Wednesday, November 4 2009

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Mwai Kibaki President of Kenya....

The Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting begins in Port-of-Spain on November 27 and continues for three days.

Fifty-one heads or their representatives will assemble at The Hyatt for the talks.

Two countries have been suspended - the Fiji Islands which was suspended from membership on September 21, 2009 and Nauru, which is in arrears.

We continue today witha daily feature on the Commonwealth and will feature the Heads of these States who are expected in Port-of-Spain in November.

Mwai Kibaki, 77, is the President of Kenya.

Kibaki was previously Vice President. He also held several other cabinet positions, including a widely acclaimed stint as Minister for Finance, Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Health.

He then served as an opposition Member of Parliament from 1991 up to his election as Kenya’s third president in 2002.

He was sworn in on December 30 2007 for his second term as president after controversially emerging winner of a bitterly contested election that was marked by accusations of fraud and widespread irregularities that led to civil unrest.

Though baptised as Emilio Stanley by Italian missionaries in his youth, he has been known for all intents and purposes as Mwai Kibaki.President Kibaki’s style is that of a competent technocrat, as opposed to that of the populist leaders so common in Africa. He, unlike his predecessors, has not tried to establish a personality cult. He has not had his portrait on every unit of Kenya’s currency, neither has he had all manner of streets, places and institutions named after him. He has not had state sanctioned praise songs composed in his honour, does not seek to dominate and lead all news bulletins with reports of his presidential activities, and does not engage in the populist sloganeering of his predecessors.

Family oral history maintains that his early education was made possible by his much older brother-in-law, Paul Muruthi, who insisted that young Mwai should go to school instead of spending his days grazing his father’s sheep and cattle and baby-sitting his little nephews and nieces for his older sister.

Kibaki turned out to be an exemplary student. He was first educated at Gatuyaini School (two years) where he completed what was then called sub “A” and sub “B” which is the equivalent of standard one and two (first and second grade). He then joined Karima mission school for the three more classes of primary school. He then moved to Mathari School (now Nyeri High School) between 1944 and 1946 for Standard four to six, where, in addition to his academic studies, he learnt carpentry and masonry as students would repair furniture and provide material for maintaining the school’s buildings. He also grew his own food as all students in the school were expected to do, and earned extra money during the school holidays by working as a conductor on buses. After Karima Primary and Nyeri Boarding primary schools, he proceeded to Mang’u High School where he studied between 1947 and 1950. He passed with a maximum of six points in his “A” level examination.

Influenced by the veterans of the two World Wars in his village, he considered becoming a soldier in his final year in Mang’u. However, a ruling by the Chief colonial secretary, Walter Coutts, which barred the recruitment of the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru communities into the army, put paid to his military aspirations. He instead joined Makerere University College, Kampala, Uganda where he studied Economics, History and Political Science. He graduated best in his class in 1955 with a First Class Honours Degree (BA) in Economics.

After his graduation in 1955, Kibaki took up an appointment as Assistant Sales Manager of Shell Company of East Africa, Uganda Division. During the same year, he earned a scholarship to do postgraduate work in any British University. He consequently enrolled at the prestigious London School of Economics for a BSc in public finance, graduating with a distinction. He went back to Makerere in 1958 where he taught as an assistant lecturer in the economics department until 1960.

President Kibaki whose term as Finance minister in the 1970s is widely celebrated as outstanding, has done much to repair the damage to the country’s economy during the 24 year reign of his predecessor, president Moi.

The improved management of the economy under President Kibaki has seen continued Kenya GDP growth from a low 0.6% (real -1.6%) in 2002 to 3% in 2003, 4.9% in 2004, 5.8% in 2005 , 6% in 2006 and 7% 2007, a very significant recovery from the near total economic collapse and decay preceding Kibaki’s presidency. The President has also overseen the coming into being of the Vision 2030, a development plan aimed at raising GDP growth to 10% annually and transforming Kenya into a middle income country, which he unveiled on October 30 2006.

Rebuilding, modernisation and expansion of infrastructure have been going on in earnest, and many sectors of the economy have recovered from total collapse pre-2003.

Numerous state corporations that had collapsed during the Moi years have been revived and are performing profitably. The telecommunications sector is booming. Several ambitious infrastructural and other projects, which would have been seen as unattainable pipe dreams during the bland and largely stagnant Moi years, are planned or ongoing. The country’s cities and towns are also being positively renewed and transformed.

Development is also ongoing in all areas of the country including Kenya’s hitherto neglected and thus largely undeveloped semi-arid or arid north. Further, it was during the Kibaki presidency that the Constituency Development Fund, CDF, was introduced in 2003. The fund was designed to support constituency-level, grass-root development projects. It was aimed to achieve equitable distribution of development resources across regions and to control imbalances in regional development brought about by partisan politics. It targeted all constituency-level development projects, particularly those aiming to combat poverty at the grassroots. The CDF programme has facilitated the putting up of new water, health and education facilities in all parts of the country including remote areas that were usually overlooked during funds allocation in national budgets.

The president has also overseen a reduction of Kenya’s dependence on aid by western donors (which still remains significant though),with the country being increasingly funded by internally generated resources, tax revenue collection having grown tremendously during his term, and also by increasing investment, grants and loans by non-western countries, mainly Japan, People’s Republic of China and the Middle East, and to a lessor extent investment by South African, Libyan and Nigerian corporations, and even Iran.

President Kibaki is officially married to Lucy Muthoni. They together have four children: Judy Wanjiku, Jimmy Kibaki, David Kagai, and Tony Githinji. They also have three grandchildren: Joy Jamie Marie, Mwai Junior and Krystina Muthoni. Jimmy Kibaki has begun to emerge as a politician in his own right, likely to be his father’s political heir.

In 2004 the media reported that Kibaki has a second spouse allegedly married under customary law, Mary Wambui, and a daughter, Wangui Mwai. After the news broke, the State House released an unsigned statement that Kibaki’s only immediate family is his wife, Lucy and their four children. The Washington Post termed the entire scandal as a “new Kenyan soap opera”. In 2009, Kibaki, accompanied by a furious Lucy Kibaki, held a press conference to re-state to the world that he only has one wife.

President Kibaki is known to be a keen golfer and is one of the longtime members of the Muthaiga Golf Club.

He is a practicing Christian and belongs to the Roman Catholic Church.



Economy

After independence, Kenya promoted rapid economic growth through public investment, encouragement of agricultural production, and incentives for private and foreign industrial investment. Gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an annual average of 6.6% from 1963 to 1973. Agricultural production grew by 4.7% annually during the same period, stimulated by redistributing estates, diffusing new crop strains, and opening new areas to cultivation.

Between 1974 and 1993, however, Kenya’s economic performance declined. Inappropriate agricultural policies, inadequate credit, and poor international terms of trade contributed to the decline in agriculture.

In 1993, the Government of Kenya began a major programme of economic reform and liberalisation. A new minister of finance and a new governor of the Central Bank of Kenya undertook a series of economic measures with the assistance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As part of this programme, the government eliminated price controls and import licensing, removed foreign exchange controls, privatised a range of publicly owned companies, reduced the number of civil servants, and introduced conservative fiscal and monetary policies. From 1994 to 1996, Kenya’s real GDP growth rate averaged just over 4% a year.