This thread is not about Mwai Kibaki
- Thread starter Da Vinci
- Start date
It was not his wish
True,but now that he is gone I think it's appropriate. Rest well mzee
wrongturn
Elder Lister
Mwai Kibaki: President who squandered opportunity to fix Kenya
To his friends and admirers, Kibaki was a gentleman who survived the murky Kenyan politics unscathed. To detractors, he was a coward and indecisive politician.
nation.africa
He served as president of Kenya – the third after independence – from 2002 to 2013, a critical period in Kenya’s transition from a one party state to democracy. He also served as the fourth vice-president (1978 to 1988) under President Daniel arap Moi.
To Kibaki’s detractors, however, he was a coward and indecisive politician who, in the face of political storms, never saw a fence he did not want to sit on. He was derided as a conformist and loyalist who never raised a finger against the gross excesses of the political system, which he served to the hilt.
It was Kibaki, for instance, who moved the motion that made Kenya a single-party state by law in 1982. Similarly, at the height of the clamour for political pluralism in 1991, Kibaki remarked that attempting to remove the Kenya African National Union (KANU) from power was tantamount to attempting to cut a mugumo (fig) tree using a razor blade. Yet a few weeks after this statement, he jumped ship from the government to set up an opposition party.
This aspect of his character earned him the sobriquet ‘General Kiguoya’ (General Coward) among his own Kikuyu contemporaries
Failures
But Kibaki’s presidency was also tempered with a series of monumental failures.
He assumed the presidency under circumstances which could have dealt with the scourge of negative ethnicity. The National Rainbow Coalition that assured his electoral victory was overseen by an organ known as the Summit.
The membership of this Summit represented the country’s regions and major ethnic groups. These included Mwai Kibaki (Kikuyu), Moody Awori and Wamalwa Kijana (Luhyia), Raila Odinga (Luo), Kipruto Kirwa (Kalenjin), Charity Ngilu and Kalonzo Musyoka (Kamba), and Najib Balala (Mijikenda).
Soon after electoral victory, the Summit was shunted aside. An assortment of the central figures of the Jomo Kenyatta regime – all of them Kikuyu – were reconstituted as Kibaki’s main advisers. This led to the reemergence of the so-called Mount Kenya Mafia that dominated the Kibaki presidency.
Second, and a corollary to the above, was the dishonouring of the memorandum of understanding that had laid the basis for the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition and opposition unity.
This included the promise that Kenya would have a new constitution within the first 100 days of the Kibaki administration. But the undertaking was abandoned. Instead, three years down the road, Kenyans were presented with a draft constitution so mutilated and watered down that they rejected it in a referendum in 2005.
Within two years the euphoria that had accompanied Kibaki’s ascension to the presidency swiftly dissipated into gloom and disenchantment. The criticism that this triggered was that the Kibaki regime was bent on self-destruction.
The third failure was the lack of commitment to genuinely fight corruption despite having campaigned on a reform and anticorruption platform. Instead, Kibaki abetted and condoned corruption by an inner circle of his cabinet ministers.
In one case of questionable procurement contracts in the ministry of defence and calls for the sacking of the minister in charge, Kibaki simply transferred the errant minister to another portfolio.
In another case wherein a minister was accused of conflict of interest and abuse of office for private gain and amid an uproar against the minister, Kibaki is reported to have rhetorically asked, of no one in particular, whose goat the minister had eaten! He clearly didn’t see the misdemeanour in terms of resources that had been stolen from the Kenyan people.
The final, and perhaps the most ignominious legacy on the part of President Kibaki was the blatant rigging of the 2007 presidential election.
The violence that the stolen election caused pushed the country to the brink. More than 1,300 people were killed and more than 500,000 displaced. Had the international community not swiftly intervened to facilitate a power sharing agreement, there is no saying what might have become of Kenya.
Arguably, therefore, his able stewardship of the economy notwithstanding, Kibaki will be remembered as the president who squandered a historic opportunity to remake Kenya and ended up plunging the country into unmitigated chaos, all for the sake of clinging onto power following an apparent electoral loss.
mzeiya
Elder Lister
I disagree.
Kibaki had balls but his personality of a stubborn man made many not to see his grit.
No one else vied against Moi post multipartyism and remained the same but Kibaki fought on and won the 3rd time.
I celebrate this hero.
wrongturn
Elder Lister
He had some notable success , I think history is open. But i believe in 2002 he had the goodwill of Kenyans to steer the country ahead free of tribalism and corruption. But it is debatable whether it was LDP who sabotaged the dream or the kibaki kitchen cabinet that derailed it. But what I personally celebrate kibaki for is opening up the economic opportunities to the masses via legislation.
Successes
Kibaki’s leadership, especially as a two-term president, had a number of noteworthy successes.
The first major one was infrastructural development, especially road construction. Emblematic of this was the construction of the Thika superhighway. The 44.5km highway that links Nairobi to Thika, an industrial town in Kiambu County, central Kenya.
Second was the introduction of free primary school education. An estimated 1 million children enrolled in school who would otherwise not have been able to afford to do so.
Third was the introduction of the Constituency Development Fund. Through this a slice of the national revenue is distributed annually to parliamentary constituencies to fund development projects and programmes determined at the constituency level. If managed well, the idea has the potential to revolutionise rural development.
Fourth, and perhaps most important, was the revival of the economy from decades of mismanagement. During his first term, the country’s GDP growth rate rose from 0.6 percent when he took over to 7 percent at the end of his first term.
Meria
Elder Lister
Some senior government officials approached Kibaki to tell him on their intentions to name the then newly refurbished Thika road after him, they got a rude shock.."Hio barabara inaenda wapi? wakajibu.. Thika mzee,..akawambia "Basi wacheni umpumbavu"
"Meffi ya Kuku"
It's Me Scumbag
Elder Lister
Always acknowledge the source. Although in this case sijui which is your source...Mwai Kibaki: President who squandered opportunity to fix Kenya
To his friends and admirers, Kibaki was a gentleman who survived the murky Kenyan politics unscathed. To detractors, he was a coward and indecisive politician.
He served as president of Kenya – the third after independence – from 2002 to 2013, a critical period in Kenya’s transition from a one party state to democracy. He also served as the fourth vice-president (1978 to 1988) under President Daniel arap Moi.
To Kibaki’s detractors, however, he was a coward and indecisive politician who, in the face of political storms, never saw a fence he did not want to sit on. He was derided as a conformist and loyalist who never raised a finger against the gross excesses of the political system, which he served to the hilt.
It was Kibaki, for instance, who moved the motion that made Kenya a single-party state by law in 1982. Similarly, at the height of the clamour for political pluralism in 1991, Kibaki remarked that attempting to remove the Kenya African National Union (KANU) from power was tantamount to attempting to cut a mugumo (fig) tree using a razor blade. Yet a few weeks after this statement, he jumped ship from the government to set up an opposition party.
This aspect of his character earned him the sobriquet ‘General Kiguoya’ (General Coward) among his own Kikuyu contemporaries
Failures
But Kibaki’s presidency was also tempered with a series of monumental failures.
He assumed the presidency under circumstances which could have dealt with the scourge of negative ethnicity. The National Rainbow Coalition that assured his electoral victory was overseen by an organ known as the Summit.
The membership of this Summit represented the country’s regions and major ethnic groups. These included Mwai Kibaki (Kikuyu), Moody Awori and Wamalwa Kijana (Luhyia), Raila Odinga (Luo), Kipruto Kirwa (Kalenjin), Charity Ngilu and Kalonzo Musyoka (Kamba), and Najib Balala (Mijikenda).
Soon after electoral victory, the Summit was shunted aside. An assortment of the central figures of the Jomo Kenyatta regime – all of them Kikuyu – were reconstituted as Kibaki’s main advisers. This led to the reemergence of the so-called Mount Kenya Mafia that dominated the Kibaki presidency.
Second, and a corollary to the above, was the dishonouring of the memorandum of understanding that had laid the basis for the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition and opposition unity.
This included the promise that Kenya would have a new constitution within the first 100 days of the Kibaki administration. But the undertaking was abandoned. Instead, three years down the road, Kenyans were presented with a draft constitution so mutilated and watered down that they rejected it in a referendum in 2005.
Within two years the euphoria that had accompanied Kibaki’s ascension to the presidency swiftly dissipated into gloom and disenchantment. The criticism that this triggered was that the Kibaki regime was bent on self-destruction.
The third failure was the lack of commitment to genuinely fight corruption despite having campaigned on a reform and anticorruption platform. Instead, Kibaki abetted and condoned corruption by an inner circle of his cabinet ministers.
In one case of questionable procurement contracts in the ministry of defence and calls for the sacking of the minister in charge, Kibaki simply transferred the errant minister to another portfolio.
In another case wherein a minister was accused of conflict of interest and abuse of office for private gain and amid an uproar against the minister, Kibaki is reported to have rhetorically asked, of no one in particular, whose goat the minister had eaten! He clearly didn’t see the misdemeanour in terms of resources that had been stolen from the Kenyan people.
The final, and perhaps the most ignominious legacy on the part of President Kibaki was the blatant rigging of the 2007 presidential election.
The violence that the stolen election caused pushed the country to the brink. More than 1,300 people were killed and more than 500,000 displaced. Had the international community not swiftly intervened to facilitate a power sharing agreement, there is no saying what might have become of Kenya.
Arguably, therefore, his able stewardship of the economy notwithstanding, Kibaki will be remembered as the president who squandered a historic opportunity to remake Kenya and ended up plunging the country into unmitigated chaos, all for the sake of clinging onto power following an apparent electoral loss.
Mwai Kibaki: president who squandered the opportunity to fix Kenya
Mwai Kibaki: President who squandered opportunity to fix Kenya | The Citizen
Mwai Kibaki: President who squandered opportunity to fix Kenya
To his friends and admirers, Kibaki was a gentleman who survived the murky Kenyan politics unscathed. To detractors, he was a coward and indecisive politician.
nation.africa
QuadroK4000
Elder Lister
wrongturn
Elder Lister
Always acknowledge the source. Although in this case sijui which is your source...
Mwai Kibaki: president who squandered the opportunity to fix Kenya
theconversation-com.cdn.ampproject.org
Mwai Kibaki: President who squandered opportunity to fix Kenya | The Citizen
www-thecitizen-co-tz.cdn.ampproject.org
Mwai Kibaki: President who squandered opportunity to fix Kenya
To his friends and admirers, Kibaki was a gentleman who survived the murky Kenyan politics unscathed. To detractors, he was a coward and indecisive politician.
bado mapema, I think niliweka link ya nation?
lithuli ave should be renamed
Wajuajis say he was Moi's project to divide opposition votes. Had he endorsed Matiba, Matiba would have won in the morning, 8.22am. This theory seems true.
Few days before repeal of section 2A, he had claimed "you can't cut down a Mugumo tree with a razor", that time referring to activists who were fighting for democracy. Mind you it's him who in 1982 proposed the motion in parliament that turned Kenya into a one-party police state.
He had close relationship with Moi, and that's why he never did anything to Kanu thieves even after we entrusted him to crash them.
He had his successes, but he has a bag of bad things.
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It's Me Scumbag
Elder Lister
This is one that dogged him for all his years...Over 40 years later we paid the last cent,we paid over 5B for a loan guarantee of 50M. And 40 years from now,we will be paying for what they are doing now. Back to Ken-Ren
NEWS
KENYA PAYS FINAL SH2.5BN FOR GHOST FERTILISER PLANT
Written on 18 December 2019.
Kenyan taxpayers coughed up Sh2.48 billion to pay a Belgian bank for a botched agreement for a fertiliser plant started in the late 1970s, a State audit report shows. In the end, the plant was never built, meaning that the money went down the drain.
A report from a parliamentary watchdog indicates that the latest payment pushed the total amount of money lost over the botched Ken-Ren Chemical and Fertiliser plant to Sh6.33 billion. Kenya had earlier paid Sh3.9 billion to the governments of Australia and Belgium because it had guaranteed the construction of the failed fertilizer plant at Changamwe, Mombasa.
“The Government of Kenya has paid a payment of Euro 21.2 million (Sh2.48 billion) towards settlement of government guaranteed debts incurred in 1970 on account of Ken-Ren Chemical and Fertiliser Company,” the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says in its latest report on government finances.
Julius Muia, the Principal Secretary at the National Treasury, told PAC that the obligation arose from a case filed at the Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce by the Belgian bank known as Ducroire. The court found the government of Kenya liable as a guarantor and ordered it to pay Euro 21.2 million to Ducroire.
The government had entered into an agreement with a now collapsed American firm, N-Ren, to guarantee the construction of a fertiliser plant back in 1970 at a cost of Sh350 million at an interest of 8.5 percent. The debt has since risen to breach the Sh6 billion mark.
Ken-Ren was a joint ownership between Kenya and N-Ren Corporation in which the two entered into several financing and equipment procurement contracts with various Australian and Belgian banks and suppliers. The government was the guarantor.
Dr. Muia told PAC that Kenya had cleared the debts and compensation associated with failed fertilizer plant.
The Treasury argues that Kenya paid the billions of shillings to avoid a negative credit rating that could injure its reputation and lock it out of international debt markets.
“Even though the full amount of the debt is now settled, the committee is deeply concerned that government spent such colossal sums of money on a project which did not take off and against which no value for money was achieved,” Opiyo Wandayi, who chairs PAC, said in the audit report.
The debt obligation arose from the agreement that Kenya signed with the collapsed N-Ren to guarantee the construction of a fertiliser plant at a cost of $42.8 million (Sh4.28 billion). Under the deal, the government and N-Ren Ltd entered a joint venture to form a company registered as Ken-Ren Chemical and Fertilisers Company Limited, which was to manufacture fertiliser for domestic consumption and export markets.
On the advice of N-Ren, Ken-Ren then entered into several financing and equipment procurement contracts with two Australian and Belgium banks and suppliers, with Kenya as the guarantor. The suppliers of equipment and machinery were Coppee-Lavalin of Belgium and Voest Alpine of Australia. However, the fertiliser factory project failed to take off and Ken-Ren was subsequently placed under receivership in September 1978, with the Registrar-General appointed as the official receiver and provisional liquidator.
Kenya still harbours ambitions of building a fertiliser plant to help cut import costs and reduce subsidies needed to make manure affordable for poor farmers. Farming accounts for a third of Kenya’s annual economic output, but the high cost of fertilizer means farmers rely on subsidies or avoid using them, which hurts output. The government spent about Sh5 billion annually to subsidise fertiliser.
Kenya is seeking to develop oil reserves found in recent years, and produce hydrocarbons. Ammonia for fertilisers can be produced from hydrocarbon feedstocks such as natural gas and oil.
Payment of the billions of shillings for the non-existent fertilizer plant comes in a period when the government in struggling to balance its budget, prompting austerity measures. The review of the budget comes at a period when the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has missed tax targets in a business environment plagued by job cuts and reduced corporate profits.
Kenya experienced tax shortfalls of Sh60.2 billion in the three months to September and internal revenues from fines, payments for passports and marriage fees were below target by Sh24.4 billions.
https://www.iarbafrica.com/en/news-...pays-final-sh2-5bn-for-ghost-fertiliser-plant
Another angle
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/36393927/ken-ren-full-report
Sh2.4bn scandal unravels, 30 years after dubious deal
Kenyans are repaying loans for a company that collapsed when President Kibaki was Finance Minister in the 1970s.
nation.africa