Once the flood of sanctimonious tributes ebbs after Daniel arap Moi’s burial, his true legacy will remain in the 205-page manual on how not to rule a country. Chapter and verse of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010, responds to what Moi put the country through in the 24 years he was president: it disperses power, secures human rights, shares resources, protects the environment and guarantees independent institutions. And it says unequivocally, “Never again”.

Moi’s misrule neutered parliament, turned the courts into his puppets, and the bureaucracy into his handmaid. With just a little tinkering – ironically by the man who had been his vice president and minister for finance as well as by Moi’s erstwhile lieutenants – the system he used did put Kenya on the mend, thus confirming the hypothesis that the dictator had been the problem all along.

The sense of relief at Moi’s departure from office was captured in the cartoon by Godfrey Mwampembwa, aka Gado, depicting a public notice with the former president’s caricature announcing that he was no longer authorised to transact any business on behalf of the people of Kenya. But the place of honour for first caricaturing Moi in 1990 belongs to Paul Kelemba, aka Maddo.

Moi’s narcissism drove him to flatter himself into believing that there would come a time when Kenyans would pine for his return to power. Clearly, that did not come to pass in the 18 years he was in retirement – despite the upheavals of two electoral crises that bordered on civil war and secession.

Aware of his limitations in filling founding president Jomo Kenyatta’s shoes, Moi elected instead to follow in his footsteps – the irony of following a dead man’s footsteps backwards was completely lost on him. Greatly buoyed up by the sycophancy of choristers, Moi began to demand flattery as a right; returning from a foreign trip early in his presidency, Moi demanded that everyone sing his tune “like parrots” – just as he had done while serving as Jomo Kenyatta’s vice president for 15 years.

Yet, Moi’s ascendancy to the presidency was not so much a product of his loyalty to founding President Jomo Kenyatta as it was a years-long cloak and dagger scheme choreographed by the Machiavellian Attorney General, Charles Njonjo, to manipulate the Kenyatta succession in the event of his death.

Moi’s narcissism drove him to flatter himself into believing that there would come a time when Kenyans would pine for his return to power

As it happened, the numerous attempts to stop Moi from holding office in an acting capacity for 90 days were rendered moot. Duncan Ndegwa, former Central Bank of Kenya governor, writes in his autobiography that in September 1978 there was a disagreement between Njonjo and the Secretary to the Cabinet concerning Moi’s swearing in — in the presence of the Chief Justice and Moi. In the end, Moi was sworn in as President — and not in an acting capacity as provided for in the Constitution. Within two weeks of Kenyatta’s death, the entire Cabinet pledged loyalty to Moi and endorsed his candidature. He would take oath publicly as President on 14 October 1978, nearly a full month before the 90 days transition period lapsed. Moi, with Njonjo’s help, had just executed the first coup against the Constitution. Njonjo continued to employ Edgar Hoover-style tactics to build files on public figures, which information he would use to blackmail them into silence.

Moi’s presidency started as a collegial affair between himself, State Security minister Godfrey Gitahi Kariuki and Njonjo, with the trio riding together in the presidential limousine – but some say the new boss insisted on this arrangement to avoid assassination.

Njonjo’s error of judgment – hoisting into the presidency someone he considered unfit for the office in an attempt to use him to accede to power – would come back to bury the former AG’s political ambitions. Seduced by Moi into resigning from his position as AG to join Parliament in order to assist him, Njonjo betrayed his hunger for political power and was scalped for it. Within a year, he would be ready for the big fall resulting from the 1982 failed coup d’etat, and be publicly humiliated through a judicial commission of inquiry. Although the commission found Njonjo guilty, Moi pardoned him instantly, so that he could retire to minding businesses in which the president continued to hold shares, and attending the annual dog show. Some speculate that Moi and Njonjo had a gentleman’s pact in which the former would serve as president for five years before handing over to the latter.

Analyses of the pathology of Moi’s dictatorship often identify the failed coup d’état of 1 August 1982 as the turning point in his personality. The evidence points to the contrary.

Although in 1978 Moi had freed political prisoners detained under his watch as Home Affairs minister and ostensibly on Kenyatta’s authority, he returned to the default settings when university students held demonstrations to demand that one-time vice president Jaramogi Oginga Odinga be allowed to contest the 1979 elections from which he had been barred. The following year, Moi banned the Academic Staff Union, barred external speakers from the university, and seized the passports of eight lecturers (Micere Mugo, Oki Ooko Ombaka, Michael Chege, Mukaru Ng’ang’a, Okoth Ogendo, Atieno Odhiambo, Peter Anyang-Nyong’o and Shadrack Gutto).

Moi’s ascendancy to the presidency was a years-long cloak and dagger scheme choreographed by the Machiavellian Attorney General, Charles Njonjo

The open-air theatre at Kamirithu in Limuru was banned, together with the play Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo were staging, Ngaahika Ndeenda. Ngugi and Micere fled into exile.

Later, Moi publicly excoriated linguist Al Amin Mazrui, educational psychologist Edward Oyugi, sociologist George Katama Mkangi, lawyer Willy Mutunga and historians Mukaru Ng’ang’a and Maina wa Kinyatti for teaching “bad ideas”. They were all either arrested, jailed or detained without trial, or forced into exile. It would mark the beginning of the formal decline of the university as a centre of learning and ideas.

The roll of those arrested, convicted and jailed on trumped up charges, or detained without trial, included writers, journalists and thinkers like Wahome Mutahi, Njuguna Mutonya, Paul Amina and Otieno MakOnyango.

In 1980, the army interned the local population in a school field resulting in the death of 3,000 people in what came to be known as the Garissa Massacre. A repeat performance at the Wajir Airstrip resulted in the Wagalla Massacre with 5,000 casualties.

By the end of June 1982, Parliament had removed the security of tenure for judges and the Attorney General, leading to the resignation of two Commonwealth judges — and the country legally became a one-party state. It was believed that at least three coups d’état had been planned for August 1982. By then, Moi already fit the textbook definition of a dictator.

Published memoirs by five people at the centre of government – deputy spy chief Bart Joseph Kibathi, politician Njenga Karume and heads of civil service Jeremiah Kiereini, Simeon Nyachae and Duncan Ndegwa – suggest that Moi knew about the planned August 1, 1982 coup attempt but allowed it to go ahead in order to strengthen his hand in changing leadership in the armed services. Subsequently, Moi disbanded the air force and changed the leadership of the army and the police, stocking them with his co-ethnics. It is ironical that some of the co-ethnics whom he appointed to critical institutions had the most progressive effect on them: General Daudi Tonje, whose regulations continue to guide military service; Brigadier Wilson Boinnet, who rebranded the National Security Intelligence Service; and Micah Cheserem, who led reform at the Central Bank of Kenya in the aftermath of the export compensation scandal.

Moi, with Njonjo’s help, had just executed the first coup against the Constitution

Moi was easily threatened by ideas, and was loath to engage what he termed as “foreign ideologies”. He was mortally afraid of political challenge and competition. Since the 1960 pre-independence election in which he defeated his brother-in-law Eric Bomet in Baringo with 5,225 votes to Bomet’s 503, Moi had dodged every opportunity to obtain a popular mandate, contenting himself with being “elected” unopposed until he was forced to confront his opponents in the 1992 and 1997 elections. In both instances, he slipped through to the presidency with only a third of the vote, even after committing a host of election irregularities.

Notwithstanding Moi’s aversion to new ideas and intellectuals generally, he surrounded himself with pliable intellectuals and left a large imprint on Kenya’s education sector. He appropriated the choral music genre, infiltrated universities through the establishment of district students’ associations, introduced a quota system in admissions to secondary schools and banned the umbrella students’ body, thus entrenching tribalism.

His bold education investment through the Kabarak schools and university, and the change in the education system to respond to the country’s needs as well as expanding higher learning by opening up universities, have all had mixed results. For example, the free milk programme that encouraged school attendance and retention was also used to brainwash children into reciting a loyalty pledge, and collapsed the Kenya Co-operative Creameries.

His undertaking of huge infrastructure projects to expand air transport, increase electricity generation, and his commitment to environmental conservation through tree planting and building gabions is counterbalanced by massive corruption, the proliferation of white elephants, and land grabbing in the country’s water towers.

In 1980, the army interned the local population in a school field resulting in the death of 3,000 people in what came to be known as the Garissa Massacre

A man who never enjoyed a popular mandate outside his Baringo birthplace where his original name – Kapkorios – was lost, Moi seemed easily threatened and reacted by capturing, personalising and predating on the instruments of state – the courts, the police service, the academy, the military, the bureaucracy, the political party.

Significantly, Moi appropriated the treasury and converted it to his personal use to buy and maintain political loyalties or to punish those he perceived as dissenters. Underneath the façade of churchgoer piety, public generosity and the common touch, lurked a cold and vindictive megalomaniac fueled by an insatiable hunger for power.

The assassinations of Foreign minister Robert Ouko, Catholic priest Fr Anthony Kaiser and student leader Solomon Muruli are often laid at Moi’s doorstep, and few others. Yet, many watchers of Jomo Kenyatta’s last years acknowledge his frailty and unavailability, but stop short of assigning blame for the muscular actions that took place in that time, such as the assassinations of Pio Gama Pinto, Tom Joseph Mboya and Josiah Mwangi Kariuki. These deaths were conveniently laid at Kenyatta’s feet when it was Moi who was Home Affairs Minister and the greatest beneficiary of the victims’ absence from the political arena.

Four years before Mboya’s death, when Kenyatta suffered a mild stroke, and there was great concern about his succession, Moi and Njonjo schemed to create a constitutional amendment to raise the age of presidential eligibility to 40 years, up from 35. Mboya was 37.

Published memoirs by five people at the centre of government suggest that Moi knew about the August 1 1982 coup attempt

Mboya’s assassination in 1969 was believed to have been orchestrated by a “big man”, whom everyone assumed was Kenyatta. No one has explored whether anybody else might have been the “big man”. Moi’s car was stoned when he attempted to pay his respects to Mboya’s widow two days later. Two days after that incident, Moi issued an incongruous statement blaming the death on the Chinese working in concert with “a local party”, meaning the Kenya People’s Union.

In the case of popular legislator Josiah Mwangi Kariuki’s death, Moi issued a statement in Parliament claiming that the politician was in Zambia when in fact his post-mortem examination had already been concluded. Kenyatta took much heat for the killing of Pinto, Mboya and JM Kariuki, but the greatest beneficiary of Kenya losing three leading political giants is not too difficult to imagine.

Under Moi, security services normalised the use of torture and other human rights abuses. The highrise Nyayo House in Nairobi was constructed in 1979 with custom-made torture chambers in the basement, which would be put to chilling use during the years of Moi’s untrammelled power. Numerous families were torn apart by the effects of detention without trial, enforced disappearances and torture.

Handpicked by colonial authorities in 1950 for civics training to become a moderate leader, Moi initially declined to represent Rift Valley in the Legislative Council but later accepted after Moses Mudavadi and Enock Kiprotich Ngulat turned down nominations for the job. In the first electoral contest to represent Rift Valley in the Legislative Council, Moi won 4,000 votes against John ole Tameno (750) and Justus ole Tipis (1,500).

Moi appropriated the treasury and converted it to his personal use to buy and maintain political loyalties

Moi had started out as founder of the regionalist party, the Kenya African Democratic Union, which placed emphasis on human rights. His defection to the centralist Kenya African National Union when Kadu dissolved exposed his commitment as only skin-deep. The defection earned him the plush position of Home Affairs minister, previously held by Vice President Oginga Odinga, from where he harassed his predecessor into resignation.

Some have claimed that Moi sold out on claims for community lands in the Rift Valley in exchange for power. Settlement in the Rift Valley would reemerge as a sticking point, leading to the ethnic and political clashes that marked the darkest periods in Moi’s reign, and the Moi who had warned non-Kalenjin against buying land in Rift Valley would oppose devolution, saying it was a recipe for breaking up the country. His political scions continued the animus through micro-aggressions against the new order.

Moi defenders shy away from interrogating his nationalism but never question his patriotism in the plunder and pilferage of public resources that led to the near-collapse of the economy. Curiously, audit firm Kroll Associates, commissioned by Moi’s successor Mwai Kibaki to investigate corruption in Kenya, found that Moi and his acolytes had stashed Sh140 billion outside the country. A significant amount of money and assets was reportedly surrendered to the government when Moi left power in December 2002.

Since the 1960 pre-independence election in which he defeated his brother-in-law Eric Bomet in Baringo, Moi had dodged every opportunity to obtain a popular mandate

In the 40 years of mediocrity that Moi gave Kenya in service as a member of the Legislative Council, vice president and president, he erected monuments to prop up his fragile ego and gave his name to numerous institutions, but none was large enough to fill the void his rule had created in the nation’s psyche.

Moi considered himself a peacemaker, and intervened in conflicts from Angola and Mozambique to Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan. His greatest achievement in the field of diplomacy remains the revival of the East African Community, and the creation of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Drought and Desertification, but even here, he had less than stellar results in countries where his personal loyalties clashed with his role as mediator. Moi’s friendship with Juvenal Habiryamana is believed to have influenced his suggestion of a two-state solution for the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi.

His paternalism in Uganda soured relations with Yoweri Museveni when the latter deposed General Tito Okello despite a signed peace agreement and his sheltering of Somalia’s Mohamed Siad Barre complicated peacemaking in the neighbouring nation.

South Sudan, which was to be the jewel in Moi’s crown of peacemaking efforts, has come apart at the seams. Moi adopted a problematic posture with regard to apartheid South Africa. He received Frederick de Klerk and broke sanctions to allow South African Airways flights to Nairobi, prompting African National Congress’s Nelson Mandela to fly in and seek him out at his Kabarak home.

Under Moi, security services normalised the use of torture and other human rights abuses

Moi’s reentry into Kenyan politics to endorse Kibaki in the 2007 election despite legal bars to his participation from retirement resulted in political rapture that precluded him as peacemaker and mediator when Kenya went bust.

His departure from power opened a floodgate of legal suits for torture and other human rights abuses, land seizures and dispossession, but there has been no formal accounting for economic crimes after the judicial commission of inquiry into the Goldenberg export compensation scandal. It is speculated that when Moi visited Kibaki in a London hospital following the latter’s accident on the campaign trail in 2002, a pact was struck to not prosecute Moi if he allowed free elections that year.

Credit is due to Moi, though, for his ability to adapt to change. Here was a Cold War politician who found his footing in the new world order confronting terrorism and plural politics. The self-styled professor of politics found himself out of his depth in the global arena, and was at the mercy of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at the end of his rule. It is a tragedy that in spite of his deeply felt anti-imperialist sentiment, he mortgaged the country and left it at the mercy of the IMF and the World Bank on his way out.

Even the worst dictators have a human side to them – they love music, play with grandchildren, eat roast maize by the roadside — but it is hardly enough to humanise the evil that they commit.

Moi separated from his wife, Lena, in 1975 and lived as a bachelor until his death, but had reportedly reconciled with her before she died. His biographer, Andrew Morton writes that, with the exception of Gideon, he was disappointed in his children and it is remarkable that he did not attend the burial of his eldest son, ace rally driver Jonathan Toroitich.

South Sudan, which was to be the jewel in Moi’s crown of peacemaking efforts, has come apart at the seams

Books on Moi reveal little of the man, but Wanjiru Waithaka’s fictional account, Duel in the Savanna, portrays a man not too dissimilar to Moi in the character of Zack Dwanje. It is so far the only known speculation on Moi’s personal life. He is survived by his children, Doris, Jennifer, Raymond, Philip, John Mark, Gideon and June.

Kanu, the party Moi took over, is in a shambles, with 13 legislators out of 349 in the national leadership. The country is on a trajectory opposite to where he had been taking it. The harambee, his channel for generosity, has become a conduit for corruption.

A man of numerous contradictions, Moi thrived in randomness – hiring and firing people over the radio, making policy pronouncements by the roadside, and creating the appearance of popular participation in an administration he ran on a very tight leash. If his life leaves behind a lesson, it is in the codification of the Kenyan constitution so that the country need never again be subject to the whims of one person.