Kenya's Underlying Political Tensions

The following post was written by UUSC President Charlie Clements. Clements writes from Kenya, where he is leading an emergency delegation to assess the political and humanitarian crisis that has engulfed the country in the wake of the flawed presidential elections of December 2007.

For the last five years Kibaki has been giving, or selling, land to Kikuyus in places like the agriculturally rich Rift Valley, near Eldoret, often displacing people who had been squatting on the land for decades. Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, and Moi, the second president of Kenya, had done this, Kenyatta favoring his own Kikuyus for the 13 years of his reign and Moi, his own Kalinjens, for the 24 years of his reign. That kind of unequal land distribution and economic favors, ”feeding at the trough,” sowed the seeds of this crisis.

But virtually every Kenyan who tells this story dates it to 1992, when elements of a real opposition and grassroots movement for multiparty rule began to form. Back then, Moi unleashed a similar kind of “hooligan” to those who are inciting violence, but they were armed by the KANU (the ruling party, which governed since independence) and more organized. Like today, they released a lot of pent-up resentment about ethnic privilege. Much of it was directed against coastal communities. Moi won those elections. Waves of violence, mostly directed against districts where people had voted against or were likely to vote against the ruling party, were successful in protecting the ruling party’s interest. Similar violence was unleashed again in the 1997 elections, displacing 100,000 people in the Rift Valley. Police forces also disrupted nationwide voter-registration efforts and attacked campuses. In those elections, both Kibaki and Raila ran as presidential candidates, finishing second and third respectively to Moi, who was elected to his last legal term as president.

It took a tremendous effort and many lives lost to get Moi to finally loose his grip on the one-party state in 1992, and a broad coalition, which included almost every ethnic group, gathered forces to finally defeat his party in 2002. To hear people describe their emotions, it as if the “wicked witch was dead,” and Kibaki and Raila were the heroes in this epic struggle to defeat the ruling party -- no matter that Kibaki was Kikuyu or Raila was Luo. Their party was the National Alliance of the Rainbow Coalition (NARC), which issued a written pact that had helped unify the opposition. The party also issued a memorandum of understanding, which defined a power-sharing arrangement whereby Kibaki would be president and Raila prime minister under a revised constitution that would weaken the presidency in favor of the newly created prime-minister position. There was also a commitment to end corruption. There was great excitement that the “feeding at the trough,” which according to many sources left Moi one of the richest men in the world, with several billion in Swiss and other offshore accounts, would finally end. The ethnic groups that had been neglected and the poor, the majority of Kenyans, would finally be listened to and responded to.

Kibaki defaulted on the pact pretty quickly. Raila was sidelined, and “feeding at the trough” became “engorgement at the trough.” The power of incumbency in Kenya is enormous, and yet another nationwide coalition came together with the intention of overturning the incumbent Kibaki. The coalition was committed to creating a Kenyan government that would be both transparent and accountable. Because Kikuyus represent nearly 30 percent of the population, the Kikuyus don’t require an alliance with other tribal groups to have a majority -- this is how Kibaki intended to maintain his grip on power. As we had heard all week, it was a heated, but relatively nonviolent presidential campaign (compared to the 1992, 1997, and 2002 elections). A number of commentators viewed this election as the best exercise of democracy in the country’s 50-plus-year history – from all standpoints, from voter education, to get out the vote efforts, to numbers of people registering to vote, to numbers who actually voted. An election official said the turnout in each district varied between 68 and 75 percent.

Raila led in polls by a substantial margin before the election. A fairly sophisticated American NGO did exit polling that showed Raila with a substantial margin. Raila led the tallying with a substantial margin until suddenly the regional tallying apparatus closed its doors, wouldn’t communicate for some time, and then announced Kibaki had suddenly made up a 1.3 million-vote deficit to win. Even more suspicious was that there were no accompanying parliamentary or municipal office votes, which should have been cast at the same time as the “newly gathered” presidential votes. These are the big irregularities, and I gather that there were many other gross irregularities that have also been well documented.

After the surprise announcement of Kibaki’s victory, he was quickly sworn in as president in a backroom ceremony, closed to the press and the public. There was no time to object or challenge the legality of the election. As intended, it was a fait accompli and the cause of much of the violence we see today.

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