How Moi Quietly Prepared for Kenyatta’s Death a Decade Before It Happened

The Secret Plan for Kenyatta’s Death That Shaped Moi’s Rise

How Moi Secretly Planned Jomo Kenyatta’s Funeral Ten Years Before He Died

In April 1968, Jomo Kenyatta collapsed at the coast. He had suffered a stroke in Mombasa and lay unconscious for three days. When he finally came around, the men closest to him quietly accepted something they had never allowed themselves to say out loud. Their president was mortal.

That moment of reckoning set in motion one of the most secretive operations in Kenya’s post-independence history, a decade-long plan to manage Kenyatta’s death before it happened.

Agriculture Minister Bruce McKenzie moved first. A white Kenyan who served in Kenyatta’s cabinet while also working as an agent for British and Israeli intelligence, McKenzie was uniquely positioned to bring in outside help without raising suspicion. He approached British High Commissioner Sir Edward Peck and made the case plainly. Kenya needed a contingency plan, not just for the funeral, but for everything that would follow. The British agreed and quietly brought in Commonwealth Office officials to help draft it.

The plan was stamped Top Secret and titled Contingency Plan for Arrangements in the Event of the President’s Serious Illness or Death.

McKenzie proposed that only a small circle within government should know. That circle included Vice President Daniel arap Moi, Attorney General Charles Njonjo, Dr Njoroge Mungai who was Kenyatta’s personal physician and a cabinet minister, and Colonel J.R. Anderson, the Chief of Staff at Defence Headquarters in Nairobi. The British involvement was kept from all of them. McKenzie presented the draft as entirely his own work.

Kenyatta himself was told nothing. As McKenzie put it at the time, any suggestion that he could not be long in this world might upset him.

The funeral plan was elaborate. Upon the President’s death, his body would be taken to his home in Gatundu for embalming. It would then lie in state at State House Nairobi for three days before a full state funeral on the sixth day. The service would be held at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, with burial at a consecrated site to be officially named Kenyatta’s Shrine. A special coffin was to be secretly built in London. A qualified embalmer was to be kept on standby, ready to fly to Nairobi at short notice. Street maps, photographs, and layout plans of Gatundu, State House, the church, and the burial site were all taken to London for the planning process.

But the funeral was only part of the problem. The succession was the real powder keg.

Kenyatta had named Daniel arap Moi as his Vice President in January 1967, but Moi was never truly accepted by the men who surrounded Kenyatta. His Kikuyu inner circle, the group that would later be known as the Kiambu Mafia, treated him with open contempt. They had their own candidate in mind. Dr Njoroge Mungai, a Harvard-educated physician and longtime Kenyatta loyalist, was being quietly positioned as the long-term successor. In their thinking, Moi would serve as a 90-day caretaker after Kenyatta died and then step aside. The constitution would take care of the rest.

On June 19, 1968, McKenzie convened a meeting with Moi and Mungai to present the funeral draft. Six days later, parliament passed a constitutional amendment that entrenched exactly the arrangement the inner circle wanted. Under the new provision, when the President died, the Vice President would assume office on an acting basis for 90 days, after which a general election would be held. The assumption was that Mungai would win that election and the presidency would remain in Kikuyu hands.

What the Kiambu Mafia did not account for was time.

Kenyatta did not die on anyone’s schedule. He held on for another decade, outliving the plans made for him, surviving the coffin built for him in London, and watching the political ground shift beneath everyone’s feet. Tom Mboya, who had also been seen as a potential successor, was assassinated in Nairobi in July 1969. By the mid-1970s, attempts were made to amend the constitution again specifically to block Moi from the succession, but those efforts failed. Moi had spent his years as Vice President carefully building alliances across the country and consolidating his position.

On August 22, 1978, Kenyatta died in his sleep at State House Mombasa. He was in his mid-eighties. The plan that had been drawn up ten years earlier was set in motion. But the succession it produced was not the one his inner circle had designed.

Daniel arap Moi became President of Kenya.

He would rule for 24 years.