Fifty one years ago, the government of Kenya proscribed Kenya’s second main opposition party, the Kenya Peoples Union. The first opposition party, KADU, had been co-opted in KANU in a merger that effectively consumed it.
The period between 1964 and 1966 is eventful in Kenyan politics because of the scale of political conspiracies, machinations, realignments, the fights in government, assassinations, deportations, and, beneath all this; the consolidation of power and resources — through personal fiat and constitutional amendments — by Kenyatta himself, foremost, and the coterie of jesters who quickly surrounded him to fill the void created by Jaramogi’s departure.
So in KPU, the progressive nationalists (as they called themselves) had a new vehicle to checkmate the KANU regime, or so they thought.
Even though Kenya was a young state stretched by the hangovers of the exiting avowed colonialists, it was now being tempered by the insidious pretenses of the neocolonial remainers and the lofty appetites of their African closet admirers who, desperate to fill in in and fit in, launched large-scale primitive accumulation as a new material conundrum of the African psychological condition.
The first casualty would be Bildad Kaggia. The last is yet to be born.
KPU was the first political party to openly state that their goal was to challenge the emerging “capitalist class system” in Kenya…and the first to be vanquished.
KPU was the first real “hustler movement”, which makes the current cohort of hustler nation adherents somewhat disingenuous in their refusal to dust the KPU Manifesto from the ash heap of history and use it as their guiding star.
KPU attacked KANU for consecrating an economic system which left the majority African peasantry on the fringes of the new money economy.
The opposition party forewarned the descent into mass penury with just a paltry wallowing in excessive wealth, all thanks to a lopsided capitalist economic model still anchored on colonial exploitation, dispossession and disempowerment and which was now being ruthlessly re-engineered to satisfy a new generation of exploiters.
KANU responded with murderous intensity. In its three years of existence, KPU was denied political platforms to sell its ideology, was harassed and harangued at every turn by a less studied vermin called “KANU Youth wingers”, backed by the state.
Globally, KPU was sucked in the evil of McCarthyism as the world was increasingly defined by propaganda labels of the West and East. KPU’s socialist stance brought on it the full vengeance of the West’s anti-communist fearmongering.
And yet, more effective and efficient in waging its war on KANU, KPU earned zealous support from the masses across the country but especially in central Kenya where landlessness and the new money economy had left so many behind.
Jomo Kenyatta, in response, dusted the colonial rule book on ethnicity and tribal posturing. When he failed to address the dire economic paradox of the most land hungry people, yet also the same people who had lost life, blood and limb fighting for uhuru na mashamba, he gave them something to clutch on — tribalism.
Tribalism under oath!
And as the poor peasant became more hopeless, hapless and landless, he also become more tribal.
With ethnicity clawing back nationalist solidarity, KPU digression into irrelevance started.
It no longer mattered how hungry or dispossessed or poor or bitter with the failures of government one was. All that mattered was that the people running government — regardless of how terrible they were running it — spoke my language and shared my surname and God-forbid, they were not “those other people”.
Avowing it to be a socialist response to the capitalist state formation then being earnestly pursued by Jomo Kenyatta, his white collaborators and African enablers alike, KPU founders painted a Kenya that was flowing with milk and honey, and were the common man — watu wa mkokoteni, mama mboga, watu wa kiosk, shoeshiners, watu wa bodaboda, watu wa wheelbarrow, etc would be high up on the negotiating table.
KPU relentlessly attacked the heart of KANU, questioned its sincerity to the pledges made for Uhuru, and exposed KANU’s economic model as flawed for a country where the 99% — composed almost wholly of the African peasantry — lacked the critical essentials for decent life:
“We have seen in Kenya that satisfied politicians in high offices cannot understand the problems of the hungry and the landless”.
“Uhuru has no meaning until the land problem is solved”.
“KANU leaders have betrayed the people in their deep felt need for land, grabbing it for themselves and sharing it with foreigners.”
“As a priority, KPU will introduce a new land policy”.
“The KANU government has detained and persecuted KPU leaders and progress trade unionists whose organizational ability and mass appeal they cannot be match even by buying people with imperialist money”.
“The strength of KPU and what it standards for is the main preoccupation of KANU strategists”.
“In Kenya today, economic growth serves to strengthen the hand of the private interests which already determine how the bulk of the wealth of the nation is used and divided. Their first motive in this is to make a profit for themselves and their shareholders. The international brotherhood of profit-seekers finds a ‘healthy and stable’ economic climate in Kenya”.
Then it made the first pledge to hustlers:
“When KPU is in government, YOU will be in government, carrying out policies in the interest of wananchi”.
And then it all went up in smoke.
That was fifty one years ago.
Empowerment, not power. Jobs, not positions.
But this is Kenya, and hope does not always win.
