The Kenyan flag.
There are men who hunger for freedom and men who hunger only for the throne that freedom builds, and a revolution seldom knows which kind it has raised until the fighting stops. By the time the difference shows, the throne is already taken. Kenya learned this slowly, in the years after the flag came down, and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga had a front-row seat as it unfolded.
Reading his Not Yet Uhuru, you keep looking for Jomo Kenyatta’s political philosophy and never find it. There is no Nkrumah in him, no Nyerere, no real attachment to majimbo or a strong centre beyond what served him. Power was everything; the rest could be sorted out later. When Kanu disliked a constitution, he swallowed it, took office, and amended it from inside afterwards. Six decades on, that is still how the people who govern us operate.
Through Michael Blundell, the settlers’ go-between with the colonial government, Kenyatta promised that land in independent Kenya would only ever change hands on a willing-buyer basis. In return, the British cleared a road to the top that had looked shut while he sat in jail. He later squeezed the same promise from his heir, Daniel arap Moi. So the man jailed as the dark heart of Mau Mau reassured settlers their farms were safe, and within months they swung from loathing him to worship.
Generous cheques
That reassurance meant disowning the uprising that had made British rule untenable. At Nakuru in 1962, before a hall of European farmers, he urged everyone to forgive and forget. To other crowds he warned he would not let hooligans run Kenya, and called Mau Mau a disease wiped out and never to be remembered. It stayed banned until 2003, 40 years in which the forest fighters were written out of the story they had bled to create.
For Jaramogi, watching from the front bench, Uhuru was meant to be concrete — colonial structures pulled down, land returned to Africans, a state that answered to the people who had suffered for it. He had refused to take office until Kenyatta walked free, turning that release into a national demand. The favour was never repaid. He was dangerous because his authority lived outside the state, and could not be removed without enraging the millions who revered him. So he was handled instead, sidelined by degrees until the system could discard him.
The same instinct explains how easily he later absorbed men who had fought Kanu’s centralism. Moi, Ronald Ngala and Masinde Muliro had founded Kadu, the majimbo party the settlers quietly backed to check the radicals. On paper their federalism contradicted his craving for a strong centre, yet once the prize was power the difference melted like sugar in tea. There had never been much revolution in them, only a scramble for a place. Kadu folded into Kanu and produced no settlement, only a bigger machine answering to one man, and Moi’s climb to the vice-presidency said the rest.
Land was the test that gave the whole thing away. The willing-buyer formula was written into the 1960 Land Order in Council, and the government bankrolled it with loans from Britain, the World Bank and West Germany. The result was almost a joke — Africans were invited to buy back, on credit, the very land taken from them at gunpoint. Departing settlers left with generous cheques while squatters and ex-detainees got instalment plans. The well-connected, who had filed themselves under landless, looted the schemes, and when they defaulted the taxpayer carried the bill.
Overgrown presidency
Bildad Kaggia warned that independence without the land returned was a betrayal dressed as a ceremony. In 1965, Kenyatta rounded him in public, mocking him for staying poor while his fellow detainees grew fat, demanding to know, “what have you done for yourself?” The whole creed of the new Kenya sat in that sneer — loyalty counted in acres, conscience punished with the cold. Kaggia was eased out of Kanu while Kenyatta and his circle gathered land until the family ranked among the country’s largest owners, and the forest fighters came home to find their plots gone.
This is the house we still live in today. The colonial state was never really pulled down at Uhuru. Its overgrown presidency survived, its suspicion of anyone who answered back survived, and all of it simply changed owners when the flag came down. A father does not inherit the family home, change the locks on his own children, then expect thanks for keeping the keys.
So, when the next lot come asking for our votes, the only question worth putting to them is the one Jaramogi’s book still asks of the last. Do they hunger for the country, or only for the throne it builds? We have spent 60 years learning, too late each time, that men who reach for power with nothing behind them mean to keep the house and lock the children out. We meet them again next year in the 2027 elections and Kenyans must see through the deception of the ones who pretend to be fighting for them.
The writer is a whistleblower, strategy consultant and a startup mentor. www.nelsonamenya.com
