NAIROBI: As Daniel arap Moi raised his ivory club to speak as Kenya’s president for the last time on Monday, a street-boy wriggled onto the dais beside him.

The urchin had no option if he wanted to hear the final words of Moi’s 24-year rule. The public address system had broken down, and beneath a dais crammed with diplomats and African heads of state,200,000 Kenyans were whistling and jeering.

“Go away!” and “bye-bye!” they shouted, as the 78-year-old President Moi shuffled the pages of his speech.

“Everything is possible without Moi!” they sang; a campaign slogan of Mwai Kibaki’s National Rainbow Coalition which on Friday became one of the first opposition parties to win an election in north, east or central Africa.

“The people of Kenya have spoken,” said Moi, and then took his seat, grim-faced, beaming Kibaki.

In his inaugural speech as Kenya’s third president, Kibaki compounded Moi’s misery. “I am inheriting a country which has been badly ravaged by years of misrule and ineptitude,” he said, to riotous cheers.

Bigger cheers followed when Kibaki hinted for the first time that the massive economic crimes of Moi’s regime would be prosecuted.

“It would be unfair to Kenyans not to raise questions about certain actions or policies of the past that continue to have grave consequences,” he said.

Beside him, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Tanzania’s President Ben Mpaka listened impassively. Both lead regimes accused of corruption; and both were recently returned to power at elections tainted by violence and claims of vote-rigging.

Zambia’s President Levy Mwanawasa, who, for the first time in Africa, is prosecuting his predecessor for corruption, was on firmer ground.

“The situation here reminds me of what we have in Zambia,” he said, raising Kibaki’s two-fingered victory salute.

Moi’s convoy was pelted with mud as it arrived for the ceremony at Uhuru Park — where Kenya’s founding father Jomo Kenyatta accepted independence from Prince Philip in 1963. He left Nairobi by helicopter immediately afterwards, skipping a formal lunch with Kibaki and dignitaries including Zanele Mbeki, the wife of the South African president.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.