Kikwete Came with Mysterious Magic Message!

Mr Annan resumed the talks to start work on what is commonly known as Agenda Four on long-term resolutions which includes comprehensive constitutional review within a year.
The Saturday Nation tried to reconstruct the events that led to the peace agreement and established that there may have been outside forces behind the success.

Sources say that last Sunday, two days after suspending the talks, Mr Annan was set to travel to Kampala to meet with Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni. It is not yet known what he was to discuss with him, but he seems to have decided not to make the trip at the last minute.
It would seem he got a signal that the days ahead would produce a deal. Two days later, President Museveni addressed the East African Legislative Assembly in Arusha, where he said: “In the pre-colonial Uganda there was a joke about one of the clans whose members built a hut but did not leave space for the doorway only to discover the mistake when the house was complete. The recent problems in Kenya, tragic as they were, nevertheless, illustrated this point of short-sighted political architecture.”

Wiggle room

Perhaps he was suggesting that Kenyan politicians, without specifying which ones, were digging themselves into a position in the talks which was leaving them no wiggle room, and that was short sighted.

He then said that Kenya’s crisis, which had caused shortages in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Southern Sudan, DRC Congo and some parts of northern Tanzania had shown that the region was interdependent: “Kenya and the concomitant difficulties throughout the whole region have shown that the head cannot be independent of the neck; the neck cannot be independent of the chest; the chest cannot be independent of the abdomen; the abdomen cannot be independent of the limbs; and vice versa. Of course, you can have amputees and cripples. They, however, do not lead a full life. Their potential is diminished to the extent of the loss of parts of their bodies.”
Later the same day, President Kikwete flew to Nairobi to join the Annan mediation effort. When President Kikwete arrived, he assured Kenyans that there would be a deal.

The next morning, President Museveni was addressing an investors’ meeting in Kampala, and confidently told the meeting that President Kikwete was in Nairobi, and the Kenya crisis was going to resolve.

Both President Kikwete and President Museveni seem to have known that a deal was possible, and the Tanzanian leader seems to have brought a message that dramatically broke the deadlock once he met President Kibaki and Mr Odinga. What that message was, remains a mystery.
What is clear though is that the whole process was greatly helped by Mr Annan’s diplomacy of meeting the two principals separately.
Add this to President Kikwete’s persuasion that the PM’s post will not take away the executive powers that President Kibaki enjoys in the Constitution.

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