Kenya: holding a nation hostage to a bankrupt political class

Paul T. Zeleza

(January 12, 2008) Disputed results from December's elections have left Kenya in deep  political crisis. The opposition has refused to accept the results,  which have been questioned by local and international observers.  Three days of violent protests have left more than 120 people dead.  The battles are concentrated in opposition strongholds and shanty  neighborhoods in the major cities from the coastal city of Mombasa to  Nairobi the capital to Kisumu the western port city on the banks of  Lake Victoria where a curfew has been imposed. Live television and  radio broadcasts have been banned. While there is relief and even  celebration among some supporters of the ‘victorious’ President  Kibaki, the frustration and fear gripping the country is almost  unprecedented in forty four years of independence. A proud country  that likes to see itself as an oasis of stability in a volatile  region is being held hostage by a bankrupt political class. Many  Kenyans are filled with a sense of shame and anguish, as well as  fortitude to salvage their country’s fortunes and future.

Lost in the electoral shenanigans and post-election turmoil has been  a historic opportunity to consolidate the country’s newly minted  democracy, to confirm its democratic credentials in the region and on  the continent. Instead Kenya now faces a prolonged period of  political uncertainty that will play itself out in unpredictable ways  from the streets to parliament, severely testing the fragile fabric  of public order, social cohesion, and inter-group relations,  especially those structured around the complex inscriptions of  ethnicity, class, gender, and generation. Some worry that Kenya might  turn into East Africa’s Cote d’Ivoire, a once stable and relatively   prosperous postcolony in West Africa that descended into chaos and  civil war because of its failure to manage the combustible politics  of democratic transition.

A close and disputed election

The opinion polls pointed to a close election. They were proved  right. But only one out of 50 polls conducted in the lead up to the  elections, showed President Kibaki in the lead; the rest pointed to a  possible narrow win by the opposition candidate, Mr. Raila Odinga.  The latter maintained his lead during the early counts of the  presidential vote, but when the final results were announced by the  Electoral Commission of Kenya, he trailed by 231,728 votes. President  Kibaki was declared duly elected with 4,584,721 votes against Mr.  Odinga’s 4,352,993 votes. Election observers expressed surprise, the   opposition cried foul, riots erupted, and the country teetered on the  brink of an unprecedented crisis.

What a difference five years makes. In 2002 President Kibaki was  inaugurated in broad daylight before an ecstatic crowd of a million  people in Jamhuri Park in Nairobi; this time he was hurriedly  inaugurated in the evening less than an hour after being declared  winner before a small and dour crowd of officials. The intoxicating  euphoria of 2002 has given way to widespread anger and anxiety. In  2002 the masses brutalized by decades of one-party rule rediscovered  their voices and will; the nation was united in its hopes for the  future, believed fervently in the possibilities of productive change.  Now, many feel betrayed and disempowered, robbed of their votes and  voices.

Whatever the future holds for Kenya and its tortured journey from  dictatorship to democracy, underdevelopment to development, the  present crisis has a complicated history rooted in the political  economies of colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism that have  characterized Kenya over the last century. This is to suggest that  the present moment, the current political crisis, is rooted in  complex historical forces that go beyond the ubiquitous ‘tribalism’   beloved by the western media in discussing African politics or  explaining its proverbial crises, or the excessive obsession with  personalities often found in the African media itself. This is of  course not to dismiss the role of ethnicity or particular leaders, it  is merely to point out the need to put both in the context of broader  historical forces that have propelled Kenya to this moment and might  impel it out of it.

Was it possible to unseat an incumbent president after only five years in power?

The recent Kenyan elections promised to achieve an extraordinary  development: unseating an incumbent president through the ballot box  after only five years in power. This would have been unprecedented in  Kenyan history, and is rare in Africa where incumbents typically  serve the constitutional two terms and some even try to rig their way  into illicit third terms. Nicéphore Soglo of Benin is one of the rare   presidents to suffer such a fate; elected in 1996 he lost the 2001  elections to the former dictator, Mathieu Kérékou. This is a tribute   to the power of incumbency to win or rig elections, the inordinate  advantages enjoyed by ruling parties to use the sanctions and  seductions of state power.

The manipulation of electoral processes and results by ruling parties  is of course not confined to Africa: remember the U.S. elections of  2000, and President Putin’s recent attempts to prolong his rule? It  is not uncommon for ruling parties in many so-called mature  democracies to call elections opportunistically, redraw electoral  districts in their favor, or ‘bribe’ the electorate with contrived   economic goodies. However, it can be argued the national costs of  electoral malpractices are much higher for African (and other  countries in the global South) that are struggling against the  challenges of internal underdevelopment and political and cultural  subordination than for the more globally hegemonic western countries.

Many current politicians lost their seats in parliament

Save for the disputed victory for the president himself, the  government suffered a political tsunami as a score of cabinet  ministers and the Vice-President lost their parliamentary seats.  Altogether, the Party of National Unity (PNU), cobbled together only  last September, under which President Kibaki run, won only 37 seats,  the victorious opposition party, Orange Democratic Movement (ODM),  led by Mr. Raila Odinga took 100 seats, and the rest (parliament has  210 directly elected members) went to the Orange Democratic Movement- Kenya (ODM-K), the party of the third major presidential candidate,  Mr. Kalonzo Musyoka, and other smaller parties.

Swept away also were power brokers of the former dictator, President  Daniel arap Moi including the once feared Mr. Nicholas Biwott and the  tycoon Mr. Kamlesh Pattini an infamous architect of one of Kenya’s  largest corruption scandals, as well as Mr. Moi’s own ambitious three   sons. In a sense, the election signified a rejection of leading  politicians associated with Presidents Moi and Kibaki. While the two  represent different presidential administrations, one dictatorial and  the other democratic, they are associated in the popular imagination,  and were painted by the opposition, as old men leading corrupt  regimes. Remarkably, Mr. Moi campaigned indefatigably for his  successor, to the obvious glee of the opposition.

Thus the contest between the octogerian Mr. Kibaki and the flamboyant  Mr. Odinga pitted a generational struggle for power. It is one of the  ironies of contemporary Africa that countries that have enjoyed  political stability since independence such as Kenya, Malawi, and  Senegal, are still ruled by the nationalist generation that brought  independence, while the countries with more turbulent histories have  long made the generational transition. In this sense, the Kenyan  election was a referendum between the older and the younger  generations, between the Kibaki generation in power since  independence and the Odinga generation that came off age after  independence.

Elected on a strong anti-corruption platform, the Kibaki government had new corruption scandals of its own but delivered on the economy

The first Kibaki government was elected in 2002 on a strong anti- corruption platform. Impoverished and exhausted from 24 years of  authoritarian and corrupt rule by the Moi administration, the country  was hungry for a clean government that would bring to justice corrupt  former officials and lead a transparent and accountable government  capable of reviving the economy and pursuing development. The drive  against Moi-era corruption scandals not only stalled, but new  corruption scandals sprang up, and the new administration’s anti- corruption credentials were irreparably damaged when the government’s   own anti-corruption czar, Mr. John Githongo fled to exile in the  United Kingdom in 2005.

But the Kibaki administration delivered on the economy. The country’s   economic growth rate jumped from 0.6% in 2002 to 6.1% in 2006. Buoyed  by this robust growth, the government unveiled its ambitious Kenya  Vision 2030, a development blueprint to turn Kenya into a newly  industrializing “middle income country providing high quality of life   for all its citizens by the year 2030." President Kibaki and his PNU  run on this economic record, while the opposition claimed it could  achieve even faster growth unadulterated by corruption. One sought  continuity, the other promised change. In reality, there was little  difference in the programs of the PNU and ODM and their contending  presidential candidates.  

Kibaki and Odinga--similar on policy, different in personality and 'symbolic' populism

As is often the case in such contexts, the absence of policy  differences was more than made up by the personality and symbolic  differences of populism in which Mr. Odinga bested the president. Mr.  Odinga a millionaire businessman, who had once been a political  prisoner, and most importantly, was the son of the nationalist icon  and former vice-president, Mr. Oginga Odinga, campaigned vigorously  in his red hammer to achieve what had eluded his father. He appealed  to the youth and people from disaffected regions, while assiduously  assuring domestic and foreign business interests who preferred the  wealthy, elderly and gentlemanly President Kibaki that he had long  shed the socialist inclinations and firebrand reputation of his  younger days.  

The contestation between continuity and change in the electoral  contest partly reflected the glaring mismatch between growth and  development, both socially and spatially, and tapped into deep  yearnings for a new socioeconomic dispensation, a restless hunger for  broad-based development frustrated by neo-liberal growth. Kenya’s  economic recovery and growth from 2002 largely benefited the middle  classes rather than the workers and peasants, the bulk of the  population. Even among the middle classes, the benefits flowed  unequally between those in the rapidly expanding private service  sectors rather than in the retrenched and decapitalized public  sectors, which has been under assault since the days of structural  adjustment in the 1980s.  

For many Kenyans, therefore, the economy may be doing well, but they  are not. As dependency theory used to postulate in the radical 1960s  and 1970s, growth is not synonymous with development; neo-liberal  growth is even less likely to lead to broad-based development because  people are secondary to profits, public to private good. In Kenya, as  in much of Africa and indeed the wider world since the onset of neo- liberalism the gap between the rich and the poor has widened, the  sense of economic insecurity has increased among large numbers of  people even as their countries’ economies grow. This partly helps  explain the tightness of the vote and the prospect of a government  losing elections in times of rapid economic growth.  

High economic growth, but continued unequal income distribution

If the economic growth of recent years in Kenya stoked expectations  of development, the unequal distribution of wealth thwarted those  expectations and engendered popular frustration, while democracy gave  a new vent to express the frustrations. Anti-corruption discourse,  the widespread popular distaste against corruption was both real and  rhetorical in so far it reflected disgust at actual corruption  scandals and invoked deep disaffection among many Kenyans who felt  left out of the rapidly growing economy, a critique of rising  economic class inequalities. In the authoritarian past there was no  political alternative to the one-party state, now the discontented  electorate could transfer its hopes for development to the  opposition, even if the investment in the opposition did not promise  to yield different dividends.  

Class 'versus' ethnicity/race in the election

But class is not a reliable predictor of political loyalties and  voting behavior even in the so-called developed countries. Often far  more powerful are the constructed identities of ethnicity or race. In  Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, ethnic identities have greater  political salience than racial identities. This is not simply because  politicians mobilize ethnicity for electoral purposes, which they do  and Kenyan politicians are notoriously adept at playing the ethnic  card. Rather, elections for members of parliament are local or  regional political events, latched on to the national presidential  election; they are spatialized performances in which both the  candidates and voters are located in particular constituencies and  tend to share some common identity, ethnic or otherwise.  

As we await a fuller breakdown of the elections results, it is clear  that many members of parliament lost elections in their  constituencies to competitors from their own ethnic groups. In such  cases, party allegiance, record of the incumbent, and personalities  all played a role. It is mostly in the large cities with their  ethnically diverse populations where ethnic consciousness could be  mobilized and the ethnic card played. In such contexts party  allegiance loomed exceptionally large as a proxy for ethnicity. Only  the president is subject to both local and national constituencies,  and hence the enhanced ethnicization of the presidential election.  

The complex interplay of local, regional, and national elections is  of course not confined to Kenya or Africa for that matter. Look at  voting patterns across Europe and North America and the different  regional strategies political parties tend to employ to appeal to  voters in various regions, not to mention the use of race. Nor is the  ethnicization of electoral politics a peculiar African predilection.  In no major western country has a black person ever been elected  president or prime minister. In the United States, few blacks win  state wide offices. Currently, there is only one black governor out  of 50, and one black senator out of 100—the charismatic Barack Obama,   the half-Kenyan and half-Luo 2008 U.S. presidential candidate. Yet,  nobody labels electoral contests and results in western Europe and  North America as ‘racial’, let alone ‘tribal’; they are given more  dignified names.  

Media reports on the Kenyan elections and especially reports of the  protests following the inauguration of President Kibaki almost  invariably include the word ‘tribal’; the reference is to ‘tribes’  and ‘tribalism’ as primordial identities untouched by history, as  ancient hatreds immune to modernity, as pathological conditions  peculiar to Africa. Forgotten is the simple fact that both Mr. Kibaki  and Mr. Odinga could not win the elections based on voting from their  so-called ‘tribes’; two ethnic groups out of the country’s many  ethnicities. While the presidential candidates received overwhelming  electoral support in their home provinces, to win the presidency  ethnic coalition building is essential, for the president has to win  at least 25 of the vote in at least five of Kenya’s eight provinces.  

The 'construction' of ethnic identity: 'political' and 'moral' ethnicity

The enthnicization of politics in Kenya is not a reflection of some  atavistic reflex, or simply the result of elite political  manipulations or primordial cultural affectations among the masses,  even if the elites do indeed use ethnicity and the masses are  mobilized by it. It is salutary to remember that some of Kenya’s  ethnic groups only emerged or developed their current identities  under British colonial rule. Few can trace themselves to the remote  past notwithstanding the work of some historians to distinguish their  ethnic communities with long and pristine pedigrees. Imagined ethnic  and national histories are of course not about the past, but the  present; they are part of the discursive and political arsenal for  claim making in the present and for the future.  

As we have learned from African studies, we need to distinguish  between ‘moral ethnicity’, that is, ethnicity as a complex web of  social obligations and belonging, and ‘political ethnicity’, that is,  the competitive confrontation of ‘ethnic contenders’ for state power  and national resources. Both are socially constructed, but one as an  identity, the other as an ideology. Ethnicity may serve as a cultural  public for the masses estranged from the civic public of the elites,  a sanctuary that extends its comforts and protective tentacles to the  victims of political disenfranchisement, economic impoverishment,  state terror and group rivalry. In other words, it is not the  existence of ethnic groups (or racial groups) that is a problem in  itself, a predictor of social conviviality or conflict, but their  political mobilization.  

Ethnicity related to uneven regional development: Kikuyu compared to Luo areas

Ethnicity in Kenya is tied in complex and contradictory ways to the  enduring legacies of uneven regional development. During colonial  rule Central Kenya, the homeland of the Kikuyu, became the heartland  of the settler economy, while Nyanza, the Luo homeland, languished as  a labor reserve that furnished both unskilled and educated labor to  the centers of colonial capitalism. Not surprisingly, the Kikuyu bore  the brunt of colonial capitalist dispossession and socialization, and  were in the vanguard of the nationalist struggles that led to  decolonization and they came to dominate the postcolonial state and  economy. Capitalist development and centralization of power  reinforced domination of the Kenyan economy by the Central Province  and the Kikuyu, a process that withstood the twenty-four year reign  of President Moi, a Kalenjin from the Rift Valley, and was  reinvigorated under President Kibaki’s administration.  

Central Province and Kikuyu dominance of Kenya’s political economy  bred resentment from other regions and ethnic groups. It fed into  constitutional debates about presidential and political  centralization of power, and the regional redistribution of resources  that dominated Kenyan politics until 2005 when the draft constitution  supported by the President and Parliament was rejected in a  referendum. The ODM was born in the highly politicized maelstrom of  the run up to the referendum.  

Both Kikuyu and Luo ethnic groups have both elites and peasants and workers

This narrative tends to ignore an important qualifying fact, that not  all Kikuyus are dominant and not all Luos are disempowered. Colonial,  neo-colonial and neo-liberal capitalisms have bred class  differentiations within communities as much as they have led to  uneven development among regions. In other words, Kikuyu and Luo  elites have much more in common with each other than they do with  their co-ethnics among peasants and workers who also have more in  common with each other across ethnic boundaries than with their  respective elites. This is a reality that both the elites and the  masses strategically ignore during competitive national elections,  because the former need to mobilize and manipulate their ethnic  constituencies in intra-elite struggles for power, and the latter  because elections offer one of the few moments to shake the elites  for the crumbs of development for themselves and their areas.  

Kenyan politics exhibits familiar African trends

Kenyan politics exhibits familiar African trends. The country started  its independence with a hurriedly negotiated multi-party system  between the nationalists and the departing imperial power that could  not withstand the homogenizing imperatives of nationalism and the  intoxicating and intolerant demands of uhuru: nation-building,  development, and democratization. Before long, Kenya joined the  African bandwagon towards the one-party state. It became a de facto  one-party state as the pre-independence opposition party KADU folded  voluntarily into the ruling KANU in 1964, while the post-independence  radical Kenya People’s Union formed in 1966 by former vice-president   Oginga Odinga, the father of the ODM leader, was violently suppressed.  

Kenya as a one-party state: 1978-2002

Kenya became a de jure one-party state under President Moi, who took  power in 1978 following the death of the founding President Jomo  Kenyatta, and was confronted by on the one hand the political  tensions engendered by the attempted coup of 1982, and on the other a  slowing economy that stagnated under the onerous weight of structural  adjustment programs imposed with market fundamentalist zeal by the  international financial institutions—the World Bank and International   Monetary Fund—and western governments. By the end of the 1980s, it  was clear that while the country remained relatively stable in a  tumultuous region its early promise had been squandered under a reign  of authoritarianism, corruption, and structural maladjustment.  

As in much of Africa, from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s,  the unproductive power of one-party rule faced growing popular  opposition. The struggles for the “second independence” by the  restive masses and organized civil society scored limited victories  in the 1992 and 1997 elections, and finally seized the prize in the  elections of December 2002 when the ruling party, KANU, lost to the  opposition National Rainbow Coalition (NARC). It was a new day:  democracy expanded as political and civil freedoms spread, so did the  economy as the stagnation of the Moi years receded, but the social  and structural deformities of the postcolony remained as entrenched  as ever. It is in this context that the current crisis can best be  understood.  

The last five years: growth of both democracy and the economy, but not development for the people

The last five years have seen the growth of both democracy and the  economy, but the marriage between democracy and development remains  unfilled. The economic growth rates under President Kibaki resemble  those in the early post-independence years under President Kenyatta.  The difference is not only that neo-colonial capitalism of the  Kenyatta era, which had a nationalist face, has given way to  contemporary neo-liberal capitalism, which has a neo-colonial soul,  democracy has reconfigured old challenges and brought new ones that  the society and state have yet to manage satisfactorily as the  results of these elections amply demonstrate.  

Examples abound that as the suffocating lid of state tyranny is  lifted during moments of democratic transition the suppressed voices  and expectations of civil society surge, but the stresses and strains  arising from the competitive grind of democracy often find  articulation in the entrenched identities, idioms, and institutions  of ethnic solidarity. The challenge in Kenya, as in other divided  multicultural societies, is the need to balance group and national  interests through further democratization, devolution of power, and  power sharing. In so far as ethnic interests and cleavages are only  one set among many other possible bases of political contestation— class, religion, region, and gender that often mediate and reinforce  ethnic identities and antagonisms—there is need to think about group   interests beyond ethnicity.  

The current trials and tribulations facing Kenya will not be resolved  without the emergence of a leadership that is truly up to the  challenge, a leadership that pursue a national project of profound  social transformation, that eschews narrow and shortsighted  exclusionary politics and neo-liberal economic growth. Kenya, and  Africa as a whole, have no historic alternative from building truly  democratic developmental states if they are to chart the twentieth  century more prepared and empowered than they did the disastrous  twentieth century marked by colonialism and neo-colonialism and their  depredations that were simultaneously economic and existential,  cultural and cognitive, political and paradigmatic.  

The current leadership, both the ‘victors’ and ‘losers’, seem keen to  retain or gain power at all costs. The power struggle is as sinister  as the differences among the leaders are small. But often it is the  very narcissism of minor differences that breeds gratuitous violence  and viciousness as histories of genocide demonstrate. The leading  politicians engaged in combat whose followers are tearing their  lovely country apart are members of the same recycled political class  committed to neo-liberal growth that offer no real solutions to  Kenya’s enduring challenges of growth and development, choiceless  democracy and transformative democracy.  

Most of the major figures in the three leading parties, PNU, ODM, ODM- K, served in the Moi and Kibaki administrations at one time or  another. Their politics do not differ in any significant ways.  Indeed, it is a mark of the promiscuity of the political class that  the three parties were formed quite recently, and politicians shop  for parties with the consumer ease of well-heeled customers. In a  sense, then, their collective interests of the politicians and  national interests of the population are not coterminous, although  converges do exist and are invoked at certain moments. The political  animus between the Kibaki and Odinga camps is rooted in the now  infamous secretive Memorundum of Understanding on the distribution of  cabinet positions and power drawn up among the opposition parties  that hurriedly formed NARC to fight the ruling party KANU in the 2002  elections. NARC was a marriage of convenience for a splintered  opposition determined to win that failed to survive squabbles over  the spoils of victory. Before long, Mr. Odinga and his followers  began complaining that Mr. Kibaki had reneged on the MOU and thus  began the slide to the current political impasse and crisis.  

Can elections bring real choice?

President Kibaki’s contested ‘victory’ has deprived the country of  the opportunity to see that the opposition offers little more than a  recycling of the same policies and politicians as has been witnessed  in other African countries that are now into their third or fourth  cycle of competitive multiparty elections. As this has become evident,  the lure of elections as engines of fundamental socioeconomic  transformation has dimmed in many countries and the search for new  forms of politics is underway. In Kenya the disputed results of this  election may have done the same. Only time will tell, perhaps long  after the violence has subsided. What can be predicted is that the  Kibaki government will be paralyzed in the new parliament, where it  controls less than a fifth of the seats, and might even be brought  down by a vote of no confidence, although the power of the government  to secure or ‘buy’ support from self-serving parliamentarians cannot  be ruled out, as has happened in Malawi and other countries where the  President’s party is in the minority. And a popular uprising, or even   an 'orange revolution', can never be ruled out.  

Kenya’s current political tragedy is part of a much larger story. The   absence of articulated and organized institutional and ideological  alternatives under neoliberalism is at the heart of the political  crisis facing contemporary Africa and much of the world. It has led,  thus far, to the ossification of politics, and in some countries, the  premature abortion or aging of elections as instruments of  transformative change. The specter of choiceless democracies is not  confined to countries in the global South, for in many parts of the  global North including the United States the ideological divide  between the major parties is often indecipherable, the result of  which is political apathy as nearly half the population has exited  the electoral process. For more fragile societies, the danger is not  apathy, but anarchy. As a keen observer of Kenya, a country where I  spent many fruitful years studying and teaching in the late 1970s and  1980s, I hope the country can avoid such a fate. Perhaps the ferocity  of the reaction to the botched elections will serve as a wakeup call  to the political class and the troubled citizenry to chart a more  productive future for their beloved country. A good beginning would  be for the contending parties to agree to a binding independent and  internationally monitored investigation of the election results.

 Paul T Zeleza is editor of The Zeleza Post. This article was first  published at http://zeleza.com/blogging/africanaffairs. It also appeared in Pambazuka News and may be accessed at http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/45212