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Anyona’s strange afterlife

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Published on Tuesday, 05 June 2007 20:44

When Parliament broke for a five-week recess in April 1977, there was a shared feeling among MPs that the session had belonged to the then Kitutu East MP, Mr George Moseti Anyona.Anyona had joined Parliament as a nonentity in 1974, but by 1976 he had earned himself the title of "a one-man backbench," thanks to his courageous and often well-informed criticism of the Government.

Anyona hardly knew peace in life. Even death, which was supposed to bring him the eternal rest, controversy has stalked him since he died in a road accident on November 5, 2003.His troubles stemmed from his decision to stand up to two regimes that had put the entire nation and Parliament under siege. Yet in death, he has returned to the loneliness that standing up to the Kenyatta and Moi regimes bequeathed him. The two regimes reduced him to an outcast, with only a very small lot of not more than five politicians ready to share his predicament.

Go-getter

In death, he has been pushed a lot lower, even before he is lowered into his final resting place. His fate lies with his enraged brother, a women’s group for whom he raised funds and the courts as the rest of nation watches in awe.Yet debate continues to rage over issues that Anyona stood for, most notably the supremacy of Parliament and the ruin that corruption visits on the nation.When the Government introduced an amendment Bill that sought to empower the President to forgive anyone found guilty of election offence, Anyona was one of only two MPs who voted against it. The other was the then Eldoret North MP, Miss Chelagat Mutai.

The two argued that the Bill would give President Kenyatta a chance to bring his people to Parliament by fraud.That Bill became law after an intimidated Parliament rubber-stamped it in just an afternoon. By the time Parliament reconvened in June 1977, the void was glaring – and the nation was the loser – a trend that was to continue into the 1990s. Fiery backbenchers – Chelagat Mutai, Martin Shikuku, Jean Seroney – had been hauled into detention, one by one.

When Seroney, then Tinderet MP and his Butere counterpart Martin Shikuku were detained, fear gripped the backbench. Anyona, who unsuccessfully contested for presidency in 1992 and 1997 on a Kenya Social Congress ticket, decided to take over from where the others had left despite Kenyatta’s ominous warning that "a hawk was flying in the sky and the chickens had better watch out."

Detained

Anyona and Mutai alone grappled with the controversial issues the two had championed and which others dared not touch. Neither lasted long. Mutai was soon jailed for inciting Uasin Gishu farmers to violence and Anyona followed soon. Like Shikuku and Seroney, Anyona did his homework well on matters of public interest. And he loved debate.

When he was challenged to prove that some government tenders had been interfered with, he promptly tabled documents, only for the State to claim that the papers were classified and the MP could only have stolen them. But when Parliament resumed that year, Anyona too was no more: he was detained for linking senior government officials to a tendering scandal that had rocked the Kenya Railways Corporation. He was detained two days before the recess, a move that was seen as an attempt to forestall debate on his arrest.

Anyona was said to be a threat to national security, though all he had done was to question how a tender that had been won by a Canadian firm was later awarded to a British firm. On the day he gave a notice of a Motion to introduce a Parliamentary Select Committee to investigate the matter, he was picked up within Parliament. With Anyona’s detention, slowly but steadily, the fire that the backbenchers had kept Speaker Fredrick Mati fighting was being extinguished. The last of a group of outspoken MPs who dared challenge the Government had been silenced.

Even MPs who never liked him agreed that it would be sometime before another Anyona emerged in their midst. An MP from Kisumu was quoted swearing that it was not the time for outspokenness. "The wise thing to do now is say yes to everything the Government proposes. Above all, say very little in Parliament. One should save all his energies for harambee meetings."

Seeker of justice

Anyona began his battle within Kanu when the environment was fluid. He was behind a faction that emerged in the mid 1970s calling itself "Constitutional Supporters." Their plot was to take up leadership from the Kenyatta loyalists. The gloom over the supremacy of Parliament continued with the balance of power since the assassination of JM Kariuki tilting in favour of the Executive.

Thanks to the presence of people like Anyona, Parliament had asserted itself when JM was murdered in 1975. Through a select committee to investigate his death, pushed through by a fiery backbench, Parliament was able to investigate JM’s murder and condemn the Government in honest terms. That is not what Kenyatta wanted, and something had to give way. John Keen, Masinde Muliro and Peter Kibisu, who despite being in government voted with the backbenchers for the adoption of the report on JM, lost their jobs in turns.

Kibisu was later to be jailed for an assault incident that was several months old. Mark Mwithaga, a fiery MP who had been the vice-chairman of the committee on JM and had called for a thorough shake-up of the police force, got jailed for an assault and battery case that was 20 months old. Parliament without Anyona became so dull that the front bench began criticising itself for lack of anybody to raise storm.

Perpetual fighter

Kenyatta’s death appeared to bring some hope for Anyona, who was released together with literary critic and author Ngugi wa Thiongo, Seroney, Koigi wa Wamwere and Wasonga Sijeyo, among others in December 1978. But Anyona was apparently doomed to fighting for everything. When he tried running for Parliament in 1979, he realised he was still blacklisted.

The national executive committee of Kanu said he would have to seek special clearance to contest his former seat. It turned out that Kanu was unhappy that Anyona had stated his stand on a number of issues since his release while his fellow former detainees kept quiet.

Among the mistakes he made was to support then vice-president Mwai Kibaki’s assertion that ordinary party members were qualified to contest, a stand that had been contradicted by President Moi. Anyona opposed the idea that one had to be a life member of Kanu to contest a seat. He was eventually barred from contesting when Kanu’s Kisii branch rejected his application papers. Never a man to give up, Anyona sued the branch chairman, Mr Zachary Onyonka, only for Moi to rule that no one could sue a Kanu official, as it amounted to suing the party’s chairman who was the president.

Bomshell

A few years later, Anyona appeared before a Kanu disciplinary group to defend himself. He said he had been out of politics for about 10 years, effectively making him unable to fend for himself and his family.

He was ready to rejoin the fold and support the party and the Government, he told the committee. He was to appear the next day to continue with his plea and get a ruling when Moi suddenly disbanded the committee, throwing Anyona’s fate in uncertainty.

Locked out, Anyona contemplated forming a party together with his friend Jaramogi Oginga Odinga with whom he had been locked out of mainstream politics. It only earned him another stint in detention and expulsion from the party. Come 1988 and aware that he would not be allowed to vie, Anyona decided to lie low until after the elections when he dropped a bombshell as Parliament prepared to convene in 1989.He announced he was vying to be Speaker of National Assembly. This raised alarm in Kanu, which issued a statement saying only Kanu members could vie for the post.

Undeterred

Undeterred, Anyona turned up at the National Assembly clutching a Kanu life membership card, a voter’s card and national identity card, only to be denied nomination papers. By 1989, Anyona was still fighting the system, but changing tact. Like Jaramogi, Anyona was never a man to come pleading for mercy over his errors. He simply stressed that he was committed to democracy and blamed other forces for his troubles.

Still, he was uncharacteristically beginning to talk a lot about loyalty peppered with assertions that he had been sinned against. In a statement one Sunday in 1989, Anyona said he, together with Jaramogi, had never wavered in loyalty to Kenya and Kanu, "even in the face of bleak moments of political limbo and social wilderness.

Apparently, the limbo and wilderness was taking a toll on Anyona who appeared to be asking himself how long he was willing to suffer so others could be free as he used to say. On the same day, Anyona talked of how hard life could be outside Kanu because one could not even get a job. Anyona never got admitted back to the party, so he stuck to his Kenya Social Congress. By the time he died 202 days ago, he was not the same man who formed the one-man backbench in the 1970s to counter the Kenyatta terror.