Flaws in the Showcase

By George Russell

A revolt reveals dangerous tensions in black Africa's model state

The sense of strain and anxiety lingered ominously. Banks and government offices were open, but workers and shoppers who normally thronged the downtown streets of Nairobi (pop. about 970,000) were rushing for home by midafternoon to observe a dusk-to-dawn curfew, leaving the city center a ghost town. Blocks of shops in the downtown area were boarded up, concealing the shattered windows and vacant shelves left behind by an orgy of looting. Occasionally, sprawled corpses could be seen on city streets, evidence that a tough government crackdown was still in progress in one of black Africa's most pro-Western and pro-capitalist countries. All told, at least 129 Kenyans were dead and an additional 100 missing last week after the suppression of a bizarre coup that, though it failed, cracked the veneer of Kenyan stability, which has endured during 19 years of independence.

The strange and violent 72-hour outburst beginning on Aug. 1 was led by discontented enlisted members of the country's 2,200-member air force in an effort to overthrow the government of President Daniel arap Moi, 57. It came as a particular shock to Kenyans, who are proud of their country's reputation as a model of African capitalism and stable black self-rule in the midst of a region of turbulence. Suddenly, Kenya was revealed as a country racked, beneath its placid surface, by savage and dangerous political and economic tensions. Says Peter Frank, manager of the Hilton Hotel in downtown Nairobi: "The magic that was Kenya disappeared on a Sunday morning."

Save for its ferocity, the abortive coup might have been dismissed as an aberration. The rebel enlisted men did not appear to have any ideological motivation, and many were members of the Kikuyu tribe, which dominates the country's sole political party, the Kenya African National Union (K.A.N.U.). When the insurgents seized Nairobi's Voice of Kenya radio station, they announced the overthrow of Moi's "corrupt and dictatorial" government in the name of a shadowy National Redemption Council. The airmen backed their denunciations with recordings of Caribbean reggae tunes and Viennese waltzes.

What gave the clumsy power grab more importance, however, was that the airmen were almost immediately joined by students from the University of Nairobi and by hordes of ragged shantytown dwellers, who went on a rampage of looting and destruction. They proceeded to plunder everything that they could carry away from the stores of downtown Nairobi's predominantly Asian retailers (estimated losses due to the looting: $50 million). Recalls one eyewitness to the destructive orgy: "Guys were running around stuffing money into their pants, and when their pockets were full they stuck the money in their underpants."

Within six hours loyalists from the 12,500-member Kenyan army and the 1,800-member General Service Unit (a paramilitary police force) rallied to beat back the rebels and began to restore order. To be safe, Moi finally placed virtually every man in Kenya's air force under arrest.

Much of Moi's trouble may be of his own making. After he was elected in 1979 as the successor to Kenya's legendary founding father Jomo Kenyatta, the new President was praised by observers for his relatively liberal approach to politics. But in the past six months Moi has shown an increasingly authoritarian bent. He has ordered the detention, without charges, of seven people, including four Nairobi University lecturers, presumably for expressing reservations about his rule, and the lawyer who took up their case. In June, after the country's most prominent left-wing tribal leader, Oginga Odinga (a member of Kenya's second-largest tribe, the Luo), who is known as "Mr. Double O," reportedly threatened to form an opposition socialist party, Moi rammed through a constitutional amendment converting K.A.N.U.'s de facto one-party rule in Kenya to formal status.

Moreover, Kenya's $7 billion economy, long the strongest in East Africa, is in bad shape. At the root of the problem is the Kenyan birth rate of at least 3.9%, the world's highest, compared with .7% in the U.S. Only 15% of the country's land is arable, and, to make matters worse, the government's agriculture program has badly faltered. As a result, Kenya, once self-sufficient in food production, has become a chronic importer of expensive grains, including the daily staple, corn. Prices for the country's traditional exports (coffee, tea, livestock products) have drastically fallen. Kenya is expected to run a balance of payments deficit of as much as $1 billion this year. Per capita income, only about $400 annually, is declining.

Moi put into effect drastic austerity measures, including import restrictions and foreign exchange controls. Nonetheless, the stores of Asian traders in Nairobi were still full of luxury imports available to the economic elite and the more blatantly corrupt members of Moi's own government. Warns one Nairobi businessman: "Unless the government does something drastic to improve the situation, all hell is going to break loose."

Diplomatic analysts, especially those in Washington, were still expressing relief last week at the Moi government's survival. Among other things, the Kenyan port of Mombasa is a strategic port of call for the U.S. Indian Ocean fleet. Kenya gets $79.5 million a year in military and economic aid from Washington, and U.S. technicians are currently dredging Mombasa's harbor to make it a more effective base of operations for the Rapid Deployment Force. Warns one U.S. expert on Kenya: "We can take heart that the constitutional government restored order, but we can't blind ourselves to the economic problems." Neither can Moi. But in his tough putdown of the rebellion, he seemed to be signaling that Kenya's problems would be addressed by increasing authoritarianism.

With reporting by Marsh Clark/Nairobi

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