allAfrica.com: Kenya: When Rivals Think He is Down, It's a Fresh Start for Kibaki (Page 1 of 2)

If Robert Greene's seventh commandment of power: Get others do the job for you, but always take credit (or bag the prize) was carved in stone, Mwai Kibaki would be the Moses to take it to the Israelites.

Once he was ushered into politics as Kanu executive officer in March 1960, events took their own course but with a characteristic trend that had luck and circumstances find him at the right place at the right time.

He did not work hard for it. At times he did not even want it. But because others wanted it and saw him fitting into their designs, they gave it to him. In the end many fell by the wayside.

But, by a twist of fate, the man they saw as a mere pawn in their game plan ended up taking home the prize.

The first casualty of the Kibaki bug was Oginga Odinga. The country's first vice- president had enthusiastically fetched Mr Kibaki from Kampala to use him to fight his arch-rival, Tom Mboya.

A quick reading of Mr Kibaki's character le Mr Mboya, a more cunning and a ruthless fighter than Mr Odinga, to move deftly to have Mr Kibaki in his corner and used him, knowingly or otherwise, to frustrate Mr Odinga.

As the 1963 independence elections approached, Mr Odinga's game plan was to politically finish Mr Mboya in his Nairobi political base. Odinga and Mboya had a balanced support among the Luo in Nairobi.

The decisive vote would come from the Kikuyu voters where Mr Odinga at first had a little edge over Mr Mboya because of his historical liaison with the Waiyaki family.

One-time Foreign Affairs minister Munyua Waiyaki was quite a force to reckon with in city politics at the time.

To offset the balance, Mr Mboya convinced Mr Kibaki to contest the then Donholm parliamentary seat (later renamed Bahati then Makandara). Mr Mboya himself would contest in neighbouring Kamukunji constituency.

The plot was to have Mr Mboya whip the Luos in both Kamukunji and Donholm into electing him, and Mr Kibaki as the latter did the same with Kikuyus in both constituencies.

It worked, and both went to parliament to the utter dismay of Odinga.

To reward him, Mr Mboya and James Gichuru talked President Kenyatta into appointing Mr Kibaki assistant minister for Finance with Mr Gichuru as the minister in the first independence Cabinet.

Retired politician John Keen, who played ball from Odinga's side in those days,remarks of Mr Kibaki: "He was a big disappointment on our side. We had expected him to shore up our numbers and humiliate the Mboya group.

Cut-throat politics

And what did Mr Keen think of Mr Kibaki those days? "I never heard him talk, and I thought he had no taste for the cutthroat politics of the day", he says adding, "those days we were hotheads who would tell off Kenyatta himself and get away with it. To us Kibaki did not exist, politically that is."

But while the excitable radical group of John Keen could not see much threat in the young Mr Kibaki, the pragmatic Mr Mboya saw a great potential in him as a tool to cut the hotheads down to size.

Mr Mboya had been appointed the first minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs with the sole mission of removing legal hurdles that stood in the way of an imperial presidency which Kenyatta wanted for himself.

Secondly and equally important, he was to use the position to politically tame the radicals coalescing behind Mr Odinga. He played the role to great satisfaction of himself and his boss.

But Mr Mboya had his sights set high. To get where he eventually wanted to be in the leadership of the new republic, he knew he had to have his pulse on the country's economic planning.

So in July 1963, he convinced Prime Minister Kenyatta to create the Economic and Planning department within the Ministry of Finance and appoint Mr Kibaki as it's de facto head though still an assistant minister.

It was done. Five months later, the department became a full-fledged ministry with Mr Mboya as the minister and Mr Kibaki his assistant.

Using the new ministry together with his position as Kanu secretary general, Mr Mboya worked overtime to push his political rival Mr Odinga off the political cliff.

When the Odinga group finally walked out of the Cabinet in March 1966, a top beneficiary of the ensuing Cabinet reshuffle, courtesy of Mr Mboya, was Mr Kibaki, who was elevated to a Cabinet minister and moved to the Commerce and Industry docket.

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