By Abdullahi Alas
There is a peculiar species of man that flourishes in the corridors of power-the faithful retainer, the keeper of secrets, the one who absorbs the indignities of proximity to greatness without ever asking whether that greatness deserves his knees.
Lee Njiru is such a man. For forty-six years, he knelt. For forty-six years, he served. For forty-six years, he watched, he listened, he recorded, and now, in the twilight of his years, he has written a memoir that tells us everything about the psychology of serfdom and nothing about the integrity of a man.
It is a book that promises to demystify State House, to peel back the velvet curtains and reveal the machinery of power in all its grubby glory. Instead, it gives us a love letter to Moi's regime-a hagiography dressed in the tattered robes of affirmation.
Njiru served as press secretary to Jomo Kenyatta and then, for forty-three and a half years, to Daniel arap Moi. The first thing that strikes the reader of this curious volume is the moral vacuum at its heart.
Njiru poses no difficult questions about his service. He does not ask whether a man can serve a dictator and remain innocent. He does not wonder whether the salaries, the allowances, the foreign trips, the proximity to power-that heady perfume of influence-were worth the price of his soul. He simply tells us that he served, and that he served well, and that he expects recognition for his service.
Orwell's observed. "In a time of revolution, there are only two kinds of people-those who are for the revolution and those who are against it." Njiru, it seems, was for the regime, whatever the regime happened to be.
Loyalty, for Njiru, was not a moral choice but a professional obligation-like a butler who serves whichever family occupies the manor, indifferent to whether they are decent or depraved.
The silence in this book is thunderous.
In February 1984, over four days, security forces in Kenya's North Eastern Province detained, tortured, and executed hundreds-perhaps thousands-of ethnic Somalis from the Degodia clan.
It was one of the worst human rights violations in Kenyan history. Survivors describe mass graves, summary executions, systematic brutality. The government, to this day, has never fully accounted for what happened.
Lee Njiru was the director of the Presidential Press Service in 1984. He was responsible for managing President Moi's public image. He was, in the parlance of our time, the spin doctor-the man who shaped the narrative, who decided what the public would see and hear about their president. What did he know about Wagalla? When did he know it? And what did he do with that knowledge?
His memoir does not say. Not a single word. Not a sentence. Not a passing reference.
Winston Churchill, once wrote: "The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may destroy it, but there it is."
Njiru has chosen to resent the truth. He has chosen to ignore it. He has chosen, in the most profound act of moral cowardice, to pretend that it never existed.
Now, consider the man who occupies State House today.
William Ruto, the fifth president of Kenya, is a beast of the very system Njiru served so faithfully.
He was first elected Member of Parliament for Eldoret North in 199, defeating Moi's preferred candidate, no less-and served three terms until 2013. He was Minister for Home Affairs under Moi himself from August to December 2002. He served as Deputy President under Uhuru Kenyatta for ten years, from 2013 to 2022. And now he is President, leading the KK administration.
What would Njiru make of Ruto? The question is not merely rhetorical.
Both men are products of the same political culture-the culture of loyalty, of patronage, of silence in the face of excess. But where Njiru was the courtier, Ruto is the king, and the king, as we are learning, has his own stifles.
The KK administration, now in its fourth year, presents a curious spectacle. Many Kenyans experience the economy at the micro level; the cost of food, rent, transport, school fees, & healthcare. When citizens feel poorer despite official assurances of recovery, economic narratives collapse. No amount of statistical improvement can override the daily arithmetic of survival.
The parallels are uncomfortable. Njiru served a regime that committed atrocities and said nothing. Ruto leads an administration that critics say is eroding institutions and, some would argue, saying nothing about its own excesses. The culture of impunity that Njiru documented-and, by his silence, enabled-has not been abandoned by subsequent regimes. It has been rebranded. It has been repackaged. But it persists.
There is, in the final pages of Njiru's memoir, a "subtle but unmistakable note of regret." He expresses disappointment that the Moi family did not give him the recognition he feels he deserves. This, we are told, is the tragedy of his life: not that he served a dictator, not that he witnessed atrocities and said nothing, but that the dictator's children did not invite him to the funeral, seriously?
One is reminded of the court jesters of old, who would perform for their kings and expect to be remembered in the annals of the kingdom. But a jester is only as valuable as his performance, and once the king is dead, the jester is forgotten.
Njiru's tragedy is not that he was not thanked. His tragedy is that he never understood what he was thanking. He spent forty-six years in the service of power, and he emerged with his loyalty intact, his principles-whatever they were-unchanged, and his conscience untroubled.
This is not a man who has been broken by life. This is a man who has accommodated himself to life, who has made his peace with power, who has decided that the rewards of service are worth the cost of silence.
But what cost, one asks, has he paid? Not the cost of a guilty conscience, evidently. Not the cost of sleepless nights. Not the cost of wondering whether he should have spoken up, whether he could have saved lives, whether his position gave him an obligation to speak truth to power. No, the cost he complains about is the cost of not being thanked. The cost of not being remembered.
It is a lamentable spectacle. A man who stood at the center of power for four decades, who watched the machinery of state do terrible things, who was in a position to tell the truth and chose instead to serve his master, and who now complains that his master's family has not given him his due. It would be comic if it were not so tragic.
Orwell, in his essay on Gandhi, wrote: "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection but is willing to be defeated and broken up by life." Njiru has not been defeated or broken up. He has emerged from forty-six years of service with his soul intact-or rather, with whatever passes for a soul in the service of tyrants.
And what of Ruto?
The man who was once the upstart MP who defeated Moi's preferred candidate has become the president who, critics say, overruns institutions and fails to address corruption. The hustler has become the establishment. The reformer has become the status quo. The cycle continues.
Perhaps that is the true lesson of Presidents' Pressman. Not that Njiru was a bad man-he was merely a man, like so many others, who chose comfort over courage, loyalty over truth, taciturnity over speech.
But that his story is not unique. It is the story of Kenyan politics itself: a story of men who serve power, who benefit from power, who protect power, and who, in the end, are forgotten by power. The courtier kneels. The king reigns. The people suffer. And the cycle begins again.
Abdullahi Alas is a Governance Commentator & a man who never forgets Wagalla.