Of double standards and dark shadows; hypocrisy shaping 2027 presidential race

There is certainly a lot of hypocrisy poisoning the air at present. Double standards, wooh! All those little white hens out there! To hear some people moralising, you’d think they and their heroes have always exhibited the most impeccable standards of behaviour. They sanctimoniously lecture others on ethics, while having violated the same rules themselves. 

All this has nothing to do with any constructive national effort but, rather, involves desperate attempts to protect and enhance certain positions and forestall damaging exposure. There is a sharp disconnect between pious words and dirty deeds.

The cases concerning William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta are only too well known, from the rapacious and widespread land and business-grabbing, the off-the-scale financial looting, the stashing of huge, unimaginable, volumes of Kenya’s wealth abroad, and the human rights abuses.

Both have faced the ignominy of an international court and charges of murder, rape and persecution of their fellow Kenyans. Their tenures as president have been marked by extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, coercive intimidation and state-sanctioned torture, all designed to neutralise political opposition.

Uhuru can no longer stand as a presidential candidate. Ruto is doing his darnedest not to become the first one-term president. Neither is in a justifiable position to criticise anyone for anything, even dropping litter.

And I agree with Ruto – anyone who thinks it is good to vote for thieves is reasoning-impaired and needs their head seeing to.

‘Tribalist!’ is a frequent charge, aimed mostly at Rigathi Gachagua, who has indeed been guilty of tribalistic hubris.

But among presidential hopefuls, we’ll start with former chief justice David Maraga, who on September 1, 2017, bravely annulled the presidential election of June 8 that year. It was unprecedented in the annals of our judicial rulings, and no one can take that from him.

But Maraga has had his challenges. He faced multiple ouster petitions in 2019, including one alleging that 85 per cent of his office staff were from his Kisii community, and that most of the office’s discourse was conducted in the Kisii language.

During public scrutiny in 2012 by the Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board, a 2009 criminal case came up where he had reduced a murder charge to manslaughter for Kisii defendant Andrew Moache Ominga, a policeman who had trailed, confronted and shot dead David Kimutai Too, then Ainamoi MP, together with Too’s girlfriend, who had been dating both men.

Maraga has defended both his judicial rulings (“rule of law”) and his office appointments, saying the latter were based strictly on merit and qualifications, rather than ethnic considerations. Of course. Presumably, only Kisiis were qualified.

We are grateful that Maraga hasn’t killed anyone, persecuted anyone or had anyone raped, but the matter of tribalism remains an open question.

Next is Fred Matiang’i, who returned to Kenya in April last year after two years with the World Bank in the US.

Uhuru has apparently never accepted the idea that he would not somehow regain control of this county, whether as prime minister via his attempted Constitutional changes, or by proxy.

That proxy could have been Ruto, but Ruto got cocky and took off at a tangent, and now the chances rest in Matiang’i, prominent as a Cabinet Secretary (CS) during Uhuru’s presidency, and indeed effective in several areas.

As CS Education, Matiangi’s achievements included overhauling the Kenya National Examinations Council, expanding access to secondary education, and introducing free textbooks and the Competency-Based Curriculum.

He oversaw the transition from analog to digital TV, expanded broadband access, and supported the Konza Technopolis, the so-called ‘Silicon Savannah’, the5,000-acre smart city and Special Economic Zone located in Machakos, Makueni, and Kajiado counties.

As CS Interior, he strengthened community policing with the Nyumba Kumi initiative, organising residents into clusters of ten households that could mutually monitor security threats.

These and related achievements marked Matiang’i out as a competent and successful technocrat.

But darker shadows hang over him, and Matiang’i has been associated with several major scandals, one involving a piece of land in Ruaraka. This became a public corruption controversy after it emerged that he in 2017 authorised the payment of some Sh1.5 billion to two companies associated with businessman Francis Mburu, for this 13.5-acre plot that the government had in fact already owned since the 1980s. 

Matiang’i has consistently maintained his innocence, arguing that he acted in good faith, but the Court of Appeal in July this year ruled the acquisition unlawful.

Nor did the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) see innocence in the affair, and in August it ordered Matiang’i and 24 others to repay the Sh1.5 billion, with interest. Mburu has since sued to stop the EACC recovering the money.

It transpired that government officials had been warned that the land was already in public ownership, so calling this a ‘witch-hunt’, as some have, typifies the kind of blame-shirking we need to eliminate. Forcing culpable people to take responsibility for actions that have harmed the public is exactly what we have been lacking. This is a start.

In 2018, Matiang’i announced that traces of mercury had been found in 10,000 bags of brown sugar imported from Egypt by Flora Bakers Ltd – a claim that was later disproved.

To shorten a long story covering a number of trials and reviews, the Kenya Bureau of Standards and the Kenya Revenue Authority, with top officials initially charged for releasing the goods, testified that the sugar was legally compliant. Matiang’i’s earlier ban was branded political and aimed at protecting sugar cartels.

Much more significant are the human rights abuses that occurred while Matiang’i was CS Interior.

On August 15, 2017, during post-election turbulence, police forced entry and tossed teargas into a home in Nyalenda, a Kisumu suburb, violently assaulting the parents and in the process inflicting mortal injuries on their six-month-old daughter, Samantha. The baby became a national symbol of police brutality and impunity, the so-called ‘Baby Pendo’ scandal.

A public judicial inquest found senior police commanders culpable under the legal doctrine of ‘command responsibility’, and that the police force had been guilty of a systemic campaign of murder, rape, and torture.

It was the first time police officers had been charged with crimes against humanity under the domestic International Crimes Act, but the Director of Public Prosecutions at the same time dropped charges against eight senior police commanders, sparking widespread outrage. ‘Command responsibility’ evidently only applied on the lower rungs of the ladder.

Then, in 2021, during the Covid pandemic, came the deaths of two brothers, Benson Njiru Ndwiga and Emmanuel Mutura Ndwiga, aged 22 and 19, on their way home from their pork butchery at Kianjokoma, Embu.

Post-mortem examinations  found multiple injuries caused by blunt objects. Public protests led to a further death when a protestor was shot dead by police using live bullets.

Six police officers were arrested for the brutality, said to be linked to the enforcement of Covid restrictions. They pleaded not guilty, were released on cash bail and remain free to date. Five years later, the case crawls on, with just nine of 25 prosecution witnesses having so far testified.

Justice delayed is justice denied. In a mature democracy, or where there is genuine and appropriate accountability, the top man would have taken the fall and resigned long ago.

Possibly the gravest matter while Matiang’i was CS Interior concerned the decomposing bodies found in the River Yala, Siaya County, between July 2021 and early 2023. Some 40 people had been tortured and strangled, or had drowned or had plastic bags put over their heads. Their hands were bound and their bodies sewn up into sacks.

Many of those identified (there were mass graves and identification is still not complete) were young men from Nairobi, in whose low-income areas a number of other young men had also been found brutalised and dead.

The idea that random criminals, whom the police tried to blame, could have transferred victims in such numbers from Nairobi to Siaya, some 400km away, or even why they would have done so, was clearly implausible. These were extra-judicial killings.

Missing Voices, a group documenting such deaths, said that 167 people had been killed or had disappeared in police custody in 2020. Matiang’i has vehemently denied any personal or ministerial responsibility.

Denying personal responsibility is all very well, but ministerial responsibility? Surely that is what being a Cabinet Secretary entails, taking responsibility for everything that happens on your watch?

Harry S Truman, 33rd president of the US, popularised the concept with a sign on his Oval Office desk that read ‘The Buck Stops Here’.

You can’t just opt out. The ultimate liability for a decision, problem or outcome rests with the person in charge, and that person cannot shift the blame to someone else. ‘Command responsibility’, remember?

If it were not so, then it would be the greatest hypocrisy for anyone to criticise current CS Interior Kipchumba Murkomen for presiding over political violence and goonism.

I’m not saying he should not be so accused. He should. But – if an English idiom is not too obscure – what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Kila mtu abebe msalaba wake. If Murkomen is guilty, so equally is everyone else involved in similar, or worse, activities.

Then we come to Gachagua, who has come out of late as a defender of the faith, so to speak, and turned out to be an extremely useful person when it comes to revealing information about official skullduggery.

Besides being militantly anti-Ruto – a huge plus – Gachagua is an effective grassroots mobiliser, an articulate and compelling speaker, and a champion of community values. Wait. We’ll get to that.

I particularly appreciated him when he urged young people to stay at home ahead of the planned June 25, 2026, Gen Z memorial demonstrations.

This, to me, came from the very sound instinct of a mature father. Had I been a parent with young people on the streets, I would wholeheartedly have welcomed his advice.

Sometimes the balance must be weighed between doubtful potential gains and almost certain losses. It was rumoured that there would be widespread bloodshed at the hands of the authorities. Gachagua’s view was that a completely empty city would send a more powerful message, without putting yet more young lives in danger. It was pragmatic and prudent.

It was not the first time that Gachagua had taken a similar stance. While still deputy president, he had refused to echo Ruto’s stigmatising of Gen Z protesters of June 25, 2024, as “treasonous criminals”. He instead referred to them as sons and daughters of Kenya, and led a minute of silence to honour the protesters and the security officers killed, while appealing to the youth to abandon further plans putting themselves in danger.

He was unsystematically impeached barely three months later, on October 8, 2024.

But Gachagua, too, has dark shadows that hang over him. As a district officer in his 20s, he was accused of abuses of power and of misconduct, including failing to prevent state-backed violence, murders, and the mass displacement of thousands of Kikuyu residents by YK’92 operatives.

While serving in Kiambaa Division, he allegedly organised the 1990 raid on the Limuru home of opposition leader Ken Matiba, an attack that was part of state-backed intimidation to silence Matiba and Charles Rubia, who were leading the push for multiparty democracy.

Gachagua was dismissed from the provincial administration in 1997, for gross misconduct, desertion of duty and allegations concerning the mismanagement of relief food.

It is not a pretty record but it is not worse than the records of others mentioned above, and it is significantly different in one particular, in that Gachagua had been a minion following orders, not the person at the top of the tree giving those orders.

One unfortunate thing about Gachagua is that his championship of community values has also too often in the past been restricted to the Kikuyu community, rather than to the community of all the country’s peoples.

There’s a sadness in this for me. While wishing not to appear in any way patronising, it is my belief that ‘tribalism’ – and I am personally as much subject to this human response as anyone else – reflects a deep-seated social bond that can drive positive shared purpose, in itself not a bad thing. It is a force that, directed constructively and as part of a national ethos could harness basic human instincts to nurture and promote vital strengths.

Tribalism is not confined to Kenya. It exists in every country. Taking Britain as an example, ‘southerners’ continue to have deeply ingrained prejudices and views about ‘northerners’ and vice versa. It is human instinct to prefer your own. But that’s just by the way.

Gachagua’s most egregious tribalism came when he declared after the 2022 election that Kenya had its shareholders – evidently Kikuyus whose votes were crucial in helping Ruto gain power – and that these shareholders would be due greater consideration in matters such as national development, and would be first choice for government appointments and contracts.

Gachagua later defended the remarks, saying they had been tied to pre-election power-sharing agreements and biblical principles, and that he had been ‘quoted out of context’. I’m sorry, but that’s a rather moth-eaten old turkey.

As things stand, Gachagua cannot vie for the presidency due to his impeachment, but he clearly represents the hopes and wishes of a large number of people. His place in a senior role in the nation’s future cannot be in question – because isn’t that what representative democracy is all about, representing the people’s wishes?

I saw a recent clip online, where Gachagua was earnestly swearing before God and man that he would never be like Ruto. I want to believe him.

I have written plenty before about Kalonzo, a man who has many very creditable achievements to his name, even if his critics like to call him indecisive and overly self-interested.

I always warm to Kalonzo when he speaks. I like what he says and how he says it, and I think he is generally a good man. But while he would be so useful in government, he is not, in my view, the man to lead it. Time has unfortunately passed him by.

Just as I hope I may contribute something of value to the Standard, while not seeking to be the editor-in-chief, so my near age-mate Kalonzo should look at what of value he can contribute to a new kind of government, without aspiring to be the top man. He is very much needed, but not there.

Some time ago, Martha Karua, of the People’s Liberation Party and the United Opposition, now Ukombozi, said that, in choosing a single opposition presidential candidate for next year’s general election, “We must take into account the views of the majority, and there is no other way for a presidential candidate other than a scientific process that tells us what the people want.”

With possibly millions out there shouting the name of one person, I think what the people want is an issue that has already been covered. ‘Leadership’ has a meaning. It means that people are following. Empiricism might not be a science, but it is a valued philosophy. It would be the worst kind of hypocrisy now to begin some kind of sham ‘selection’ process.

What we actually urgently need is some kind of healing process, so that a formula for building an effective government can be evolved that doesn’t exactly wipe the past clean, but which faces it squarely without shrinking from its reality, which comes to terms with it, and which enables a way forward. As Edwin Sifuna succinctly put it this past week, no one is perfect and there are no angels.

We are where we are and we need to harness the abundant strengths that we have. There are no easy answers, but under clean leadership, these actors, individually and together, could transform this country. If they are divided, we shall all fall.

We are in your hands, guys. Please don’t let us down.