The
Kenya Election: Economic and ethno-political factors
(continued from last week)
Mwai Kibaki was elected president in December 2002 with over 62%
of the vote. The country’s foreign backers were only too quick
to salute the polls as “a triumph for democracy”. In
a way they were right - the polls had been free and fair, and the
candidate for change had been elected. But in another way this was
a hasty form of wishful thinking because the ostensible “de-tribalisation”
of the election had been due more to a series of fortuitous coincidences
than to a real decline in the appeal of ethnic politics.
The key words in the campaign, however, had been “hope”
and “change”, and to some extent the new Kibaki administration
managed to deliver the goods. The economy did pick up and Kenya
witnessed a spectacular economic recovery, largely based on Keynesian
economic recipes and helped by a favourable international environment.
This can be illustrated by the annual rate of growth in 2002-07,
which reveals a gradual improvement from -1.6 % in 2002 to 2.6%
by 2004, 3.4 in 2005, and an estimated 5.5% in 2007. But this was
only one side of the economic coin. Social inequalities also increased;
the fruits of economic growth went disproportionately to the already
well-off (and, among those, to the Kikuyu well-off); and corruption
reached new heights, matching some of the excesses of the Moi years.
When John Githongo, the man appointed by President Kibaki to fight
corruption, blew the whistle in January 2005, he had to flee to
Britain in fear of his life. Githongo is himself a Kikuyu, and his
denunciation of a massive series of financial scandals in which
hundreds of millions of dollars had vanished was seen as a betrayal
of his tribe as well as of the government he served.
Moreover, the security situation in Kenya deteriorated steadily
in these years, with the ordinary people bearing the brunt of a
triple process: a growing wave of routine crime in urban areas,
rival agrarian claims leading to pitched battles between ethnic
groups fighting for land, particularly around Mount Elgon and in
Kisii, a running feud between the police and the Mungiki sect, which
left over 120 people dead in May-November 2007 alone.
Mungiki is a bizarre cross between pre-Christian Kikuyu neo-traditionalism
and an extortionist gang. The sect ran protection rackets on the
matatu (mini bus taxi) routes, helping it to prosper among the poorest
urban neighborhoods and among the landless-peasant squatters in
central province; it also has a tradition of hiring its muscle-boys
to political candidates during election campaigns. In 2002, the
Mungiki had backed the losing Uhuru Kenyatta camp. This cost it
dearly in terms of political clout, and it had desperately tried
to recover the lost ground by intensifying its terroristic hold
on the slum population and on the matatu owners.
The accumulating result of these various processes was a feeling
of deep dissatisfaction - not so much with President Kibaki as a
person but with his entourage, with his robbing cronies, and with
his incapacity to sympathize and do something about the plight of
poor Kenyans. Raila Odinga, the candidate of the Orange Democratic
Movement (ODM), was then able to capitalize on that frustration
in a way that fused various types of motivation: ethnic (the Kikuyu
have grabbed everything and all the other tribes have lost), political
(Kibaki betrayed his promise for change), social (crime and violence
are out of control), economic (what is the point of economic growth
when it does not bring any benefits to the ordinary citizen).
As the electoral campaign neared its climax in December 2007, the
ODM opposition enjoyed a widespread lead in opinion polls and seemed
ready to sweep Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU) out
of power.
The election on 27 December 2007 was both a parliamentary and a
presidential one. At the legislative level, 2,548 candidates from
108 parties were vying for 210 seats; at the presidential level,
three candidates - the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, ODM leader Raila Odinga
and former foreign minister Kalonzo Musyoka (who had split from
the ODM) - were competing.
Everybody (including himself) knew that Kalonzo Musyoka had no chance
of winning and that he was simply angling for the position of a
strategic post-election ally who could sell his support to a probable
minority victor in need of additional backing. Kalonzo Musyoka is
a Kamba, and the Kamba - although closely related to the Kikuyu
- had chosen the British camp during the Mau Mau emergency. This
gives them a hybrid status in the Kenyan ethno-political landscape,
in which they hold the capacity to swing either with the Kikuyu
or against them.
The polls were a messy business for a number of reasons. The voters’
rolls had been poorly updated or at times not updated at all. Some
dead people were still on the rolls and electors who had changed
residence had not been properly struck off in one place and re-registered
at their new address. The rules governing the help which could be
given to illiterate voters (up to 80% of the electoral body in some
remote constituencies) were poorly enforced. Foreign and national
observers were not always given free access to the polling stations,
and later to the ballots.
But all in all, the parliamentary segment of the election proceeded
smoothly. Twenty-two parties won seats, although only four can be
considered as “serious” (the eighteen others have between
one and three MPs, sharing twenty-eight seats between them): Raila
Odinga’s ODM, which won ninety-two seats, Mwai Kibaki’s
PNU, which won thirty-four seats, Kalonzo Musyoka’s splinter
ODM-K, which won sixteen seats, Uhuru Kenyatta’s Kanu, which
won eleven seats. The results speak for themselves: with 45% of
the MPs, the opposition has a clear majority over the incumbent
administration.
This is what makes the results of the presidential election definitely
suspect. Kenya’s electoral commission (ECK) declared on 30
December that Kibaki had garnered 4,584,721 votes against 4,352,993
for his rival Raila Odinga, and immediately proceeded to inaugurate
the incumbent president as the winner. This tight margin (little
more than 230,000 votes, about 2.5% of those casts) is very fragile
in view of the following facts.
(To be continued…)
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