ICFTU, which played a key role in Kenya’s independence through trade unionism, is an aggregation of international trade union secretariats set up in 1949 to counter an upsurge of left-wing trade unionism outside the communist bloc, according to Ramparts. The CIA allegedly funded operations at the time.

But when George Cabot Lodge, one of the directors of the ICFTU, made the statement (believed to have been in specific reference to Mboya at the time) that “the obscure trade unionist of today may well be the president or prime minister of tomorrow,” he left no doubt about Mboya’s personal ambitions and by extension the CIA’s scheme of things.

Initially, CIA’s natural strategy was to underwrite Mboya and his labour federation as a force against Kenyatta. But when tact changed in accordance with the world order and the CIA’s new priorities, it was agreed that Western labour groups stop funding Mboya.

An accommodation with Kenyatta was now thought necessary, particularly to ensure that he did not support rebels in Congo, and to get him to close ranks against the agitating Kenyan left.

But the die had been cast. The CIA, through its activities, had effectively propped up Mboya as a possible future President of Kenya. That threat was real during Kenyatta’s time and even at the dawn of the second decade of his leadership, according to Ramparts.

It was a strategy that the CIA would use again to the benefit of Kenyatta against Odinga — use the credibility of the appropriate militant to crush the rest. The CIA link, which Mboya vigorously fought to distance himself with, would be used later to fight him politically by branding him a traitor and a man who could not to be trusted. He wrote lengthy responses in his defence.

But had the CIA sowed enough seeds of wrath between Mboya and the political establishment in Kenya to provide someone with enough reason to kill him?

REFERENCES:

1. Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya’s murder & the return of one-party State
2. Ready or Not – TIME
3. Setback for Tom – TIME