Kieren Keke
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The Honourable Kieren Keke MP |
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|---|---|
| Member of the Nauruan Parliament for Yaren |
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Assumed office 2003 |
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| Preceded by | Anthony Audoa |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
27 June 1971 Yaren District, Nauru |
| Nationality |
 Nauruan,  Australian
|
| Political party | Naoero Amo |
| Residence | Yaren |
| Religion | Christian |
Kieren Aedogan Ankwong Keke (born 27 June 1971) is a Nauruan politician and medical doctor. He is a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and has previously been speaker of the Nauruan Parliament.
He is currently a leading figure of the Nauru First (Naoero Amo) party, and is one of the few medical professionals on the island (others are Dr. Mark Kun, Dr. Ludwig Keke—Kieren's father, a dentist, Dr. Godfrey Waidabu—now living in the Marshall Islands), and Dr. Kiki Thoma).
In 2004 he was not allowed to take his parliamentary seat. The speaker of Parliament, Russell Kun claimed that Keke, having Australian nationality as well as Nauruan, could not sit in Parliament. Keke was also arrested along with Baron Waqa, David Adeang and Fabian Ribauw in April 2004 and charged with sedition after a protest at Nauru's airport, but the charges were soon dropped. The charges were dropped following a resolution of Parliament moved by Keke and others charged that the charges be dropped. The DPP was not consulted by the Parliament and the motion was in contravention of the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Keke was reelected to Parliament in October 2004, and retained his post as health minister.
Keke resigned from the government, along with Frederick Pitcher and Roland Kun, in late 2007 over allegations of misconduct on the part of Adeang and Scotty's unwillingness to act against Adeang. He led the opposition to Scotty in a no-confidence motion on 13 November 2007; although a majority of those voting supported the motion (eight in favor, seven opposed), it fell short of the necessary nine votes.
After Scotty was ousted in another vote on 19 December and Marcus Stephen (a cousin of Kieren Keke) was elected President, Keke was named Minister of Foreign Affairs, Telecommunications, and Transport.
Keke had previously been regarded as a reformist, both through his participation in the Administration of Ludwig Scotty, and because of the reformist discourse of the Nauru First Party, of which Keke is a prominent member. The outgoing Scotty Administration, which had won a landslide election victory only weeks before Keke and others resigned and participated in successive votes of no confidence, enjoyed wide popular support, and was broadly seen in the years 2004-2007 as offering a stable contrast to a previous period of very frequent use of the vote of no confidence, when governments would fall over issues which sometimes reflected relations between personalities rather than the exigencies of the wider national interest. Others would argue that allegations against former minister David Adeang, around which the November and December 2007 no convidence votes against President Ludwig Scotty were centred, constituted an issue important enough to justify the use of such a Parliamentary device, with its far-reaching consequences.
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