ON the very day that another blood-soaked chapter was being added to Pakistan’s history, a political transformation was also under way in faraway Kenya. It wasn’t anything quite as drastic or irrevocable as an assassination: Kenyans were only casting their votes.
And as the counting of ballots began, it appeared the pundits were about to be proved correct: challenger Raila Odinga had the edge over the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki.
A couple of days later, Kenya briefly displaced Pakistan in international headlines as the East African nation erupted in an orgy of violence. What’s more, it seemed that ethnic hatreds underlay the wave of killings, intimidation and displacement. This clearly wasn’t a good advertisement for democracy: it’s not the sort of behaviour elections are supposed to encourage. Besides, Kenya has frequently been held up as a model of African stability: its recent history isn’t exactly trouble-free, but never before in the 45 years since independence has the country appeared to be perched so precariously on the verge of ungovernability.
So what went wrong? The immediate cause for the eruption was the election result which showed Odinga losing to Kibaki by a whisker, whereafter the latter was hastily sworn in for a second term. The opposition cried foul, and its contention was supported by circumstantial evidence. Foreign observers declared themselves dissatisfied, and even the head of the election commission confessed that he had been pressurised to prematurely announce the outcome. The apparently opposition-instigated violence was directed mainly against the largest tribal group in the country.
Kibaki is a Kikuyu, and members of the tribe are believed to have voted overwhelmingly in his favour. Which, in some eyes, made them fair game. The unrest was petering out by the beginning of this week, increasing the prospects of humanitarian assistance reaching the quarter of a million Kenyans who have been displaced by the conflict. The official death toll of over 480 — a senior police officer puts it at nearer 600 — included up to 50 women and children deliberately incinerated in a church on the outskirts of Eldoret. One mother recounted how she was able to scramble outside through an open window, carrying her three-year-old daughter. The child was snatched from her and thrown back into the flames.
What is it, one is compelled to wonder, that turns human beings into barbarians? The phenomenon, mind you, is universal: almost unbelievable acts of collective cruelty have been witnessed on virtually every continent in living memory. They have generally been based ostensibly on differences of ethnicity or religion, but there are invariably economic undercurrents at work. Of course, political manipulation serves as a vital catalyst in turning amicable neighbours into mortal enemies. Educational deficiencies facilitate the task, as does the desperation bred by socio-economic deprivation.One wouldn’t, until a couple of weeks ago, have thought of Kenya as a powder keg but many of these ingredients were in place. And this isn’t the first time that resentment against the Kikuyu — who, as the largest tribal group, make up more than one-fifth of all Kenyans — has been sharpened and exploited for political gain. The resentment flows from the group’s relative economic success, arguably based in part on patronage under independence leader Jomo Kenyatta, himself a Kikuyu, who ruled the country for 15 years. His successor, Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin, reputedly turned a blind eye to pogroms against the Kikuyu in the Rift Valley during the 1990s.
Members of the tribe are viewed as outsiders in that part of Kenya. This is partly a consequence of a land grab by European ‘settlers’ during the colonial era: when the British pulled out after independence, they sold their farms and estates to the highest bidder, and the Kikuyu were even then better off than most other Kenyans. Moi’s antipathy derived in part from an abortive coup attempt against him by mainly Kikuyu air force officers.
When Kibaki won the 2002 election (with crucial assistance from Odinga) after Moi had been president for 24 years, it marked the return of the Kiyuku to centre stage. His triumph was viewed as a watershed in the wake of the introduction of multi-party politics which ended the monopoly of Kenyatta and Moi’s Kenya African National Union (Kanu), not least on account of Kibaki’s anti-corruption platform. He was unable, however, to sustain the broad coalition that had facilitated his electoral victory. A number of ministers, including Odinga, campaigned for a no vote in a 2005 referendum that would have increased the president’s powers and, having succeeded in defeating it, quit the cabinet.
The incidence of corruption did not go down under Kibaki, although the worst transgressors among his ministers got their comeuppance at the ballot box. Economic growth has chugged along at a respectable six per cent but close to half of all Kenyans remain mired in extreme poverty, subsisting on $1 a day. Although Kibaki, one of Kenya’s richest men, did keep his promise to institute free primary education for all, the sector remains debilitatingly under-resourced.
Odinga’s platform featured the promise of an assault on economic disparities as well as on graft, yet many of his associates in the Orange Democratic Movement are not without taint. The fact that Odinga, a member of the Luo ethnic group, has allowed tribal differences to be exacerbated in his quest for political office isn’t any more reassuring than his variegated political past, which has included stints in every major political party.
His father, Oginga Odinga, was a Kenyatta comrade who turned into an opponent not long after independence. Raila Odinga, who spent six years in prison after being implicated in the coup attempt against Moi, eventually merged his father’s party with Kanu and became the latter’s secretary general under Moi. Once it became clear that Moi had picked Kenyatta’s son Uhuru as his potential successor, Odinga left to form the National Rainbow Coalition that catapulted Kibaki into power. Lately he has been refusing to negotiate with Kibaki unless the latter effectively concedes that he lost the election, while Kibaki — in the wake of talks with Jendayi Frazer, the US assistant secretary of state for Africa — has expressed his willingness to share power in a national government. Later, as mediation efforts gathered momentum on Monday, Odinga announced that he was cancelling planned nationwide rallies to avoid fresh violence and give negotiation a chance. A delayed diplomatic effort by the African Union was also on the cards at the time of writing.
Given that no profound ideological differences divide Kibaki and Odinga, some sort of a compromise — involving a supervised recount or a rerun of the election — should not prove impossible to work out.
It’ll prove much harder to cool the simmering tribal antagonisms: Kenya will be considered fortunate if its suffering on this account is sporadic rather than continuous. “Our Kenyan identity, so deliberately formed in the test tube of nationalist effort, has over the years been undermined ... by our leaders — men who appealed to our histories and loyalties to win our votes,” says Kenyan writer and journalist Binyavanga Wanaina. “The burning houses and the bloody attacks do not reflect primordial hatreds. They reflect the manipulation of identity for political gain.”
Irresponsible and exploitative leadership is an affliction Kenya shares with so many other nations. Unfortunately, it would seem unduly optimistic to expect that the jolts it has lately suffered will produce a change for the better on that front.
The writer is a journalist based in Sydney.
mahir.worldview@gmail.com