by Peter Kimemia

The aftermath of the most hotly contested general elections in Kenya’s history has left many Kenyans stunned – and the international community baffled – at just how wrong things can go in an erstwhile politically stable country.

With its economic upturn and fairly democratic governance within five short years, Kenya was being largely hailed as a model African country firmly on the right track to prosperity that would help lift many citizens from below the poverty line.

Within the five years under Mwai Kibaki, Kenya had effected compulsory free primary school education that saw about two million learners from poor families rejoining school, revived agriculture and agro-based industries such as Kenya Co-operative Creameries (KCC), the Kenya Meat Commission (KMC), increased earnings from tourism through aggressive marketing and general improvement in infrastructure, sunk boreholes in the semi-arid regions thereby stamping out skirmishes over water resources, restocked hospitals with medicines, made healthcare affordable and increased government revenue threefold from what was being collected before 2003.
As a result of a raft of crucial reforms, the economy grew from a dismal 0.8 percent in 2002 to about 7.1 percent per annum by late 2007.

Indeed, so many things were seemingly going right for Kenya prior to the general elections.  Even on the day of elections, Kenyans turned up in large numbers to the polling stations to cast their ballots. This was done peacefully and in an orderly fashion.

Professor Joel Barkan, an expert on Kenya’s election system, remarked that the election campaign and the voting process had “arguably been the freest and fairest in the country’s multiparty history”.
The difference between this and previous election exercises was the fact that the government was not involved in electoral malpractices as had been the case prior to 2002. Quite often, prior to previous elections, the government would engage in massive gerrymandering and sponsor acts of violence against its perceived opponents with the aim of displacing and preventing them from voting.  However, in spite of the largely peaceful electioneering, Kenya has experienced the worst violence since independence.

So what went wrong?

In order to understand the genesis of the post-election violence, we need to consider many contributory factors, the most important being Kenya’s colonial legacy.

The Kenyan post-colonial state was a product of a divide-and-rule scheme that had been perfected by the British colonialists in many sub-Saharan countries, including South Africa. This system involved setting one ethnic community against the other and ensuring that any possibility of unity among Africans remained remote and seemingly untenable.

This deceptive strategy was particularly employed with much desperation at the sunset of colonial rule in Kenya. The Kikuyu, which is the largest ethnic community in Kenya, bore the brunt of colonial dispossession and oppression. Inevitably, they were the first to wage a real concerted struggle against colonial rule in Kenya. This culminated in the Mau Mau War of the late 1940s up to the late 1950s. The then so-called white highlands adjoining Nairobi and stretching beyond the snow-capped Mt Kenya and the Aberdare ranges in the North and the Rift Valley in the West had been in a most brutal campaign alienated from the Kikuyu people. Some were pushed into labour reserves while others ended up in mass detention camps or in new areas such as the Rift Valley. 

On the eve of independence, a group of panicky, yet crafty, politicians from within the settler community decided to unleash their ultimate weapon of choice – sowing divisions. If they knew the dire implications of their manoeuvres, they clearly did not care and were only focused on securing their privileged economic and political positions at the time. Led by one Michael Blundell, a group of settler politicians started whipping up fears among the smaller ethnic communities about the mortal dangers of being dominated by the larger communities, namely the Kikuyu and the Luo. They convinced the former to push for a Majimbo constitution. Majimbo is a Swahili word whose English equivalent denotes federalism.

In essence, what the British were doing was to encourage smaller communities to agitate for regional autonomy based on ethnicity. This would require that different regions in Kenya reflect homogeneity in terms of ethnic composition.

Of course this strategy sounded very attractive to the emerging crop of local elites among small ethnic groups and it served the settler community even better because they could also claim their own “state” and avoid being under a Jomo Kenyatta-led government.

The agitation led to some serious skirmishes as the small communities attempted to evict people that they now perceived as outsiders.

However, although the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the party dominated by the Kikuyu and the Luo, accepted the Majimbo constitution, it was only because they did not want the independence to be delayed any further.

The Majimbo party was known as the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) and was dominated by the Kalenjin people in the Rift Valley and some coastal communities. KANU won the 1963 elections by a landslide and by 1964, Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga (father of the current leader of opposition, Raila Odinga) had convinced KADU leaders to break ranks with their colonial backers and consolidate the unitary system of governance.

Besides, the federalism experiment had yielded the unflattering verdict that nearly all the regional governments were economically unviable. The system was simply too expensive and divisive for a newly independent country.

After Kenyatta’s death in 1978, Daniel Moi, a Kalenjin and the then vice-president, took over power.
By then, Oginga Odinga had politically fallen out with Kenyatta and he had subsequently been edged out to the periphery. In order to consolidate his position, Moi instituted a major purge against the Kikuyu who had hitherto dominated the public arena. Even Kikuyu businesses were not spared as Moi crafted his own cabal of political power brokers comprising mainly his Kalenjin kinsmen.

The problem with the new elite was that it was bereft of ideas of how to sustain economic growth and development, which up to the late 1970s compared favourably with that of what are today referred to as the Asian Tigers.

A combination of corruption, economic mismanagement and a serious assault on people’s civil liberties bred a lot of discontent and agitation for change. Moi took the criticisms for his misrule as an affront to him as a person, because he is Kalenjin and the bulk of his critics and proponents of a multiparty system of government were largely the Kikuyu and the Luo.

Together with his ruling elite, Moi revived the quest for the Majimbo system or ethnic federalism. For the first time in the post-independence period vicious tribal clashes were initiated by the Kalenjin as they sought to drive the Kikuyu out of the Rift Valley prior to the 1992 elections. Many Kikuyu peasants were killed and their houses burnt. The government and individual cabinet ministers were accused of complicity in the clashes especially because the former appeared to actively support the criminals who were on a rampage.

Although there were half-hearted attempts at investigating the mayhem, nothing really came out of it. Even after a government-appointed commission of inquiry headed by a senior Court of Appeal judge fingered senior government operatives as having been behind the clashes, no punitive measures were applied.

In fact, the raiders were largely allowed to take over the land which they had violently wrested from the Kikuyu while government took a cynical stance and purported to resettle the clash victims on semi-arid state land.

Effectively, a chilling culture of impunity was born in 1992 and the clashes were repeated prior to the 1997 elections and, to a smaller extent, just before the 2002 elections.

The current round of clashes began months before the election, still in the Rift Valley, but without the official support that these groups of raiders had received in the past, the government was frequently able to deal with them quickly.

However, as opposition politicians became increasingly anxious about the outcome of the 2007 election, they revived the Majimbo debate and started promising their would-be supporters that they would introduce their ethnic-based brand of federalism.

This to their supporters meant that they could again kill or evict people from other ethnic communities and take over their land and businesses.

Whatever the outcome of the election would have been, it has now become clear that well-choreographed ethnic cleansing would have occurred especially in the Rift Valley. In fact there are fears that had Raila Odinga won the presidency, the violence would have been worse because it is his party that had promised the carte blanche for post-election violent evictions.

Perceived opponents of Odinga and his party could very well have been victims of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. Various human rights organisations and international media have now started to acknowledge the fact that the bloodletting may have been premeditated and organised.   

Writing for the New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman observed that in the Rift Valley “leaflets calling for ethnic killings mysteriously appeared before the voting. Local tribal chiefs held meetings to plot attacks on rivals, according to some of them and their followers”.

Rono Kibet, one of the Kalenjin raiders quoted by Gettleman, said that elders in his community called a big meeting on 30 December when Kibaki was declared the winner of the elections.
“More than 2 000 young men gathered, and elders urged them to kill Kikuyus, Mr Kibaki’s ethnic group, and burn down their houses,” he said.

According to Kibet, the community raised the money for the gasoline; the elders blessed the young men, who then split into teams of 50 to hunt down Kikuyus with bows and arrows. He also said that he did not feel bad about shooting them.

“We attack people, we burn their homes and then we take their animals,” he said.

Besides the obvious indications that the violence was premeditated, the violent conduct of the ODM officials and some of their newly elected MPs (relayed live on about five local TV stations) when they realised that their presidential candidate was trailing the incumbent appears to have contributed immensely to the ignition of the mayhem in the urban slum areas.

After the protests started taking a nasty turn in the tallying centre at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre in Nairobi (KICC), the Electoral Commission directed that all the presidential candidates send two agents each for an overnight tallying audit of the votes.

The main protagonists, Kibaki and Odinga, were represented by Martha Karua and James Orengo respectively (both senior lawyers and politicians). It turned out that the tallying was actually accurate and the ECK promptly informed the ODM that any further action could only be granted through an electoral petition at the High Court as established in Kenyan law.

However, Odinga rejected the proposition alluding to the court’s doubtful impartiality. The ensuing standoff is what is responsible for the deaths of close to 1 000 people, some burnt alive in a church, rapes, widespread destruction of property and the displacement of more than a quarter of a million people.

As Kenya grapples with its problems, a few lessons can learnt from the current turmoil. Firstly, the importance of the respect for the rule of law.

There were serious allegations of vote rigging from both sides of the political divide. In fact, some of the most outrageous outcomes were registered in Odinga’s strongholds where a number of constituencies recorded more than 100 percent in terms of voter turnout. Under the circumstances, the most civil way out of the political quagmire would have been for the aggrieved party to go to court.
It is mischievous for politicians to purport to seek extra-judicial remedies outside the confines of the established legal mechanisms.

In all fairness, the ECK has quite a bit of explaining to do. It is still not clear why some of the results were delayed leading to allegations of possible tampering.

Odinga and the ODM understand only too well that all there is to back his assertions that the election was stolen are unverified claims. It is equally hypocritical of the international community, especially Western countries, to pay lip service to the notion of due process in a democratic setting.

The critical question is whether society must henceforth suspend the constitution to accommodate untenable demands from power-hungry gangs of elites every time they feel aggrieved and threaten to unleash violence on perceived opponents.

If it was alright for the electoral dispute in the USA in 2000 to be referred to the Supreme Court of the land, in spite of claims that it was dominated by Republican Party sympathisers, why would the US government and the West in general suppose, so condescendingly, that a similar dispute in Kenya cannot be adjudicated by a competent bench of Kenyan High Court judges?

A dangerous precedent is being set by the indecisiveness of the international community on the Kenyan crisis.

While the resort to court action is the short-term answer to the current problem, there are also a couple of long-term measures that need to be taken to ensure that such a problem does not re-occur in the future.

The new constitution that the ODM mobilised voters to reject in 2005 had a provision for a run off between the two leading presidential contenders in the event that none got 50 plus 1 percent of the vote during the first round of voting.

There is an urgent need for the contentious issues in that constitution to be thrashed out and a new constitution ratified to resolve outstanding land issues.

As things stand, a re-run of the presidential election is unlikely – not least because the country cannot raise the funds for the same. Such an exercise would require the resettlement of the displaced, registering those whose documents have been destroyed and reconstituting an electoral commission.

All these are expensive undertakings. After the trauma of the just-ended election, it is unlikely that many people would want to go through a similar exercise any time soon. For its potential for sowing further divisions, a re-run would be imprudent.

The Local Government Transformer Feb/Mar 2008