Lucy Muthoni Kibaki was buried yesterday, 9.12 am,
Nigerian time, in Othaya, Njeri County, Kenya in the presence of about
300 guests and family members, after a requiem mass attended by over 3,
000 dignitaries and 20, 000 mourners. She was the wife of President Mwai
Kibaki, the third President of Kenya, in office from 2002 -2013. She is
definitely, one of Kenya’s most controversial public figures in the
last 50 years.
Soon
after Mwai Kibaki assumed office, the brand new First Lady began to
show her true colours by ordering that a bar inside State House, where
Ministers and other government officials often tried to have fun should
be shut down and that instead of spending time drinking, the Ministers
should go and work for the people of Kenya! Within a year, the State
House Comptroller and Private Secretary to the President, Matere Keriri
had also crossed her path. Without reference to the President, she gave
him an ultimatum to resign or be sacked. Keriri had to go. She kept an
informal, secret network whose assignment was to report on Cabinet
Members. She summoned officials and gave them instructions as to what
was expected of them as if she was their boss. They knew better, they
would not dare disobey her. In one of the many post-humous accounts of
her life and times, Francis Kimemia, former Head of Public Service and
Secretary to the Cabinet reminisces, for example, that
There has been no
other First Lady like her in the history of Kenya and perhaps in the
whole of Africa. It was indeed not suprising that her casket on its
journey back to Nairobi, from Bupa Cromwell Hospital, South West London,
where she died on April 26, was draped in national colours and that she
received the equivalent of a state burial. Mama Lucy was that type of
First Lady who had she been denied such state recognition and if the
dead could rise and return to sleep, would have stormed out of the
casket and accuse the government of Kenya of disrespecting her. She was
one hell of a woman. It seems Kenyans are afraid of her, in life, even
in death. Ironically, there has been more focus on her positive
attributes rather than her frightening negatives, perhaps because it is
incorrect to speak ill of the dead.
Since the
announcement of her death, Lucy Kibaki has been praised for her love of
family values and the sanctity of the family. Some have called her the
“embodiment of motherhood.” Indeed, she was a staunch defender of the
interests of the poor and the disadvantaged in society, especially
women, children and the girl-child. She bravely led the fight against
the HIV/AIDS scourge in her country and apart from a misinterpreted
statement about her saying young, unmarried men could have sex without
condoms, and that abstinence is nonetheless crucial, her efforts at
controlling the scourge was noteworthy. She had argued for example that
government should enact legislation to compel doctors to disclose
patients’ HIV status to their spouses to prevent people getting infected
unnecessarily. She was later recognized for her efforts when she was
made President of the coalition of 40 African First Ladies against
HIV/AIDS. She was also Patron of the Kenya Girls Guide Association. She
also completed many development projects in many parts of Kenya.
The outpouring of
flowery tributes has however shaded the truth about Lucy Kibaki. She
was an outrageous, temperamental and cantankerous First Lady. If a list
of the worst African Ladies were to be compiled, in the same manner in
which some agencies prepare a list of Africa’s Most Beautiful First
Ladies, Lucy Kibaki will be the undisputed winner of the first prize,
ahead of Aisha Hamani Diouri, Niger’s tyrannical First Lady of the 60s.
Lucy Kibaki’s conduct as First Lady is one of the reasons why students
of contemporary African Politics have often argued that the First Lady
syndrome, copied from the United States, often without the required
finesse and sophistication, should either be abolished or moderated and
that elected Presidents and Prime Ministers in Africa should learn to their wives in check. Nobody could keep Lucy Kibaki in check during
her decade-long season of influence and terror.
She
was ungovernable, unapproachable and impossible. She was the most
outspoken First Lady on the continent. She had no qualms giving the
impression that she was Deputy President or perhaps a co-President. If
President Kibaki was uncomfortable with her conduct, he lacked the power
or the courage to say so, or show his displeasure. There were rumours
that Lucy Kibaki was a husband batterer. She interrupted and overruled
him publicly, making the President look like a woman’s wrapper. She also
on many occasions, went overboard in trying to take charge of the
government. She humiliated diplomats, government officials, State House
staff, her own husband, members of the coalition government, and just
about anyone who crossed her path. She was a violent First Lady, with an
anger management problem, which could not be cured, until she suddenly
dropped out of the limelight (possibly due to failing health) in the
last two years of her husband’s Presidency.
“Of course if she called you, you prayed to your God that you had not done something wrong. But if you had, she would tell you to your face. She would correct you but she would follow up to see if things had been corrected.”
After God, it was
Lucy Kibaki as First Lady. George Satoiti, former Internal Security
Minister during the 2009 Sachangwan oil tanker fire tragedy will not
contest that either. He was on that occasion publicly tongue-lashed by
Mama Lucy for making insensitive comments, not showing enough empathy
over an accident that led to the death of over 200 and many more
injured. When at a public event, a State House official introduced Lucy
Kibaki with a wrong name, calling her Mary Wambui, the rumoured hidden
wife of her husband, the fellow got a dirty slap, delivered promptly and
ferociously.
When the former
Vice President, Moody Awori, also had a tongue slip and called her a
second lady, (a veiled reference again to the existence of Mary Wambui,
also known as Wambui ma Mwai), Lucy Kibaki did not hide her
discomfiture. She stood up and walked out of the State Luncheon. In
March 2009, amidst continuing speculations that the President had
another wife or a mistress, Lucy Kibaki got her husband to hold a World
Press Conference on the lawns of the State House, to declare his “one
man, one wife” status. She stood beside him, growling like a
headmistress with a cane in hand. She later grabbed the microphone and
abused journalists who did not like her and her family and were always
writing nonsense stories. Imagine a First Lady upstaging a President at a
press conference?
Lucy
Kibaki never liked journalists. She believed that they did not know
their job and she always offered lectures on how best to be a
journalist. In May 2005, she stormed The Nation Media Group
offices in Kenya to protest what she called negative media coverage. She
and her bodyguards actually held the media house hostage till 5. 30 am,
the following day. When one of the reporters, Clifford Derrick Otieno,
tried to record the ugly scene with his camera, Lucy Kibaki wrestled
with him for control of the camera and slapped him. She was
particularly good at dealing out slaps. Later, a member of parliament,
Gitobu Imanyara, who had been Otieno’s lawyer, was a special recipient
of that same Lucy slap. State House officials were already used to it:
any minor mistake fetched them a tingling slap.
No other first
Lady in Africa has been more insecure and disruptive. Her defenders
insist she was motivated by a burning passion to protect her family and
relationship with Mwai Kibaki, especially as Mary Wambui, her nemesis,
perpetually hugged the limelight and operated as a Presidential spouse.
Even a Kenya State House press statement originally denying Ms Wambui
was unsigned! Presidents are human beings. Every household has its
drama. But when a President emerges, he or she has a duty to serve and
concentrate and not disturb us with his or her household politics.
Marital melodrama should not stand in the way of governance. What Amina
Mama calls “femocracy”: the misappropriation of state power by
Presidential spouses, should never be allowed. This is the big lesson of
Lucy Kibaki’s legacy. Luckily for President Kibaki, Kenya prospered
under his watch, even if ethnic irredentism and corruption as reported
by Michela Wrong and John Githongo, cast a slur on everything else.
Sadly, he remains known as the smart technocrat and indecisive
President, who was always willing to sit on any fence, including Lucy’s.
They
wouldn’t dare retaliate when it was open secret that even the President
was being battered almost on a daily basis. She would later report
columnists of The Nation and The Standard newspapers to
the Media Council of Kenya for writing articles that she considered
disrespectful. Nothing came out of this eventually, but she just
couldn’t stand columnists expressing radical opinions. I recall writing a
column in this newspaper, The Guardian (Nigeria) on her
anti-media indiscretions. I also got a protest letter and a phone call
from the Kenya High Commission in Nigeria. This drew rich laughter from
the very bottom of my then emerging big belly. The poor folks at the
Kenya High Commission needed to be seen to be doing their job, of
course, lest they lost it on Lucy Kibaki’s orders.
What a woman! She
once went to a police station, wearing shorts, to report a World Bank
official, for playing loud music and disturbing the neighbourhood. The
official was holding a farewell party and was a tenant of the Kibakis.
Mama Lucy wanted him arrested. Nobody was beyond her radar, not even
members of the then Liberal Democratic Party led by Raila Odinga who
formed a coalition party, the NARC, with her husband in 2002. When she
felt they were not co-operating enough, she told them to go ahead and
resign and get lost, because in any case, “Kenyans do not eat
politics.” She loved to give speeches but there was always trouble if
anyone disagreed with her. She once shut down parliament building
because she felt Presidential Advisers did not appreciate her point of
view, which she considered to be in the national interest, while they,
in her reckoning, were pursuing personal agenda. She declared the
programme ended, and ordered that the building should be locked.
The Nigerian Government should remember to send him a condolence letter.
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