Kenya: The One-Party Way

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In the eight short years since independence began to explode throughout Africa, 30 former European colonial territories have become sovereign —and supposedly democratic—states.

But hardly any of them are really democratic. Forced to live as nations although their loyalties and organizations are tribal, torn by all the monstrous problems of backwardness and ignorance, Africa's new countries have found democracy far too difficult to live with. So far, at least 18 of them have effectively eliminated the opposition and inaugurated one-party rule. Few of the rest seem at all convinced that Western democracy has meaning in Africa. Last week, after eight months of independence, Kenya also set its course for the one-party way.

Jovial Host. After playing host to all members of Parliament at his home in Nairobi, Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta jovially announced that he will ask Parliament for constitutional amendments that will make Kenya a one-party republic. If Parliament refused, he added, he would call a national referendum in November. Since his Kenya African National Union party (KANU) represents the nation's two largest tribal groups, there is little chance he would lose the referendum.

The announcement only hastened the inevitable. Kenyatta has never favored the present British-inspired constitution, which gives what he considers too much power to Kenya's seven regional governments—three of which are now in the hands of the opposition Kenya African Democratic Union party (KADU). He has long believed that Kenya needs a strong central government to hold its 50 tribes together.

Clamor v. Cry. As far as Kenyatta is concerned, his own KANU supplies about all the opposition he needs, balanced as it is between his own Kikuyus and the Luo tribe of his powerful, Communist-backed Home Minister Oginga Odinga. In a tribal society, Kenyatta argues, the two-party system is unnatural. "We don't subscribe to the notion of the government and the governed in opposition to one another, one clamoring for duties and the other crying for rights." Will one-party government mean repression? For all his terrorist past, Prime Minister Kenyatta, 73, has so far gone out of his way to protect the rights of the minorities—black or white—who opposed him. He says he will not alter any constitutional rights, including individual freedom of expression and assembly. As he outlines it, the new regime will be a sort of a representative dictatorship, with the President chosen from and responsible to Parliament, which in turn would be subject to periodic national elections.