How A Christian Education Shaped The Life Of The Late Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki

Former Kenya President Mwai Kibaki at the London Conference on Somalia, Feb. 23, 2012. Photo from the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Creative Commons

(ANALYSIS) Way back in 1974, the respected American publication Time magazine named Kenya’s Mwai Kibaki, who was then Kenya’s finance and economic planning minister, as one of its 100 people with the potential to become world leaders. The magazine would repeat the same prophecy in 1980s.

The Time prophecies came to pass in 2002, when Kibaki, leading the National Rainbow Coalition, defeated independence party Kenya Africa National Union candidate Uhuru Kenyatta to become the third president of Kenya. Kibaki went on to win a highly controversial second term, defeating Raila Odinga of the Orange Democratic Movement in 2007 to retain rule until 2012, when he was constitutionally barred from an extra term.

After his death at age 90 on Friday, Kibaki has been mourned by Kenyans and indeed the world. A recurring theme has been how a chance meeting with Consolata Missionaries gave a young boy a chance at education and, later, at life itself and the presidency.

That chance opened doors for the young boy who would attend prestigious Mang’u High School, which was founded by another Catholic organization, the Holy Ghost Fathers. Kibaki went on to Makerere University — a Ugandan institution that had become the university of choice for bright East African students — and then the London of School of Economics for his masters. There, he became the first Black student to graduate top of his class and went back to Makerere as an economics lecturer.

As with many Africans of his age, not much is known about Kibaki’s early childhood, but he revealed that he was born on Nov. 15, 1931, and that he was taken to school because he was the youngest in the family. As Consolata Missionaries scouted for schoolchildren, Kibaki was picked by his polygamous father because he did not have the strength for the back-breaking tasks of peasant farming and looking after animals.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” the Bible says, and Kibaki’s early interactions with the Catholics were evident in all his academic and political dealings. Thrust into leadership at a young age, Kibaki was as moderate as they come, a streak that made his detractors call him ‘General Coward’ because he refused to take hard-line stances on many critical issues.

It was while teaching in Uganda in 1961 that Kibaki was lured from academia by officials from the Kenya African National Union party — which was about to lead Kenya to independence from Great Britain — to go back home to work as its executive officer. KANU would soon form the first African government, thus thrusting the young man into a political career from which he never looked back.

Kibaki later joined his fellow Catholic and former colleague at Mang’u High, Tom Mboya, working at the National Treasury. Mboya was a flamboyant trade unionist whose close connections with former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, another fellow Catholic, led to record scholarships being awarded to young Kenyans. They got an American education in readiness to take over leadership in the new government. One of them was the late professor Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

Although not a direct beneficiary of the airlifts, another brilliant Kenyan economist, Barack Obama Sr., was also in the U.S. around the same time. His son, also named Barack Obama, would later become America’s first Black president.

When the former U.S. president visited Kenya in July 2015, he held a high-profile tête-à-tête at the Villa Rosa Kempinski Hotel that was not made public.

Reports would later leak that Obama requested a private dinner with Kibaki to specifically thank him for having offered his father a job as an economist at the treasury. Kibaki was then finance minister.       

Mwai Kibaki, second from left, with other East African heads of state. Creative Commons photo

As president, Kibaki is widely considered to have done extremely well on the economic front. But the jury is still out on his achievements with harnessing the unprecedented national unity he inherited in 2002, particularly after his election saw violence that killed over 1,000 people and displaced a further 650,000.

Eulogizing Kibaki, a Kenyan international economics consultant, Mbui Wagacha, wrote in the Nation:

Ever a man of few words who stared down on political rubble-rousers (remember his exasperation with characters he called “bure kabisa”), we interacted twice on the journey, in two important meetings and issues. One, on his battle to unravel the economic mess that was the legacy of the Nyayo Era after 2002. Cometh a time, cometh the man who had, in the 1970s, already distinguished himself as an outstanding Finance minister.

President Kibaki started the turnaround by repairing a runaway banking system. He slashed sky-high interest rates and rebuilt broken revenues with strong competencies at KRA (Kenya Revenue Authority).

To his critics, Kibaki was the man who failed to take Kenya forward after securing the presidency, and soon, claims of corrupt deals reaching into the millions of shillings started seeping through.

Rhodes College professor Wanjala Nasong’o, wrote in The Conversation:

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.

The tipping point was the post-election chaos of 2007-2008. At the height of the stand-off between Kibaki and Odinga, South African politician Cyril Ramaphosa — who is the current president — was among the mediators who came to town to help get a solution. He was rejected by the Kibaki side for his longtime association with Odinga.

Other efforts toward peace saw the appointment of an African Union mediation team of “eminent Africans,” led by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and including Graça Machel, former South African and Mozambican first lady and human rights activist, and Benjamin Mkapa, former Tanzanian president. This led to the formation of the Government of National Unity that accommodated both Kibaki and Odinga.

Tom Osanjo is a Nairobi-based correspondent for Religion Unplugged. He is a former parliamentary reporter and has covered sports, politics and more for Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper.