President Moi: Last of Africa's 'big men'

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "It will go to a run-off, and whoever finishes second will beat him," predicted Jaindi Kisero, editor of the Weekly Review in Nairobi. President Daniel arap Moi has ruled Kenya with an iron hand for 19 years, and most observers still think he will win the presidential election today -- but some people are now hedging their bets.

"The man is very unpopular," Kisero explained. "The country needs to modernize. The only sector which hasn't caught up is the political one, and it has to change." The tide is turning against the traditional 'big men' who rule African states by patronage and violence -- and Moi in Kenya is not the only one who is threatened.

"While our government appears to be democratic, it is a liberation government, it is a military government and behaves as such," explains Morgan Tsvangirai, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Confederation of Trade Unions, who early this month led the first general strike against Zimbabwe's long-ruling President Robert Mugabe. "When people show their unhappiness with the way things are run, it doesn't know how to respond except with force."

The day after the strike, Tsvangirai was beaten half to death in his office by thugs who he says were sent by the home affairs minister and the police commissioner. But it's Mugabe's cronies, not Tvangirai's trade unionists, who are running scared. They fear that their time may be running out, and they are probably right.

Once upon a time, the 'big men' of the independence generation dominated Africa, but now Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana is only a memory, and Uganda's Milton Obote is even less than that. Hastings Banda of Malawi, Samora Machel of Mozambique, Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire are all dead.

Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda was voted out of office, and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania had the sense to retire. Nelson Mandela of South Africa will follow in his footsteps in 1999. The only 'big men' left are Zimbabwe's Mugabe (17 years in power), and Kenya's Moi (19 years) -- and both of them are in deep political trouble.

Mugabe's troubles may not yet be terminal, for he benefits from the fact that Zimbabwe was one of the few African states to fight a long liberation war. Mugabe is rightly revered as the hero of independence, but he has done little for Zimbabwe since.

Mugabe and his political pals have no idea how to run an economy, nor any visible interest in learning to. About fifty percent of Zimbabweans are unemployed, and yet fifty government ministers were recently given a Mercedes Benz and a Jeep each.

Zimbabwe's population has doubled since independence (to 11 million), but economic growth has not remotely kept pace. A single-party system, a controlled press, and obedient courts kept everybody in line for 17 years, but now the pot is boiling over.

The key issue, ironically, is long-promised pensions for the very war veterans who brought Mugabe to power. Their pension fund was long ago looted by senior party and state officials, so when thousands of ex-combatants demonstrated in Harare, a frightened Mugabe promised them a US$200 million pay-out.

Then, since the state's coffers were empty, he imposed income, fuel, electricity and sales tax increases without consulting either parliament or his own party. That was when the first general strike happened -- and the normally rubber-stamp parliament panicked and rejected the taxes, The only card Mugabe has left is racial hatred.

He has often railed in the crudest racial terms against the white farmers who still own most of Zimbabwe's commercial farmland. But he never actually did much about it before, because they earn the bulk of the country's foreign exchange and employ hundreds of thousands of people. Now, in order to survive politically, Mugabe has decreed that most of them will be expropriated.

They will get no compensation, except for the value of equipment and improvements. If past land seizures are any guide, much of the land will become ministers' holiday homes, or simply lie derelict. That will complete the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy -- but it may buy Mugabe a year or two.

Daniel arap Moi, on the other hand, could be gone within months. The corruption in Kenya is so flagrant, and the fall in people's living standards so acute, that popular patience has snapped. In this year's demonstrations, protesters have shouted the name of Laurent Kabila (the man who overthrew Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko last May), and referred to Moi as 'Moibutu'.

Kenya's population has tripled to 29 million since Moi came to power in 1978, but Moi's personal fortune has grown a thousandfold. It is now estimated at close to $2 billion, and his example has been followed at every level of the government. "Kitu kidogo" ('something small' in Swahili) is the constant refrain of everyone from customs officers to senior ministers.

Kenya is so broke that foreign aid donors were able to force Moi to hold multi-party elections in 1992. He got only 36 percent of the vote -- but he won anyway, thanks to a divided opposition, and an electoral law that gives victory to any candidate who gets 25 percent of the vote in five of Kenya's eight provinces.

It took some ethnic cleansing in the Rift Valley province in 1992 to ensure that five provinces would give Moi 25 percent of the vote, but the violence and intimidation worked. Up to last month it looked as if it would work again, with the opposition once more deeply divided, and ethnic cleansing driving potential anti-Moi voters out of electorally marginal Mombasa suburbs.

But in the past week one of the 20 opposition presidential candidates, Charity Ngilu of the Social Democratic Party, has pulled far ahead of the pack. If Moi can't reach 25 percent of the vote in five provinces, she will almost certainly beat him in the second round -- especially because far more women than men bother to vote in Kenya. It would a fine outcome: the last of the 'big men' beaten by the first woman president in Africa.