The canonical way of doing this in numpy would be to use np.transpose‘s optional permutation argument. In your case, to go from ijkl to klij, the permutation is (2, 3, 0, 1), e.g.:
In [16]: a = np.empty((2, 3, 4, 5))
In [17]: b = np.transpose(a, (2, 3, 0, 1))
In [18]: b.shape
Out[18]: (4, 5, 2, 3)