Nairobi — Facing an uphill battle to retain his seat, and with a well-financed opposition alliance narrowly ahead in the polls, President Kibaki faced the nation on December 12, 2007 and delivered an unusually frank assessment of his first term in office.

He had achieved more than could have been expected on the economic front, he said, but also implicitly admitted his political failures. The next Cabinet, he told the nation, would represent the "face of Kenya." A second Kibaki administration, he promised, would also pay more attention to ensuring economic development paid more heed to "equitable" distribution of resources.

Those are the two themes of President Kibaki's time in office. It has been a story of roaring economic success after years of decay under Moi. But his aloof, disinterested approach also yielded a chaotic political system that, in January last year, led the nation to one of its lowest moments as Kenyans turned against each other with 19th-Century weapons after a controversial, flawed election.

In the first months of Mr Kibaki's tenure, few would have imagined his maiden term would end with the nation awash with rivers of blood. Banks had set up kiosks from where agents chased after people, pleading with them to take loans. By the end of January 2003, more than 1.3 million new students had been enrolled in school, thanks to the Free Primary Education programme.

Landmark achievement

A United Nations Children's Fund study found that, by 2006, the number of children in the nation's 18,000 primary schools had doubled in the first three years of the Narc administration, and that almost 80 per cent of girls and boys were enrolled.

It was a landmark achievement, along with other investments in road infrastructure and health, which saw infant mortality fall from 77 to 52 per 1,000 live births. Mr Kibaki also oversaw the introduction of the Constituency Development Fund, one of the signal changes implemented in the first term and which, alongside the Youth Enterprise Fund and the Women Enterprise Fund, have attracted the attention of scholars in the field of devolved funds from around the world.

Mr Kibaki and his Finance minister and long-term ally David Mwiraria were initial skeptics of the CDF concept. Speaking on the floor of the House during debate initiated by then Maragwa MP Elias Mbau, Mr Mwiraria expressed reservations about the capacity of constituency committees to manage the funds.

But, after realising the overwhelming support the idea enjoyed with back-benchers, Mr Kibaki and Mr Mwiraria warmed up to it and allocated 2.5 per cent of the budget to the fund -- a move which translated into unprecedented levels of local involvement in decision making on resource management.

Most of these changes, economists say, resulted from the implementation of relatively simple reforms in the management of the nation's economy. John Mutua, he of the Institute of Economic Affairs, says an early decision to discourage government borrowing from commercial banks had a decisive effect.

"Banks make most of their profits from lending," he says. "Previously, the institutions preferred to lend to the government by investing in Treasury Bills and other such instruments. Mr Mwiraria made these investments less attractive by dropping interest rates on them. That meant banks had to lend to the private sector.

He also lowered the cash reserve ratio (a set amount of money banks have to retain at the Central Bank of Kenya), which freed up more money to banks to lend and also ushered in fierce competition between them."

That competition meant the private sector had access to easy credit. It unleashed a storm of activity on the entrepreneurial front. The consumption afforded by the easy credit could be witnessed in the traffic jams visible on the new roads built under Mr Kibaki's watch.

Remained unloved

Yet, despite all these achievements, opinion polls showed Mr Kibaki remained unloved in many parts of the country. This was the legacy of his inability to manage the competing expectations of the allies who campaigned for him in the inter-ethnic alliance that swept Kanu out of power. Mr Kibaki and his circle of friends from Mt Kenya had appeared to cast aside these politicians, who could easily have been placated by relatively minor concessions. That decision would prove fateful for his presidency.

"Mr Kibaki excelled on the economic front because he is a macro-manager," says Professor Macharia Munene of the United States International University. "This approach worked in economics because he let his ministers do their job and did not interfere. But, on the political stage, he didn't have the talent for micro-managing that is inherent in, say, Prime Minister Raila Odinga. That is sometimes necessary in a Third World country. And that disinterest ended up costing him."

Why did a man of Mr Kibaki's vast experience and education (he graduated with a distinction in economics and politics from the London School of Economics) have such a poor record in the governance stakes? President Kibaki rarely grants interviews, but his close confidant Matere Keriri, a bosom buddy since the 1960s and the President's first State House Comptroller, offers a wide-ranging analysis of how the Kibaki circle sees his time in office.

"When Kibaki became president, he was leading a party that was a conglomeration of individuals from several parties. They were united only by the mission of getting rid of Kanu and attaining power. They lacked a unified vision of what they would do when in power. So, how do you discipline people with whom you do not share an agenda and who you cannot sack because that will be against the interests of stability and national unity?"

Mr Keriri attributes the economic success enjoyed under Mr Kibaki's first term to the president's laid back approach. "There is greater freedom now than there has been before in Kenya. During previous regimes, the media could not operate with the freedom they do now. You could not call the President names and get away with it. You would be followed by the secret police," he says.

Mr Keriri links the expansion of the political space to Mr Kibaki's belief in the free market economic theory. "He understands there can be no development unless you allow people to develop their ideas and initiatives. That creates enterprise and can only happen when you give people freedom. That is why the economy moved from growing at 1.8 per cent in 2002 to seven per cent in 2007."

Yet a sub-text of Mr Kibaki's time in office is that his hands-off approach yielded a huge level of confusion in a country with under-developed institutions and accustomed to having a strong figure at the heart of the government running the show.

Few episodes illustrate the confusion in Mr Kibaki's first administration than the appearance in the country in mid 2006 of two small-time crooks of uncertain origin, comically named Artur Margaryan and Artur Sargsyan. They came in flashing wads of cash, hosted lavish parties and generally lived the good life. The opposition claimed they were mercenaries brought in to assassinate key political figures.

The government dismissed those charges. Yet the pair, described in briefings by diplomats as common Eastern European criminals, enjoyed state security and, mysteriously, had access to the VIP lounges of the nation's airports. They vanished as enigmatically as they had arrived after a six-month stay, but theirs was an episode that summed up the paralysis and indecision of the Kibaki presidency.

Which Kibaki will Kenyans remember? The one who failed to effectively manage an inter-ethnic alliance and presided over a politically unstable coalition which yielded embarrassing sideshows like the Artur saga and ultimately led to bloody conflict in 2007?

Pits of Nyayo misrule

Or the man who was in charge of an administration that raised the economy from the pits of Nyayo misrule, built new roads and enabled them access the credit with which to fill the new super-highways with imported cars? Professor Munene says: "President Kibaki scored a strong B in his management of the economy. There can be some criticism that the growth was not labour-intensive and did not trickle down to all citizens.

But the fact that the economy grew, that horticulture and tourism saw record levels of expansion, and that there was huge investments in infrastructure, is beyond dispute. On the political front, he scores a C tending towards a C-. Unfortunately, people tend to remember the negatives. And that may be his fate when history considers the Kibaki years."