Genesis Of A Row That Sent State House Chief Packing  

Commentary

By SUNDAY NATION Team

An American investment banker called Don Regan once served as chief of staff in the White House of President Ronald Reagan. He was a prudent and successful manager, but he will be remembered more for a bust-up that sullied the Reagan presidency and more than anything else exposed a very spooky practice of the First Family. But it wasn't entirely his fault that this happened.

The job of the White House chief of staff is analogous to that of State House Comptroller, the office Mr Matere Keriri held until last week's turn of events. Mr Keriri shared with Mr Regan something beyond the job designation. The chief of staff never got along with the First Lady, the over-protective and nagging Nancy Reagan.

Then one day something snapped. The First Lady had called Mr Regan in one of the interminable phone calls she used to make to him in the course of a day, picking issues on this, that and the other. Irritated, Mr Regan hung up on her. That proved to be his undoing. President Reagan was totally devoted to his wife and within no time, the chief of staff was fired.

That was not the end of the story. Months later, Mr Regan published a book that contained an account of his White House years. It gave a very unflattering picture of the Reagans as a couple. In the book, the fired official made the sensational revelation that the First Lady regularly conferred with an astrologer and relied on her starry readings to influence the President's day-to-day schedule.

So dependent was Mrs Reagan on this astrologer, and so influential was she on the First Family, that landmark events like nuclear arms reduction Summit talks with the Russians could not be scheduled without Mrs Reagan first getting a favourable reading from her astrologer. Likewise, Mr Keriri has been driven low by a forceful First Lady.

The Lucy-Keriri tug-of-war has been a public relations disaster for the Presidency. More than that, it has left the President exposed as somebody who is evidently not in full control of his domestic responsibilities.

Devotees of Days of Our Lives or The Bold and The Beautiful can now sit up and devour this real-life State House soap opera. Nothing quite like it has happened before in this country. The elements of the saga are quite hilarious, if unfortunate:

# The New Year's Ball at State House, Mombasa, is fouled up after Vice-President Moody Awori makes a goof by referring to Mrs Kibaki as "Second Lady". She makes a scene and boycotts the Ball despite the VP's profuse apologies. Murmurs whether the goof was really inadvertent only spice up the drama. But other sources indicate that indeed there was no goofing; that Mr Moody Awori had addressed "the Second First Lady" of the Republic, which Lucy is.

# A furious First Lady flies back from holiday and refuses to shake the proferred hand of her husband's principal aide (Mr Keriri), a stunning gesture. Mrs Kibaki even neglects to observe protocol; she shoots out of the plane well ahead of the President, greeting the waiting dignitaries first. Protocol requires she keeps a step behind the President, or just next to him, which means Mr Kibaki should precede her in the welcoming ceremony.

# Thereafter a statement from the Office of the President declares Mr Keriri has been dispatched on "compulsory leave", which is standard official parlance used when a senior official has been sacked. No way, responds Mr Keriri. His insistence that he is still the Comptroller of State House smacks of somebody determined to cling onto a job which is no longer available, and this only adds to the farce.

# Mr Keriri announces he is going overseas for a short trip, having been dispatched to London on "official duties." The nature of these duties, which presumably diplomats at the foreign affairs ministry cannot handle, are not revealed.

# Matters come to a boil when State House, out of the blue, releases a terse statement which stresses that the President's immediate family is confined to Lucy Kibaki and her four children. No mention is made of Mary Wambui. Her shocked daughter, Winnie Wangui, is reported saying the statement is "unbelievable."

# The following day Ms Wambui hits the road shopping, her formidable security detail in tow. Somebody somewhere has tipped off the press about the shopping jaunt, and so the TV cameras are on the ready. It is curious that Ms Wambui has roused herself and her powerful platoon of security men for a modest round of shopping worth not much more than Sh4,000, which any of her security men could have been sent to take care of on his own.

An assortment of "relationships experts" have sprouted forth with various explanations. A favourite one is that the Lucy-Wambui axis was a time bomb waiting to explode. More so after Kibaki became President and Ms Wambui set out not to be forgotten as Lucy hit the limelight as First Lady and Aids-campaigner-in-chief.

Ms Wambui's move from her home in Nyeri to Lavington in Nairobi, and even her being in Mombasa when the First Family was there (she was staying at the five-star Serena Beach Hotel) are now seen as pointers to somebody who had no wish to be left to fade in the background. Here, so it goes, was the fuse to the conflict we are seeing today.

She has been in the Presidential entourage on various trips. She was filmed near him during Minister Geoffrey Parpai's funeral. Other reports indicate she accompanied him to Abuja for the Commonwealth Summit.

At the State Opening of Parliament in April, Ms Wambui was spotted at the garden party being chaperoned by a happy Mr Keriri. His wife had a room at the Mombasa hotel where Ms Wambui was staying during that eventful Christmas retreat.

A source who was also staying there reveals that Mrs Kibaki actually made an appearance at the hotel one day, though the source was not clear whether the First Lady was attending a function or was meeting somebody. As fate would have it, Ms Wambui was reckoned to be out at the time.

One "Jennifer", who is an itinerant caller on TV and radio talk shows, ventures that if she had been Lucy Kibaki, she wouldn't have been content with snubbing Mr Keriri at the airport. "I would have slapped his face on the spot," she said. Mr Keriri has been cast by one side as the villain of the piece for ushering Ms Wambui into the corridors of power.

Others defend Mr Keriri as an aide who was simply following orders but had to be sacrificed when things went out of hand.

To people who know the President well, the swift disowning of Ms Wambui did not come as a surprise. The President has a record of distancing himself from people who, in his estimation, have turned out to be a liability because of their own poor judgement or performance.

Political associates of the President know without exception not to expect cover from the man whenever they do something that will impact negatively on his interests.

In African custom, the first wife is vested with a certain primacy. She is considered the family matriarch. This is the norm, irrespective of the prestige or privileges a younger one may enjoy. This is so even when she does not appear at State functions or otherwise carry the title of First Lady.

Mzee Kenyatta's first wife was Mama Wahu, who still lives in Ng'ando village in Nairobi's Dagoretti area where she set up home with Mzee when they married in the 1920s. On a quiet day, President Kenyatta would summon Mr Wanyoike Thung'u, his loyal aide, and instruct him to drive him to Mama Wahu's place. Neighbours would sense the Old Man was around due to the sudden way the locality would be swamped with security personnel.

It is not known how these occasional visits to Ng'ando registered at Mzee's Gatundu household, where First Lady Mama Ngina held forte. What is certain is that Mzee Kenyatta, who wore his polygamy as naturally as he waved his flywhisk, was never the type to be told what not to do, especially by spouses.

His second wife, Edna, knew perfectly well what she was getting into when marrying a freedom fighter who was determined to answer the call of nationalism when it beckoned from back home in Kenya.

The Roman Catholic Church has kept a deafening silence amid the whole Kibaki-Lucy-Wambui affair. This cannot be by chance, the President being a member of the Church. Yet the happenings now unravelling over the First Family are likely to leave the Church embarrassed.

Within the strictures of the Roman Catholic faith, a second wife is expressly forbidden. In fact, polygamy in general is not allowed under Catholic tenets. The culprit who contravenes this finds himself or herself excluded from taking holy communion and certain other religious obligations in the Church. The exception is where a man converts to Catholicism when he already had a polygamous family.

Kenyan law outlaws bigamy, which is the marrying of more than one woman under civil or Christian marriage laws. Marriages under customary law nonetheless afford a loophole where polygamy flourishes. Under Islam, a man may marry up to four wives.