For a former bare-feet goat herder and son of poor peasants to rise from rags to become the president of Kenya, Daniel Toroitich arap Moi was some kind of genius.

For starters, Moi never went beyond the colonial grade four (although he later went to teacher training college). That is not the stage in any educational system where anyone learns theories, principles or political philosophies.

At grade four, they do not teach human psychology or social order. In fact, going by my own experience in rural Kenya, they did not even start teaching English properly until grade six. Even in today's Internet age, grade four pupils can hardly comprehend how the world works. So, the fact that Moi can scatter comprehensible English syllables is a feat to marvel.

This is particularly the case when one considers that Moi was an elementary school teacher in the Rift Valley before joining politics.

And coming from a tiny Tugen community, Moi shouldn't have had a fighting chance even within the wider Kalenjin communities. After all, he faced able challengers from the Kalenjin communities with solid educational backgrounds like Jean Marie Seroney and Dr Taita Towett.

The climb was sharp and steep. It was also difficult and tortuous. Moi started off as a Kenya African Democratic Union politician.

Unlike the nationalist Kanu, Kadu was financed and used by the British colonialists as a means to undermine the independence movement.

Kadu purported to represent "smaller" communities in Kenya; those who "feared" that the bigger communities like the Luo and Kikuyu would dominate them if self-governance was achieved by Africans.

After political independence, Moi lingered on in Kadu until the party was disbanded.

Then, he joined Kanu and became Jomo Kenyatta's loyalist. And within three years, Moi became the third vice-president of Kenya, having taken over from Joseph Murumbi who had succeeded Jaramogi Oginga Odinga but suddenly resigned due to disagreements with Kenyatta.

Jaramogi and Murumbi quit over ideological differences with Kenyatta. However, Moi had no strong philosophical convictions and beliefs. What he fully understood and practiced was the politics of survival.

No amount of roadblocks the Kiambu Mafia constructed in his path to stardom could stop Moi. He either gingerly circumvented or persevered through them.

Along the way, he used the opportunities and privileges closeness to power accorded him to acquire wealth and retain a small loyal team that he could rely on. Charles Njonjo and Simeon Nyachae fall under this category. So that when Kenyatta eventually died in 1978, Moi was able, through a mixture of luck and circumstance, to assume power.

Like a true genius, Moi used the aborted 1982 coup attempt to consolidate power and crush perceived or real threats. Soon all political parties except Kanu were banned and opponents detained, exiled, killed or reduced to penury.

Moi increasingly used his power to extend control over the economy, social and cultural spheres. Tawala Kenya and Nyayo songs were pervasive on the airwaves. Print media fell under the Nyayo spell.

Before long, Moi and his coterie focused on public land as a theatre for control and a source of personal wealth. Loyal politicians, senior army officers, diplomats and political fixers were rewarded with public land.

In the process, forests, public toilets, roads — name it — were invaded, occupied and converted into personal property by the politically well-connected.

That is the origin of Kiptagich tea estate. Kiptagich is a massive tea estate with a modern factory located within the Mau forest water tower. It covers more than 5,000 acres. The tea estate is in public land. Apparently, Kiptagich "belongs" to former President Moi.

Public records disclose that Moi never paid a dime for the land; never invested a penny to clear it; and never spent anything to buy seedlings. In other words, the land, tea plantation and infrastructural developments belong to the public.

Understandably, Kiptagich is very close to Moi's heart. He loves the farm and factory. They are his cash cow, so to speak.

Any inkling that Kiptagich might be repossessed by the people of Kenya makes Moi not just nervous but violently confrontational. Yet no one - not even Moi — has claimed that he purchased the land or that it isn't on the Mau forest complex.

Moi and his supporters have not indicated that the proceeds from the tea estate are being donated to charity or used in the public interest. If Moi bought the land, he has not stated from whom and for how much.

However, if he simply took the forest land when he was President, he must still explain to us why he did so. Kenyans are also interested to know why he deserves compensation of Sh 760 million for public land he has been unlawfully profiting from.

The writer is a barrister in Canada and advocate in Kenya. He is also the advisor of the Prime Minister on coalition affairs.

My fellow Star columnist Charles Mzee recently wrote that one Maina Njenga, former supreme leader of the 'Mungiki' terror squads and now a born-again Christian, was likely to be one of the key factors in determining the outcome of the 2012 election.

He then presented a historic, as well as a sociological account of why the increasing polarisation of the people of Central Province into a small, selfish and manipulative group of "haves" and a very large, dispossessed, and previously easily manipulated group of "have nots" would reach a point of resolution, one way or another, in the 2012 elections.

And that Njenga, as the undisputed leader of the "have nots", would be the single most important person in that crucial election.

At least, that is what I understood Mzee to say in that column.

While I largely agreed with his detailed assessment of why the "have nots" of Central Province have had a raw deal going back to the Mau Mau insurrection of the 1950s, I will only believe in Njenga's reputed massive political influence after I have seen it in action.

Our short history of multiparty democracy has provided many cases of political leaders who seemed to have irresistible influence, but were later found to be incapable of delivering much in the way of presidential votes cast in the millions, or constituencies swept by the dozen.

My focus for that election is therefore more on the Rift Valley, and on the epic battle shaping up between the Agriculture minister William Ruto and the Moi dynasty as represented by the former President and his son Gideon Moi.

And the seriousness of this battle is shown in that it has so far involved not showcase political rallies with dozens of Cabinet ministers and other VIPs in attendance, but rather steady and systematic grassroots campaigns.

Also in that neither side ever acknowledges the other, nor yet hurls insults at the other, but each just goes about making friends and influencing people with quiet determination.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this political battle for the former President. It is in its own way just as important as the ba¬tles he fought to remain Vice President in the late 1970s, when it was clear that Jomo Kenyatta could not live very much longer.

I would put it this way: while Ruto could lose this battle to the Moi dynasty and still be around to fight again in 2017 - even if he lost his own Eldoret North Constituency seat - for the Moi dynasty it is do-or-die in this next campaign.

Think about it: for almost half a century, going back to the old pre-independence Legislative Council of colonial times, Moi was the undisputed political leader of the Kalenjin community. Then came the 2007 General Election and of three sons of the former President who tried their luck, none won a parliamentary seat.

If the Moi dynasty is again whitewashed in this manner - and this time specifically by Ruto - what chance is there that they can recover from this devastating blow. How would any Moi son ever dare offer himself again as a candidate for Parliament?

So it is virtually guaranteed that the Moi family is not going to be holding anything back this time. And they have the advantage of being the outsiders at present. They have all the time in the world to go about their work of winning enough support on the ground to ensure that when it really matters, Ruto will find that he actually does not command the unquestioning loyalty of the Kalenjin community as his hangers-on are inclined to claim.

And this, as it happens, is precisely how elections are won in Kenya — and why there is such a huge turnover in parliamentary representation in this country.

The sitting MP, whether serving in the Cabinet or sitting quietly on the back-benches, will usually have all sorts of things to attend to: parliamentary sittings; committee meetings; seminars; tours (both local and international); and the conspiratorial conclaves at which, increasingly, the outcomes of votes in Parliament are determined.

Meantime the challenger has none of these things to worry about: he or she can just quietly go about the business of meeting voters and listening to their problems; coming up with well-timed initiatives to show that he is "development conscious", etc.

So if I was asked to place a bet on the eventual outcome of the political struggle in the Rift Valley, I would bet my few shillings that the Mois will win and Ruto will lose.

Muga comments on topical issues.

It is a fiction that a day brought about by sycophants and used to advantage by a politician is a national occasion. Actually, on Moi Day we should all remember why we sought over so many years to bring that regime to a close. And what the cost was.

We have to reflect on why it is that too many of those who fought to liberate the country from such rule are now not safe, often disabled and in economic difficulty. And have not been protected against these indignities.

We have to reflect on why the children of those who brought about that change are not in good schools or at university; and why the cycle of cares and problematic earning is on them, and not instead on those who oppressed Kenya for so long. We must ponder also on why those who perpetrated those crimes have been able to buy or bargain or blackmail their way back to immunity, wealth, and even a cautious arrogance again.

No, we must not make mistakes about what the Moi regime stood for, nor about what it did. Its money, or its remnant power, or amnesia on our part, may yet bring about embellished revisionist accounts.

It is important therefore to place on record that the Moi regime was a grid of corruption, the enforced subservience of state institutions, distorted constitutional prescriptions, and 'leaders' who considered detention, torture and assassination as normal tools of governance.

Worst of all, Moi's regime generated a camp-following of ephemeral and frightened politicians in the grim shadow of unquestioning obedience to One-Man rule. They were praised when they stole from public resources. They were punished if they sought reform. They were made the political pool from which 'leadership' was offered to Kenyans for two decades.

Too many of our current 'leaders' are from that very same tainted pool. Some of them are now bringing Moi to their constituencies, calling him the father of the nation. They endanger Kenya.

Such fawning and alliances with him carry the real possibility of regression to Moi-regime-type politics. The Moi regime cannot teach anyone about reform or governance devoid of fear and protection money. It never knew anything about reform or governance based on law.

It is from this ignominious framework that we have been gradually extricating ourselves.

There is a further fiction that Moi Day commemorates some achievement. Implicit is that there is some legacy which the day preserves, that there is something to emulate. So I spent Moi Day examining the past, searching for that legacy.

I recalled Parliament making us a one-party state; those beaten mercilessly on every public occasion by the police that were used by the Moi regime as an army against his own people; a father who when he sought the truth about his daughter Julie, was told by Moi's regime that the animals were to blame; the removal of the tenure of judges; the political prisoners' mothers who shamed the man after whom this day is named — instead of being named for them; the banning and persecution of the editor of the internationally acclaimed publication, the Nairobi Law Monthly; the charred remains of a minister on a hill in Nyanza; the many, many false judgments in too many courts.

I remembered too: The torture chambers in Nyayo House, Nairobi's provincial headquarters; the many fine poets and writers in exile; Moi telling Amnesty International "to go to hell"; Bishop Muge driving into the road crash that was designed to get rid of him; the degeneration of our public services with the contamination of personal rule; the mlolongo destruction of the secret ballot and its reversed totals even after the public counting; the censorship of the press, and the monopoly of the state radio and TV; how 55 per cent of Kenyans were pushed below the poverty line.

I recalled also: The lawlessness of the provincial administration; those who died on Saba Saba Day; the fear that the Moi regime poured onto Kenyan society; one Jamhuri Day when the people refused to come to Nyayo Stadium; those who never looked for rewards but gave of their all against this oppression; the Attorney-General of Moi who said, "No one is above the law, except the President"; the detainee who was told about his wife's death after her burial; how the country's economy had declined to minus 0.2 per cent.

Twenty-four years of Moi, twenty-four memories. Out of the many, so many more. What a quaint legacy to celebrate with a national holiday.

Pheroze Nowrojee is a lawyer based in Nairobi.