Resolving the Kenyan stalemate

I'm a sad and pained Kenyan. The conflict in Kenya is simply as a result of a stolen election, stupid! It is sad that whereas the propagandists on either side wish to reignite ethnic animosities, the truth of the matter is that in 2002 Kenyans voted irrespective of their tribes for Mr Kibaki. The resurgence of ethnic positions has basically come about because of the glaring imbalances in resource distribution and employment in government offices and departments. Matters were not helped by the apparent closing of ranks between former President Moi and Mr Kibaki in what was rightly understood to mean a coming together of some vested elite class interests. It is the poor Kenyans who are hacking each other and sadly, the original problem of a stolen presidency is almost lost in the quagmire.


Were the election open and free and fair, it wouldn't matter who lost. Now, it matters who won because it is evident that the advantage of incumbency worked to Mr Kibaki's advantage. It is unfortunate that innocent lives are continuing to be lost while this problem should have been settled by a simple proclamation of Mr Odinga as the rightful winner. Currently, Kibaki is employing the resources of state terror to tame dissent in the hope that he may survive a new day. There is a simple key for peace: give Kenyans JUSTICE now. Peace will flow like a river, huge healing will accompany that effort and Kenya should move forward.


The USA and UK (and by extension the developed world) as moral custodians and global evangelists of democratic governance must step up their diplomatic and economic pressures on the bandit presidency of Mwai Kibaki to accept the democratic verdict of the Kenyan people and step aside before Kenya is torn asunder for ever. The level of ethnic suspicion and animosity can be resolved only when democracy is respected. There are no two forms of democracies, it's a rule of the majority. Kibaki lost the presidency and his party lost parliament. He cannot and must not be allowed to hang on to illicit power through the barrel of the gun. The lose of innocent lives through ethnic fighting must be condemned and the police force made to account for their love of the shoot-to-kill order. This is unacceptable. Kenyans cannot die while Kibaki is enjoying the trappings of state resources and ill-gotten executive power.


I want to see Kenyans living together again. I want to have a country to go back to.

Wave of anarchy blamed on Kenya's 'General Coward'

As the post-election death toll nears 1,000 and towns go up in flames, more Kenyans are saying the 'holy' President and his elite advisers are to blame

Mount Kenya rises in the distance, its glaciers reflecting the sharp morning light. Tea bushes cover the slopes around the huge estate, with its high walls and three separate entrances, one manned by heavily armed policemen. If the pre-election predictions had been followed, the 76-year-old golf-loving, aloof owner of the estate in Othaya should have been strolling in its neat gardens, enjoying his first month of retirement and reflecting on his legacy of furthering Kenya's passage towards democracy.

But instead Mwai Kibaki is holed up in State House in Nairobi, three hours' drive away, fighting to entrench his presidential power following a highly contentious election victory that has plunged Kenya into its worst crisis since independence. In little over a month more than 900 people have been killed, 300,000 people displaced, and entire towns split along ethnic lines.

Yesterday the violence continued. In the town of Kericho in the Rift Valley, hundreds of homes belonging to people of Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe were being set alight by gangs of youths.

Kibaki's handling of the crisis, so far limited to one brief visit to displaced people and reading out a few pre-written statements insisting he won fairly, has invited fierce criticism. The normally pro-government Daily Nation newspaper warned Kibaki: 'If Kenya disintegrates, history books will record that the collapse of a once great, united and prosperous country happened on your watch'. The Nairobi Star was headlined: 'Where is Kibaki? ... as Kenya slips into anarchy'.

Other questions come from millions of Kenyans struggling to understand what is happening in their country. How could people have misread a man who has been in government since independence, regarded as the gentleman of Kenyan politics? What motivated an already wealthy President, with little apparent ego, caricatured in newspapers as enjoying afternoon naps, to stage what the opposition has called a 'civilian coup'?

'I have spoken to nearly every prominent columnist in this country and asked "Did you see this coming?"' said Wycliffe Muga, one of Kenya's best-known journalists. 'None of them did. From being a detached, almost aristocratic President, Kibaki suddenly seemed to change overnight into a scheming, duplicitous leader willing to see bloodshed in his thirst for power.' Some are looking into Kibaki's past to see whether they missed the warning signs of a leader who would take more than 40 years to reveal his true colours.

A brilliant student at the London School of Economics, Kibaki entered Kenya's first post-independence government in 1963. Six years later he stood in Nairobi's Bahati constituency against Jael Mbogo, the popular head of Kenya's biggest women's association. He won by a wafer-thin margin in remarkably similar circumstances to December's election; behind in the early tallying, the verdict was delayed for days and a crack squad of police officers swarmed around the vote-counting centre when the result was announced. 'I was so far ahead in early vote counting that even the BBC even reported that a young woman had felled a government minister,' Mbogo, now a civil society activist in Nairobi, told The Observer. 'Kibaki stalled the result, and then robbed me of victory. Because he looks so holy, people are still asking if he really was capable of stealing this election. What I say is "Of course, he has done it before".'

As Vice-President under Daniel arap Moi, Kibaki was well regarded. His family become rich through his contacts, but he was never tainted by corruption. He was happiest on the golf course and in the colonial-era Muthaiga Club where he held court with Nairobi's elite Kikuyus; politicians and businessmen, the lines between them often blurred.

His reluctance to press for multipartyism earned him the nickname General Coward. But by the 2002 election, after 24 years of Moi's misrule, a strongman was the last thing Kenyans were looking for. Kibaki was a safe pair of hands.

'Kibaki is the one politician I have always trusted in Kenya,' said Philip Machila, 67, who used to attend party meetings with Kibaki. 'The only problem he has always had is some of the people around him.'

The 'bad-influence' theory is always used to excuse Kibaki. Throughout his first term in office he was surrounded and shielded by old friends, virtually all Kikuyu. Initially Kibaki needed protecting. Badly injured in a car accident a few weeks before he was sworn in in 2002, he was then reported to have had a stroke. For much of 2003 it was unclear whether Kibaki would complete his term. His memory was as shaky as his walk. His health improved but access to him has not. He has not given a single media interview since he became President in 2002 and does not take questions at rare news conferences.

Several of Kibaki's Kikuyu golfing friends have assumed significant influence at State House in recent years. 'Some of these people hold very strong thoughts about the superiority of the Kikuyus and their inherent right to govern,' said a former government minister. 'It's a case of "We helped end British rule using the Mau Mau, and we are the ones that keep the economy ticking over. The other 42 ethnic groups are welcome to live in Kenya, but only we can rule".' He said he did not believe 'the President is calling the shots at all. He always has to consult the hardliners around him'.

'It was not until September last year that we could even get him out on the campaign trail,' said an adviser to Kibaki's PNU party. 'He seemed very reluctant for a long time.' But the adviser rejected the assertion that Kibaki is not completely in charge: 'He attends a security briefing even morning. He understands his legacy will be hurt if this current crisis does not end well.'

Even with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in Nairobi this weekend, supporting mediation efforts chaired by Kofi Annan, Kibaki made a speech to the African Union that could hardly have been more antagonistic towards opposition supporters, already on edge after the murder of two opposition MPs last week. He reiterated that the election result was fair and that the opposition was to blame for the violence. It should take its election grievances to the courts, he said, and blamed unnamed foreign countries for suggesting a power-sharing. This hardline stance at a time when towns like Kericho are in flames - and his quiet dismissal of Murage a fortnight ago - means there is an increasing body of people who now believe that Kibaki alone must take the blame for the country's mess. 'I honestly believe he is the man driving the whole operation; the ineptly rigged election and the aftermath,' said David Ndii, a Nairobi-based analyst. 'Kibaki very much knows what is happening, and must be held responsible.'

Kenya's quicksands

By Cameron Duodu

Even as the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, joins the diplomatic efforts of his predecessor, Kofi Annan, to try and get the politicians of Kenya to resolve the current crisis through dialogue, the situation on the ground in the country is fast disappearing from the control of the politicians.

The ethnic genie is truly out of the bottle and fuels its monstrous thirst for blood on anything dramatic that happens. For instance, the murder, within days of each other, of two members of the new parliament - Melitus Mugabe Were and David Kumutai Too - has reinforced the belief among non-Kikuyus that Kibaki and his "Kikuyu gang" will stop at nothing to hold on to power.

True, the murders have tilted the balance of power in the new parliament in favour of Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU) and the parties "friendly" to it. They now boast of a majority 103 seats against 101 held by the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM).

The ODM leader, Raila Odinga, has described one of the murders as a "planned political assassination", and going by the litmus test of cui bono (who benefits), it is difficult not to agree with his interpretation.

But to his followers, a far more sinister perception of the murders offers itself - namely, confirmation that Kibaki and his supporters are a power-hungry bunch who want to monopolise political control in Kenya by any means, fair and foul. Whether any actual evidence exists to justify such a conclusion (or not) doesn't matter in the current political climate. For the police and the judiciary are as much under the cloud of suspicion as the politicians. At least 50% of Kenya's population, if not more, now ardently believe that Kikuyus want total control of Kenya.

And they have been reacting against this Kikuyu "plot" in a manner that has led some observers, including the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi Frazer, to conclude that "ethnic cleansing" is taking place in many areas of Kenya. (Her characterisation of the crisis in these terms has since been repudiated by the state department.)

But it is indisputable that the Kalenjin and the Luo, among others, are expelling the Kikuyus from what they consider to be their "ancestral land". Some of this land, they claim, was distributed to Kikuyus by the Kikuyu politicians who ruled the country after independence.

On the other hand, in Kikuyu areas, ethnic groups known to support the ODM are fleeing, afraid that the Kikuyus will reap vengeance for what is happening to Kikuyus elsewhere. It's become a classic case of the onset of national disintegration. The number of displaced people is now estimated to be at least 500,000. Some are finding safety in prisons; many more are in tents provided by the UN, where their safety is anything but guaranteed. Everywhere, it is suffering, suffering, suffering.

Meanwhile, the country is awash with rumours of people arming themselves for civil war. No proof of weapons-buying is offered, of course, but such rumours tend to feed upon themselves: since it stands to reason for ethnic groups threatened by others to defend themselves with weapons, the rumours must be true. And if they are true, then the ones being threatened with weapons must also arm themselves.

Kenya is in an area where weapons are, in theory, easy to procure - from anarchic Somalia, principally, but also from Uganda and as far away as Eritrea and Sudan. So the seriousness of the situation cannot be over-emphasised.

Can negotiations of the sort Ban, Annan and their colleagues are carrying out provide a solution? Success would depend on a deal that can be sold to the populace as a guaranteed path to economic equality. It would have to be seen as making it impossible for one ethnic group to be favoured above others in terms of important appointments (especially in ministerial office). But above all, an independent, inter-ethnic commission would have to be appointed to look into the question of land redistribution.

Such a commission must be given power to order that questionable titles held as a result of past political patronage be revoked, and ownership reverted to those who can prove that their ancestors held the land before colonial fiat turned them over to absentee landlords and nouveau-riche landgrabbers who had political leverage.

Even if such a rearrangement of Kenya's socio-economic landscape were to be agreed upon, the political antagonists would have their work cut out to get their followers to accept it as the basis for future co-existence. The trouble is that ethnic politics tends to operate under eternal suspicion - suspicion that, in the worlds of an African proverb, "there is always blood in the head of a tse-tse fly".

This is why it is totally treasonable for African politicians to play with the ethnic sensibilities of their people. Biafra (1967), the Ivory Coast (2002) and, of course, Sudan (since 1984) are among the more sanguine examples of what can happen when the greed for power blinds politicians to the realities of life among the people they claim to lead. But who cares for the lessons of history when the lust for power beckons?

It is now up to the entire world to pressurise Kenya's leaders to recognise the quicksand into which they have pushed their country and to retreat before they find themselves unable either to go forward or to turn back.

How Kenya's election was rigged

By Shashank Bengali, McClatchy NewspapersThu Jan 31, 6:00 AM ET

NAIROBI, Kenya — The spark for Kenya's firestorm of ethnic violence was lit inside a cavernous meeting hall in downtown Nairobi , where election officials over four days doctored vote counts, dismissed eye-popping irregularities and thwarted monitoring by independent observers to deliver a razor-thin victory to President Mwai Kibaki.

Observers who were allowed into the vote-tallying center on Dec. 29-30 , hours before the results were announced, said there was so much systematic fraud by Kenya's government-appointed election commission that it's impossible to know who really won.

The extent of the commission's deceptions has faded into the background as more than 800 Kenyans have been killed in ethnic clashes and police crackdowns. The events also have deeply unsettled the Bush administration, which has relied on Kenya as an ally in the war on terror and a bulwark of stability in East Africa.

Official results gave Kibaki an edge of 231,728 votes, or 2 percent, out of about 10 million cast. Initial results of an exit poll by the U.S.-funded International Republican Institute found that rival Raila Odinga had won by an 8 percent margin.

Election officials allowed five accredited Kenyan observers into the tallying center in Nairobi only in the final phase of vote-counting, and three of them shared their accounts with McClatchy . All said that the gravest cheating occurred in that room, where commissioners— all appointed by Kibaki— compiled returns before announcing them to the public.

The observers spoke in interviews and quoted from a joint log of their experiences, titled "Countdown to Deception," which Kenyan rights groups are circulating.

The long-serving chairman of Kenya's election commission played an active role in the deception, the observers said. When a tallying officer presented results showing voter turnout at 115 percent in Maragua, a Kibaki stronghold in the central highlands, commission Chairman Samuel Kivuitu didn't invalidate the result as required by law, but allowed a commissioner to reduce the figure to 85 percent and announced the results an hour later.

That was the pattern that observers reported: Results were announced even when documents were missing, incomplete, unsigned by officers or party representatives, incorrectly tabulated, photocopied or forged.

"Both sides stole votes," said Julius Melli , a 31-year-old Kenyan radiographer who witnessed the tallying of Maragua and other locales. "But Kibaki stole more, and they stole it inside the tallying center."

The Electoral Commission of Kenya , an independent body whose members are appointed by the president, had run national elections in 2002 and 2005 that were praised for their openness and accuracy.

But except for Kivuitu, who'd served as chairman since 1997, this was a largely different commission. As members faced term limits in the months before the vote, Kibaki— facing the stiffest presidential challenge ever in Kenya — packed the 22-person body with 17 new commissioners. All were considered Kibaki allies, and none had ever run an election.

"These people were criminals," said Ben Sihanya, a Stanford -educated constitutional law professor who also observed the tallying. "They were committing crimes at the behest of Kibaki's government."

Election officials were unreachable for comment, but the commission has taken out a two-page, unsigned advertisement in Kenyan newspapers to deny wrongdoing.

Koki Muli , the co-chair of the Kenya Domestic Observers Forum , suspected problems soon after the polls closed on the evening of Dec. 27 . Her network of observers monitoring the vote-counting in polling stations immediately began sending preliminary results by phone and text messages. But for two days, in the Nairobi convention hall where the election commission had set up shop— surrounded by hundreds of journalists, observers and party agents— Kivuitu announced only some of the returns.

Observers grew suspicious when results from Kibaki's central Kenya stronghold weren't read. The delays were sparking protests. "It was necessary for us to observe the tallying," Muli said.

For 48 hours, armed agents barred observers from entering the tallying center, a high-ceilinged room almost the size of a football field. Finally, faced with mounting reports of irregularities, Kivuitu allowed five observers and a handful of political party representatives into the room on the night of Dec. 29 . They were greeted with nervous stares.

"What I saw in that room alarmed me," Muli said. "It was a very scared staff."

Commissioners and staff members were seated around a dozen or so long tables, each strewn with folders containing the legal forms required to certify vote counts. In one corner of the room, a bank of computers churned out results and printouts.

The lanky, bespectacled Sihanya walked up to a table and introduced himself to commissioner Mildred Owour . "Can we sit at your table?" he asked.

"You are going to slow down the process," she replied.

At about 10 p.m. , Sihanya, Melli and two other observers sat down with agents of the main political parties and several commissioners and election officials. Their task was to scrutinize irregularities reported by Odinga's camp— and there were many.

In at least 44 out of 210 constituencies, officials in Nairobi had announced vote totals without any supporting documents from the polling centers. In most places the announced totals were off by hundreds or thousands from what journalists, party agents and foreign observers had witnessed at polling places.

The team prepared to work through the night. When commission staff members brought a stack of folders, observers asked to check whether vote totals had been added correctly.

The commission's legal officer, Jemimah Kelli , rebuffed them.

"She said, 'We can't correct the tallying now. The commission will take care of it,'" Sihanya recalled.

At another table, Muli was scratching her head over results from Mathira, in central Kenya , where nearly everyone voted for Kibaki. Election officers had failed to sign the tallies from nearly three dozen polling places, and one form had two different totals. Muli took out her cell phone and began adding up the numbers.

She calculated 77,442 votes for Kibaki, some 2,600 fewer than what was recorded on the final tally sheet and announced to the public. Later she discovered inflated vote totals for Kibaki in several other areas— "3,000 here, 3,000 there, 1,500 here, 2,500 there," she said. "It added up."

At his table, Melli saw numerous constituencies that lacked tally sheets or official signatures, but whose results had been certified anyway. In one folder, he found two tallies for the same place— one a signed original, the other an unsigned photocopy that had been altered to give Kibaki about 3,000 more votes.

The photocopied version had been used.

"It looked very ridiculous," Melli said. But Kenyan election laws didn't authorize observers to do anything more than note inconsistencies.

The legal officer, Kelli, moaned that officials had gone without sleep for several days, and she harassed Melli for paying too much attention to detail.

"She told Melli, 'You seem to be very keen. Are you being paid to do this?'" Sihanya said. (They in fact were not paid.)

When Sihanya questioned inconsistencies in one Kibaki stronghold, a Kibaki party representative, Martha Karua, accused him of being an opposition agent.

"The whole thing seemed extremely stage-managed," Melli said. "It was not a sincere verification exercise."

As the night wore on, officials became cagier. Melli asked an official for the file from Nithi, where turnout was a suspiciously high 80 percent and nearly all the votes had gone to Kibaki. The official blanched, pulled the file close to his chest and, for the rest of the night, carried it with him everywhere he went, Melli said.

The file for Kieni in central Kenya showed 87,500 parliamentary votes— nearly 3,000 more than the number of registered voters. The file for Imenti South district, where Kibaki had 96 percent support, showed 4,315 more presidential votes than parliamentary votes but contained no supporting documents. At 5 a.m. on Dec. 30 , the file for another central district, Molo, finally appeared showing 50,145 votes for Kibaki. The chairman later announced 75,261.

"They just gave Kibaki 25,000 votes from the air," Muli said.

Finally, at around 9 a.m. , Karua, the Kibaki aide, said the verification had to be halted so that the commissioners could get "back to work." An Odinga aide said he had concerns about other files, but Karua and three election officials at the table stood up to leave.

One of the commissioners, Luciano Riunga Raiji, told the observers, "You are done." Shortly afterward, a message blared over the loudspeaker ordering all observers and party agents to leave the room. By then, Melli said, it was clear that the commissioners had no intention of investigating the irregularities.

"We were waiting for them to announce the final results," he said. "But we knew Kibaki had stolen it."

Muli, who's helped train commissioners for 14 years, said: "We didn't imagine that the electoral commissioners could in a massive way influence the conduct of the election. We were wrong."

The next several hours were surreal, the observers said. As word swept through the convention hall that Kibaki would be declared the winner, Odinga called a news conference and accused the commission of rigging the vote in 48 constituencies.

A few hours later, the opposition trotted out an election staffer, Kipkemoi Kirui, who said that officials were manipulating results at the tallying center. "My conscience could not allow me to see what I was seeing and keep quiet," Kirui told reporters. He's now fled the country, according to media reports.

An hour after that, the lights went off in the convention hall, and paramilitary police cleared the building. In a sealed room, the election chairman announced Kibaki's victory on state television. Within minutes, rioters were tearing through the streets of Nairobi.

Kenya's nightmare had begun.

A bitter wind of grievance

The memory of violence will be hard to suppress. The idea of a Kenya for all Kenyans is dead

Andia Kisia
Thursday January 31, 2008
The Guardian
By now, the question of who won the election is almost beside the point. Neither "President" Kibaki nor Raila Odinga should be allowed within sniffing distance of the presidency. The country is imploding, people are dying and destitute, and these two great men have to be coaxed to the negotiating table.


The idea of Kenya belonging to all Kenyans and Kenyans having the right to live where they like is dead in the water. For some of the victims of the violence in the Rift Valley, this is the second or third time they have lost everything. Many have vowed never to come back. The message being telegraphed by the violence is that the only really safe place to put down any roots is among your own kind. Rift Valley for the Kalenjins, Central Province for the Kikuyus, and so on.


As a child, my family and I travelled at least once a year to visit my grandparents via the western reaches of the A104, the road from Mombasa to the border with Uganda. The journey was a bone-jarring eight hours, but pleasant enough, through the Rift Valley province. We would stop periodically for bathroom breaks or food in Naivasha, Nakuru, Kericho and finally Kisumu. My parents would buy produce from local farmers, all of which ended up in the cabin of the pick-up truck. And so we would continue, ankle-deep in potatoes, carrots and cabbage.


In 1992, when the violence in the Rift Valley first reared its head in the run-up to the elections, the signs of trouble were everywhere. There were burned-out houses all along the road. The farmers who sold produce by the roadside were gone - at least the Kikuyu ones were. Long stretches of the countryside were emptied out.


The Rift Valley is the largest of Kenya's eight provinces and, bar Nairobi, the most populous and ethnically diverse. People from all over the country have flocked to its urban areas and rural plantations. So in addition to the indigenous Kalenjin, there are large numbers of Kikuyu, Luhya, Luo, Kisii and others. Nothing wrong with that. Kenya, we were told over and over, was for all Kenyans. We were free to go where we wanted, live where we wanted.


For years this rhetoric concealed abiding anger surrounding land and its distribution: who had it, who didn't, why some had so little and others so much, how the land-rich had come to own what they did. But the lid was mostly kept on this disaffection until, in 1992, with the real possibility of losing power, Arap Moi cynically gave that anger a murderous outlet. Non-Kalenjin, we were told, were only visitors in the Rift Valley. They were welcome to stay as long as they toed the line, which meant voting for the right candidates.


In the event, few "outsiders" got a chance to vote in the Rift. Most were driven out in an outbreak of slashing and burning and killing that shocked us to our core. With the elections over and Moi back in office, the violence lost its intensity. The "visitors" trickled back to rebuild their lives and homes, although many did not return, and in some places it was years before things returned to normality. But that Pandora's box of violence has never been successfully shut. It has simmered under the surface with occasional outbreaks and has now exploded once again into life.


Fool me once, goes the saying, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. There must be a lot of Rift Valley Kikuyu ruing their lack of sense in returning to live among people who had so violently communicated their dislike. And there are, no doubt, many Kenyans watching and wondering what it all means.


Will any "outsiders" ever again stake their livelihoods on the existence of a country called Kenya and buy land in the Rift - or anywhere outside their districts of origin? Will we all retreat to the safety of our homogenous ethnic enclaves? Will we ever again be able to look each other in the eyes, to suppress the knowledge of the things we have done and are capable of doing to each other? And if not, what kind of country will we become?


The national memory is very long, and injuries are not easily forgotten or forgiven. The Rift is evidence of that. But now we are sowing a bitter wind of grievance, and unless we handle this cataclysm judiciously and with more courage and honesty than we have ever before mustered, we will certainly reap the whirlwind. National memory is long indeed. Let us never forget that our so-called leaders sold us all down the river.