After my release from detention, I met Moi in a meeting called by Kenneth Matiba and attended by Mwai Kibaki and G.G. Kariuki — then a powerful team. They assured me there would be no rigging if I was still interested in vying for the Nakuru North parliamentary seat, which I was — and which was held by Kihika Kimani.
After I won the seat in the 1979 elections, G.G. Kariuki, who emerged as a powerful figure in the first years of the Moi presidency, invited me to his home where he delivered to me an offer to be a Cabinet minister.
I accepted but asked to be a backbencher for one year to raise questions in Parliament for my Nakuru North constituents.
But after one year, I and Moi’s one-man, one-party dictatorship were completely incompatible. President Moi had transformed his government from a possible democracy to a fearful dictatorship.
Shortly after elections, Moi invited me and my wife to his Kabarak home where we had a sumptuous early morning breakfast.
After eating, Moi asked me to stop raising land issues in Parliament because the government had no land to give the poor. He said the only land there was belonged to Kikuyu and Kalenjin elites from whom he could not take the land.
I told Moi land was one reason Kenyans fought for independence and failure to give poor people land could make his government more unpopular than the colonial one.
By the time the Moi party, Kanu, lost the elections in 2002, his government was more unpopular than the colonial government.
When I told Moi that people wanted him to be the Joshua that would take them to Canaan, after President Kenyatta had taken them out of Pharaoh’s oppression in Egypt, taken them across the Red Sea of the Mau Mau war but left them in the desert of abject poverty when he died, Moi completely refused to identify himself as Joshua and only took his family and a few people to Canaan.
He warned me against calling for land reform, which freedom fighters had fought for in the struggle for independence.
Rather than appreciate my support for his call to lower the price of land to 500 shillings per acre, Moi warned me not to arouse people from their slumber of ignorance or I would be taken to slumber myself — “usiamshe walalao au utalala wewe”.
It became clear he had no ambition to move Kenya from the Third World to the First World.
Instead of doing everything to take Kenya to the First World, Moi’s ambition as was that of Kenyatta before him, was to stealthily, and in the dark, take his family and a few friends to the Canaan of ill-gained riches, while leaving masses of poor people in the desert of abject poverty.
Growing up, and later, when I went to Cornell University in the US, it became quite clear that under President Kenyatta, we had won not independence with democracy, but self-rule without freedom.
And instead of getting leaders who would take us to the promised land we had only substituted white masters with black masters who were completely unacceptable.
When I returned to Kenya and thought of where to start the struggle for democracy, I chose journalism. And though Kenyan leadership bragged of being democratic, when I exposed real problems in a weekend column in the Sunday Post, the police would not fail to pay me a visit. Later the Sunday Post was bankrupted with over-taxation, and with J.M. Kariuki assassinated, it became clear to me that to fight for poor people, I had to go to Parliament.
While in detention, Kenyatta died and Moi, whom I thought might become our saviour refused to become Joshua. And though he protected me against rigging in the 1979 elections, soon, I became convinced that rather than being our saviour, Moi would be our oppressor.
Under Moi, Parliament did not solve problems. It needed liberation from tyranny.
Instead of being a tool of liberation, Parliament was a victim and instrument of dictatorship.
As for me, I was under more tyranny as an MP than I was as an ordinary person. Police watched over me 24-7 wherever I went, including parliament.
Worst, I have never seen more scared MPs than when Parliament was changing the Constitution to make Kenya a de jure one party state. Threatened with detention without trial, MPs simply choked with fear.