Providing a similar leftist critique, the Marxist writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o stated that "here was a black Moses who had been called by history to lead his people to the promised land of no exploitation, no oppression, but who failed to rise to the occasion". Ngũgĩ saw Kenyatta as a "twentieth-century tragic figure: he could have been a Lenin, a Mao Tse-Tung, or a Ho Chi Minh; but he ended up being a Chiang Kai-Shek, a Park-Chung Hee, or a Pinochet." Ngũgĩ was among Kenyan critics who claimed that Kenyatta treated Mau Mau veterans dismissively, leaving many of them impoverished and landless while seeking to remove them from the centre stage of national politics. In other areas Kenyatta's government also faced criticism; it for instance made little progress in advancing women's rights in Kenya.