To his credit, Moi kept Kenya free of military tyranny

I worked for President Daniel arap Moi for some years as the editor of the ruling party’s newspaper, The Kenya Times. However, I can report, I was never at any time convinced he was intellectually and ethically well situated to trounce as easily as he did all of his competitors for the country’s most powerful office.
Somehow, none the least, the old man from Baringo had risen to our nation’s political apex and, there, was playing what is probably the greatest role that an individual can play in his or her society’s political house. Indeed, many Kenyans have asserted that to do so is to score a notably sumptuous soccer goal by a Joe Kadenge or a William Ouma (Chege).
Most international observers are very likely to agree that Mr Moi’s political life story was not ordinary. His career was one of the proofs that academic qualifications – though highly important – are not, always, in William Shakespeare’s notable language, “…the be-all and the end-all here…”
Even with almost no academic attainment to boast of, Mr Moi easily trounced all his national competitors to rise to the highest political office in one of Africa’s most highly educated and most successful countries economically. Moreover, even without political machinations, Mr Moi would have remained atop there for as long as he wished.
How was it that Mr Moi, a nearly illiterate person, easily trounced all of his competitors – many of them with some of the world’s highest academic qualifications – in successive elections? Theoretically, there may, of course, be many mutually contradictory answers to that perennial question.
Indeed, Kenya’s historians will be called upon to supply socially useful, intellectually attractive and generally satisfactory answers to that perennial question.
Our theoretically trained brothers and sisters – especially those who teach ‘political science’ on the campuses of our tertiary institutions – will, as usual, readily serve to us answers that are much more emotive than socially useful.
Ethnically, their answers will be mystifying, namely, much less educative. Howbeit, for Kenyans, the most important point is for the nation to wend its way as naturally as possible towards its destiny, though as rapidly, as can be. Kenya is already fortunate to abound in highly educated and well trained brains and hands.
That alone, however, can never suffice. How to organise those hands and intellects into a single perpetually revving machine is the national challenge. Did Mr Moi bequeath such a machine to his country? Did he train any individual to manage the machine? Because his political system was never far-sighted – being daily too immersed in trying to perpetuate a temporally regimental survival machine, his regime always limped near the domain of a national catastrophe.
In a continent perennially given to tragic political interference from young gun-equipped men from the barracks, that is a question on which -- in racial self-congratulation -- Western Europe and North America usually content themselves by giving racial answers.
Africa has failed merely because the effort is by Africans, not by Caucasians.
If that is so, why have such Caucasian countries as Greece and Portugal so spectacularly failed to keep in step with the rest of Caucasian Europe and North America? Praiseworthily, however, Kenya’s military men have always disciplined themselves and thus remained where a soldier’ should remain in the national division of labour.
Although, under Mr Moi, our political body politic has always limped uncomfortably near edge of a national catastrophe, Kenya has, nevertheless, remained free of the military tyranny that has characterised our continent ever since independence. That is why we must ensure the Moi succession is truly successful.