Building Peace in the Face of Fear as Kenya Elections Take Place

Amidst fears of violence in relation to the March 4 presidential elections in Kenya, Western Province is buzzing with peace-building work. Church leaders are mobilizing — in towns and rural areas, in pulpits, in markets with handheld microphones — and spreading a message of peace. Youth in Kakamega town are encouraging people to remain peaceful, and market women give customers encouragement to abstain from violence along with change for their purchases. These peace-building activities are thanks to a program launched by the Kakamega Grassroots Initiative (KGI), a UUSC partner, in the fall of 2012.

"Nothing negative has happened yet in Kakamega," says the director of KGI, "and our work has a lot to do with that." The director is travelling the province every day, either in a minibus with ministers or on his motorcycle equipped with a handheld microphone. Wherever he goes, he gets the local church leaders to join him in speaking in the market and the church, using their moral authority to insist that people do not turn toward violence during the elections, no matter what the outcome.

The elections on March 4 are the first round of presidential elections, in which the two leading candidates, Jomo Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, are very close in the polls. Voting is predicted to be along ethnic lines and to necessitate a second round. Kenyatta is currently indicted by the international criminal court for his role in the violence following the December 2007 elections, during which voting along ethnic lines erupted into bitter violence after charges that the voting process was rigged; the contested election resulted in Mwai Kibaki, the incumbent president, staying in power. When the violence continued into February 2008, over 1,100 people were killed and 600,000 displaced, many of whom have yet to return to their original homes. UUSC began working with KGI in 2008 to support the displaced in Kakamega who had received no support.

In the fall of 2012, KGI began a dynamic peace-building program aimed at preventing further violence in the current presidential elections. Since youth were at the forefront of the 2007 violence, KGI organized 60 youth to act as peace workers in Kakamega town, spreading their message of peace in all their different circles of influence. Given that groups destroyed marketplaces during the last election, KGI provided the 60 youth with loans to start businesses, giving them an additional stake in keeping peace. They further fortified the message of peace in the marketplace by training women to work for peace in the various markets where they do business.

The final piece of the program involved the KGI director, a pastor himself, mobilizing a group of eight church ministers to use their pulpits to urge peace. This work spread like wildfire, from minister to minister all over the province. Ministers worked together to reinforce their message and traveled together to various areas to enlist support from churches in rural areas and villages in speaking up for peace and against violence. As of Thursday, February 28, they were travelling into the neighboring province of Nyanza with their compelling message of peace. In spite of the fear and anxiety in Kenya around the presidential election, KGI's peace-building work in Western Province has been creating space for hope and courage.