Geza Ulole
JF-Expert Member
- Oct 31, 2009
- 59,062
- 79,089
Kenya's coup conspiracy
Monday, May 24, 2004 — updated on June 21, 2020
Mancham, a regular visitor to the Kenya waves Kanu's one-finger salute as he departed from Nairobi in 1972 to the amusement of Attorney General Charles Njonjo; Left, how the Daily Nation reported the coup attempt.
Every time he overflies Kenya's air space, 65-year-old James Mancham finds himself unable to suppress a flood of emotions. The land beneath him reminds him of a past he wishes to forget forever.
The grey-haired globe-trotter is no ordinary mortal. He is the first President of the Seychelles, the idyllic Indian Ocean archipelago.
Though situated a thousand miles from the Kenyan coastline, on two occasions Kenya has found itself right in the middle of the furnace that is Seychellois politics.
Mancham, now a self-proclaimed messenger of peace and reconciliation, was the president when the islands gained independence from Britain in June 1976. But he was overthrown after only a year in power by his Prime Minister, Albert Rene.
Rene remained at the helm until a month ago when he voluntarily retired to hand over power to his long-time ally, James Michel.
At the time of his retirement, Rene was the longest serving African head of state after Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Like the Libyan strongman, he was a card-carrying socialist who presided over a state-controlled economy that earned Seychelles the tag "the Cuba of Africa". Rene was also known for his lengthy speeches – at times lasting six hours – not unlike like his mentors Gaddafi and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Mancham was on an Easter holiday in the Seychelles capital of Mahe in April 1977 when he received a cable from Kenya's President Jomo Kenyatta. The Kenyan leader had an urgent message which had to be delivered to him personally by his special envoy, Bruce Mckenzie. Kenyatta's choice of an emissary was as intriguing as the message he was delivering.
Though a member of Kenyatta's independence Cabinet, Mckenzie had long relinquished all government positions, including his nomination into Parliament, citing bad health and the need to concentrate on private business.
But, as would be revealed years later, bad health and business were not the reason for his action. He had been moonlighting for international spy organisations – Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad and Bureau of State Security (Boss) of apartheid South Africa.
M Mckenzie had found it increasingly difficult to double over as a senior government official and valuable contact for the spy networks engaged in Cold War skulduggery. But he had remained a key member of the Kenyatta court and among the less-than-a-dozen who would drop in at State House without an appointment.
Because of his connections in the underworld of espionage, Mckenzie often stumbled on information classified even to Kenyatta's Cabinet, hence his unrestricted passage to the old man's sanctum.
On this sunny Easter day, Mckenzie was lunching with Mancham at State House in Mahe when his guest delivered Kenyatta's message. Mckenzie, not known for pleasantries and much courtesy, went straight to the point.
"You'll have to do in this man before he does you in," he said in reference to his host's second-in-command, Prime Minister Albert Rene.
As he pointed his fork at his host, Mckenzie laid bare his prescription. "What I am saying, Jimmy, is this: At 2 in the morning you must send someone to shoot the bastard."
"What?" asked a surprised Mancham.
To which Mckenzie replied without batting an eyelid: "Oh yes. At 4 (once Rene has been killed) get some of your most trusted police officers to plant some guns on his colleagues. After all the bastards have been arrested, you appoint one of your favourite lawyers as the magistrate to try the case."
As he leaned back on his chair, a grinning Mckenzie dropped the end-line: "And you make sure your magistrate is Mr Maximum!"
Mancham says that although he knew neither President Kenyatta nor Bruce Mckenzie to be a fool or likely to give such a warning without a good reason, he still found the prescribed "final solution" too unpalatable.
"Much as I had a mistrust for Rene's loyalty and commitment to the coalition," he recalls, "killing him had never been a conceivable option."
Three months after the Mckenzie visit, Mancham was overthrown by Rene while on a visit to London.
Fresh investigations by the Nation now disclose that Mckenzie had not been talking out of turn. His visit had come after three high-level consultations in Kenya. The first was held at the Nakuru State House in early 1977. In attendance were President Kenyatta, Mckenzie himself, Foreign Affairs minister Munyua Waiyaki and Attorney-General Charles Njonjo.
Others were head of Civil Service Geoffrey Kareithi, Foreign Affairs Permanent Secretary Leonard Kibinge and intelligence chief James Kanyotu.
At the meeting Mckenzie and Kanyotu gave a detailed brief of guerrilla training of Seychellois youth in neighbouring Tanzania to overthrew Mancham and instal Rene as the President.
The plot, Kenyatta was told, had the full backing of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere.
A source at the meeting told the Nation last week that Kenyatta had carefully listened to the brief and then asked: "How do we help our friend Mancham?"
According to the source, Njonjo and Mckenzie strongly believed that Mancham should be prevailed upon to arrest Rene right away. To make sure there was no trouble on the islands as he did this, the two proposed, a contingent of Kenyan security men would be flown to the islands.
Mckenzie and Njonjo, recalls the source, were quick to assure Kenyatta that Britain and the US would back Kenya as long as the plan was aimed at stopping the left-leaning Rene in his tracks.
Waiyaki and Kibinge were strongly opposed to any intervention by Kenya, arguing that Kenya, which was at the time having trouble with neighbours Tanzania, Uganda and Somalia, would be "biting more than it could swallow" in getting entangled in the Seychelles affairs.
On hearing arguments from both sides, Kenyatta called off the meeting without making any decision.
The second meeting followed soon. It was largely informal and held at Kenyatta's Gatundu home. Mckenzie and Njonjo had suddenly dropped in to discuss what they called an urgent matter – the looming trouble in the Seychelles.
But as it was typical of him when he was not sure what he wanted done, says the source, the President asked that Kareithi and Waiyaki immediately be called to Gatundu. Once again, the arguments had gone back and forth on the merits and demerits of Kenya's direct intervention in the Seychelles.
Waiyaki, who was about to attend an OAU summit meeting in Mauritius, which is next door to the Seychelles, said Kenya would get into a lot of trouble at the continental meeting if it got involved in "any mess" in the Seychelles.
Njonjo and Mckenzie, on the other hand, strongly dismissed Waiyaki's argument on grounds that Tanzania was already "creating a mess" there and the OAU doing nothing about it. Once again, Kenyatta declined to make a decision.
Finally, a third meeting was held at the State House, Nakuru, in early April 1977, where Kenyatta finally made the decision to send Mckenzie to the Seychelles.
A source who attended the first two meetings, but was left out in the third, recalls that Kenyatta must have been arm-twisted by Njonjo, Mckenzie and "some external force" into finally making a decision.
"Njonjo and Mckenzie had many tactics to make Mzee act in their favour. They must have used one of the tactics to convince him," he says.
But why the interest by Kenya and Tanzania in the faraway Seychelles? It all goes to the global politics at the time the two East African countries got their independence in 1963. The East-West rivalry was at its peak. Kenya had taken a pro-West stand as her neighbour looked East. Soon the superpower rivalry would be duplicated in the region.
Not a long while before, the world had blinked at the prospect of a nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet Union had plotted to build a missile launching facility in Cuba, which is only a stone's throw from the US coastline. The US had threatened to go nuclear on its rival if the plan went ahead. The Soviets withdrew, but not without the plot to have the last word by constructing the Berlin Wall.
After the showdown in the Pacific and Europe, the two superpowers turned their attention to the Indian Ocean, a vital world oil route and buffer zone between them.
The Seychelles, strategically placed in the ocean and then under British rule, came into their focus. The Americans were first on the scorecard when they built a satellite tracking station in Mahe. The station was exactly halfway around the world to match a similarly positioned facility at Palo Alto, California.
They followed this by setting up the biggest naval base outside the American soil on the Diego Garcia islands, next door to the Seychelles. Here, the Americans placed a rapid-deployment force with missiles directed at Moscow.
Feeling outmanoeuvred, the Russians, with the support of China and Cuba, turned to supporting underground insurgency and guerrilla warfare in the Indian Ocean neighbourhood. Kenya and Tanzania found themselves in the eye of the needle as far as the Seychelles was concerned.
The first showdown between the two East African neighbours over the Seychelles came in 1974 when Tanzania pushed for the OAU's admission and recognition of Rene's Seychelles People's United Party (SPUP) as a liberation movement at a summit in Algiers. SPUP was fighting for independence alongside Mancham's Social Democratic Party (SDP).
The Tanzanian motion came as an ambush to Kenya, which was rooting for the Mancham party. A former permanent secretary who was in the Kenyan delegation to Algiers, recalls Vice-President Moi and Dr Mungai hurriedly leaving the plenary session to telephone Kenyatta back home as soon as Nyerere moved a motion for the recognition of Rene's party.
"Nyerere had taken us by surprise," recalls the former PS. "We were for Mancham. He was for Rene. We could not just vote without consultation."
After talking with Kenyatta, it was agreed that Kenya vote for Nyerere's motion as doing otherwise would be interpreted that Kenya was hostile to liberation movements on the continent.
But as soon as the Kenyan delegation was back home, an urgent meeting was convened at State House, Mombasa, to find ways to stop Nyerere in his tracks. The meeting was informal, attended only by Kenyatta, State minister Mbiyu Koinange, Moi, Dr Mungai, Kareithi and the chairman of Lonrho East African, Udi Gecaga.
At the talks, it was agreed that Kenya invite Mancham so that he could be given the opportunity to rubbish Nyerere and Rene.
In June 1974, Mancham arrived at Embakasi Airport in pomp and style. Though only a leader of a party in a colony, Mancham was given a presidential welcome. To receive him was Dr Mungai and the presidential outriders.
At a press conference organised by the Presidential Press Unit at Nairobi Intercontinental Hotel the same day, Mancham hit out at the OAU for voting to recognise "political opportunists and nobodies in my country." He also took issue with Tanzania for allowing the party to open an office in Dar es Salaam, saying the office was a hide-out for propaganda and sabotage.
The following day Mancham was hosted to lunch as a state guest at the Hilton. At the gathering of who-is-who in Nairobi, Dr Mungai said Mancham had the full blessings of Kenyatta "to steer Seychelles into a peaceful and prosperous neighbour."
In the afternoon, the guest was flown to Mombasa for a courtesy call on the President. Mancham remembers Kenyatta's mental faculties as "certainly failing, but his strength of will and powerful personality still obvious."
Soon after the visit, plans got into top gear to grant the Seychelles independence from Britain. In elections held in January 1975, Mancham's SDP party narrowly defeated Rene's SPUP. But because of the narrow margin and aware that neither party could guarantee stability on the islands if it went it alone, Britain refused to hand over power to Mancham and began a process of persuading the two parties to get into a coalition.
In the first arrangement brokered in June 1975, Mancham and Rene joined hands in an interim coalition government. Mancham became the Prime Minister and Rene the minister for Lands and Works. The British Governor of the Seychelles would be in charge of Security and Foreign Affairs.
After a year, the experiment was found to be working. Britain decided to withdraw altogether in June 1976 to make room for a coalition independent government. Mancham became the island's first President and Albert Rene the Prime Minister.
But Kenya's Foreign Affairs minister at the time, Dr Munyua Waiyaki, argues that the power-sharing arrangement was like a marriage of water and oil.
"I could not see it working right from the word go," he recalls. "Mancham was a capitalist and Rene a socialist. They were definitely bound to clash."
But Mancham did not see it that way. As soon as he was declared President, he joined the jetset of the world's most glamorous. Today he would be in London in a yacht with world billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, tomorrow he would be dining with the King of Japan before hopping for an OAU summit in Morocco the next day.
In the Seychelles, they nicknamed him Vasco da Gama the traveller, the same name that would be given to President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe in the 1990s.
Mancham was accused also of acting the international playboy because of his contacts with beauties all over the world. The playboy label would later be drummed over and over again as one of the main reasons for his overthrow.
"He had become an international Casanova and an embarrassment to the Seychelles," Rene was to tell the world on the day he ousted Mancham.
Meanwhile, intelligence reports continued to gather in Nairobi of an imminent coup in the Seychelles. A retired PS says Kenya was getting inundated with reports that Nyerere was plotting a coup.
"As we had our own problems with Nyerere, we had to keep a close eye on him. It is in the process that we learnt that he was plotting to put his friend Rene in power in the Seychelles," he recalls.
Just about the time Mancham was overthrown in June 1977, Kenya and Tanzania were locking horns over the management of the East African Community.
Nyerere had closed the border with Kenya as the war of words between the two countries intensified. In the Kenyan parliament, firebrand legislator George Anyona tabled documents to prove that Njonjo and Mckenzie were working to sabotage the community's institutions. The Tanzanian press dubbed Kenya a man-eat-man society as Njonjo hit back that Tanzania was a man-eat-nothing society.
While attending an EAC council of ministers meeting in Arusha in May 1977, Njonjo told the then Kenyan minister for Community Affairs, Dr Robert Ouko, not to bother about the community as its days were numbered. But so were those of his friend Mancham as the President of the Seychelles.
The following month – on June 5, 1977 – Mancham, Njonjo and Vice-President Moi were in London as guests of the Queen to mark the silver jubilee of her coronation. The three were booked in presidential suites in Savoy Hotel.
In two days, Mancham would be honoured by making a replying speech to British Prime Minister James Callaghan at the Commonwealth heads of state summit.
But at about 3.45am, the telephone in Mancham's suite rang. He reached for it with a little anger at the morning disturbance.
"President Mancham?" the caller came through. "Sorry to bother you, but your friend Adnan Khashoggi is frantically trying to get in touch. Please call him urgently at his Paris suite."
Though a close friend, Mancham had not known the tycoon to call Presidents at such ungodly hours of the night, hence the shiver of apprehension with which he lifted the receiver once Khashoggi was through.
Khashoggi went straight to the point, just like Mckenzie had in a conversation at State House in Mahe, three months earlier. "I am sorry to wake you up, but there has been a coup in your country."
Numb with shock, Mancham said: "Adnan, this is no time for a joke."
Indeed, it was not a joke. Khashoggi had received the news from the captain of his yacht docked in Mahe. Rene, with the help of Tanzanian soldiers, had taken over the government in the Seychelles.
Back in Nairobi from London, Moi, Njonjo and Waiyaki, who had represented Kenya at both the Queen's function and the Commonwealth summit, went straight to State House, Nakuru, to brief Kenyatta on their tour and, most importantly, to discuss the latest development in the Seychelles.
A source recalls Njonjo almost banging the table as he told Waiyaki: "See now what has happened. We told you so!"
A revenge plan would soon be worked out behind Waiyaki's back. Rene had to be taught a lesson, it was decided.
Source: Nation Africa
==========
MY TAKE
I sometimes find some of reporting from Kunyaland as salted as though they presented themselves to be prior informed none of their plots ever worked during the cold war encounters with Nyerere.
