Research Points to Election Fraud

By Karuti Kanyinga
Karuti Kanyinga, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Development Studies of the University of Nairobi, explains in these excerpts from an AllAfrica interview why analysts have concluded that December’s presidential election in Kenya was rigged.

We’ve been able to look at the multiparty elections and ask ourselves how the 2007 elections compare with other elections and ask ourselves what justifies the claims of irregularities, of vote-rigging and of rigging in favor of a particular candidate, including Mwai Kibaki, the PNU (Party of National Unity) presidential candidate, and Raila Odinga, who was ODM’s (the Orange Democratic Movement) presidential candidate.

Our beginning point was a quick comparison of three elections held on the same day, at the same time, on the same spot: a civic election for local government, a presidential election and a parliamentary election. We are different from many countries – a voter comes to a polling station and is given three ballots for a civic, presidential, and parliamentary election, and the only difference is the color of the ballots... There are very few people who choose not to vote for a councillor – for local government – or not to vote for a member of parliament, or not to vote for president. The only difference is there might be a voter who might spoil a ballot...

In sum, we are saying the difference [between the number of ballots cast in voting for different levels of government] must not exceed one percent. How do we arrive at this one percent? We have done a forensic investigation of the 1992, 1997, and 2002 elections to ask ourselves the minimum number of votes that we can allow as anomalous, caused by spoiled ballots or any other reason. We have come to the conclusion that it is one percent.

In 2007, discrepancies [emerged] that cannot be explained by any scientific method.

Scientifically it does not make sense that out of all the elections that Kenyans have conducted, it's only the 2007 election where you find a difference of five percent [between the number of votes cast in balloting for different levels of government]. In some cases, five percent is a lot of votes because it's comprised of thousands of votes, implying... thousands of people went to a polling station and made a decision: "I am not voting for a member of parliament," or "I am not voting for a councillor. I am only coming here to vote for a president." That's unheard of scientifically, given what we have done in our own country [in the past]...

Put together, we found that the anomalous amount of votes - in all the results - is over 365,000. This number comes from the records of the electoral commission, even after everything had been resolved – implying that a week after results had been announced, after they had cleared their data, we still cannot account for 365,000 votes... The question is: to whom do we attribute these 365,000 votes?

When you do a cross-section of where these 365,000 votes come from, you realize that we cannot attribute all of them to Raila [Odinga], the ODM presidential candidate, because we do not have serious cases of anomalies in the ODM-controlled area of Luo Nyanza... The majority of cases where we find anomalies are in President Kibaki's strongholds, and also on the coast... We are not saying that we can attribute this wholly to that, but scientific evidence is pointing fingers to stuffing ballots, to inflating votes on the coast in order to ensure that the president gets 25 percent of the total [number of] votes. There is a constitutional requirement that a winning presidential candidate must have acquired 25 percent of the total vote in at least five out of the country's eight provinces... And on the coast is where we find very serious cases of anomalies between presidential and parliamentary votes.

Politically, of course, someone may want to argue that this is not true. Politically someone may want to argue that in the past - in 1992 and 1997 elections... the parliamentary votes had a difference of over 600,000 votes [from the presidential elections]. They forget that in both elections, there were 10 constituencies where there were no members of parliament contesting [seats]... meaning, there was no parliamentary election. There was only a presidential election, therefore presidential votes in those two elections were higher than the parliamentary vote.

The bottom line is that this election was fraudulent... that this election appears to have been rigged in favor of a certain presidential candidate, and all evidence seems to point fingers to President Kibaki's strongholds.

Share land, not power

By Peter Kimani

Kenya's independence from Britain brought political freedom, not the people's liberation - hence the current crisis.

"Until the antelopes have their own historians," counsels one sage, "History will always glorify hunting." There is succinct truth in this expression as revealed in the reportage of the Kenyan crisis over the past month.

The local press saw the events within the jaundiced prism of "post-election violence", parroting political reductionism that cushioned nefarious politicians from exposure, and punishment.

International journalists, with very few exceptions, fared a lot worse; to them this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, quoting Joseph Conrad's 19th century haunting travelogue across Africa, Heart of Darkness, as evidence.

The two narratives have been simplistic and misleading, if not outright fraudulent. But both have succeeded in throwing us off the spoor.

But there is no doubt that Kenya is one of the most unequal societies in the world, a land of "ten millionaires and ten million beggars," as populist politician Josiah Mwangi Kariuki put it, before he was brutally murdered in March 1975.

Several diagnoses have been suggested on what ails Kenya; namely, the failure of Westminster democracy and its "winner takes all" mould (hence Gordon Brown and others' prescription of power sharing); colonialism and its superficial borders (as though there is a state in the world with "natural boundaries"); tribalism - whatever that means - and the domination of the national economy by one community.

These prognoses are persuasive but defective. While it is true the imposition of western models of government ignored any home-grown structures of governance, as Basil Davidson elaborates in The Black Man's Burden, the actual birth pains for most of Africa, as manifest in the countless coups that destabilised the continent through the 1960s to the 1980s, were largely instigated by the west.

Tribalism and the domination of the economy are political expressions. Uganda's Idi Amin dreamt about the latter and subsequently expelled 80,000 Asians from his country in 1972. Jomo Kenyatta did it piecemeal from 1968 through a raft of oppressive, discriminatory legal instruments. Now someone thinks the Gikuyu are the problem. Next it will be someone else.

The ongoing mediation team, as with other past initiatives, have managed to skirt around the core issue, albeit shyly scratching its surface: land.

Land is what Me Katilili wa Meza and the Giriama people at the Kenyan coast, Waiyaki wa Hinga and the Gikuyu people in central Kenya, and the Nandi's Koitalel arap Samoei in Kenya's Rift Valley invoked over 100 years ago in their resistance against the British. As the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o observes in Writers in Politics, among others, land wasn't just a means to a livelihood but the very basis of the people's social existence.

At the height of the British rule in Kenya, less than 1,000 white farmers held more than eight million acres of the nation's best land - virtually all the available arable land - acquired through brute force or shrewd conning.

The Maasai, for instance, who were the original inhabitants of the Rift Valley, lost their land through dubious "treaties" that allowed their forcible removal from their homelands to pave way for white settlers. The land in question covers the vast Laikipia plateau stretching across two million acres of mountain, savannah and forest, from Mount Kenya in the east to the Rift valley in the west.

The uprooting of the Kikuyu from their farmlands in Central Kenya triggered the Mau Mau armed insurgency that lasted one decade, one of the bloodiest periods in Kenya's history.

Kenya's founding president Jomo Kenyatta, mistakenly jailed as the leader of Mau Mau, emerged from incarceration preaching "suffering without bitterness," specifically urging the white settlers to "stay on and farm the land". And stay on and farm they did - but for the 780 white settlers who sold their land under the Settlement Transfer Fund Scheme.

Under this project, the British and West German governments and the World Bank contributed £20m towards land buy-out for redistribution. Only 1.2 million acres of the eight million acres held by settlers had been distributed by the end of 1971 when the scheme was wound up. To date, up to six million acres of land is estimated to be in settler hands, as happened 60 years ago.

Other lords of poverty include Kenya's political elite. According to the Kenya Land Alliance, a consortium of local NGOs pushing for social and land reform, more than a half of the arable land in Kenya is in the hands of just 20% of the 33 million Kenyans. Sixty-seven per cent of the population are squashed in less than an acre per person. A whopping 13% of the population is landless.

To demonstrate the obscenity of Kenya's political elite, two influential families hold between them land the size of one of Kenya's eight provinces. A former legislator owned an entire constituency, so the people he represented in parliament were not his constituents but subjects.

There are historical parallels between what's happening now and then. After the Mau Mau armed resistance, a political settlement was sought through the Lancaster House Conferences between 1960, 1962 and 1963 that among others, upheld the sanctity of the title deed, thereby legitimising the theft of the people's land.

Today, Kenyans are facing a forced political settlement going by the pronouncements from the Big Brothers. The US Congressional Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health concluded last week that what's happening in Kenya is a "political conflict with ethnic overtones", while European Union Development Commissioner Louis Michel warned that "those who push Kofi Annan to fail will pay for the consequences".

In the meantime, the settlers who took the people's land before independence still hold it. They use the fertile red volcanic soils to grow tea, coffee and horticulture while the expansive savannahs have been converted into eco-tourism sites where they draw the rich tourists. In 2004, for instance, the combined earnings from tea, coffee, tourism and horticulture grossed about £1 billion, nearly half of Kenya's annual national budget. Yet only 31% ended up in national coffers as tax and real earnings to Kenyans.

The rest went to largely British individuals and multinationals, validating Walter Rodney's treatise in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that political independence in Africa did not mean economic liberation for the people and that the blood-sucking vampire, I mean, Empire is still intact.

Douglas Alexander, the British International Development Secretary, made a pitch for Kenyan roses this Valentine, saying their purchase would help an economy under a huge strain. That's very well, only that he didn't say 83% of the sector's total income goes to British firms like Homegrown and Sulmac.

If the British are not visible at the ongoing mediation, it does not mean they are not being heard. They learnt long ago, I suppose, one does not speak with his mouth full.

What Next - Moving from Loss and Trauma to Hope and Healing

By Paul Orieny, MA, LMTF and Alice Tindi, MSW, LGSW

A breach of humanity has occurred in Kenya, leaving people in a state of shock and disbelief. The see human beings willfully inflicting pain and death against another has wounded the souls of Kenyans not just at home but everywhere. The violence affects individuals as well as family and community.

As one Kenyan abroad recounts, “We cry ourselves to sleep, we worry about our families at home, we have severe headaches that we do not understand, our appetites are not the same, we feel or want to be left alone, we break into tears every so often, let us just say life ceased to be the same on December 30 2007.”

We feel the same pain; we are from Kenya and work at the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT). Here we have found tremendous support. In our work, we offer empathy to our clients, many from African countries. Little did we know we would be in a similar situation.

To help Kenyans through this difficult time, CVT is holding a talking circle for sharing and mutual support on Sunday, February 17 from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. at St. Alphonsus Church, 7025 Halifax Avenue North in Brooklyn Center.

We also offer below suggestions and information from our work experiences with people who experienced torture and war trauma. We hope these will be helpful to our brothers and sisters in Kenya and abroad.

When a traumatic (mfadhaiko or bumbwazi) experience happens to or is witnessed by a person, the body and the brain go into a state of alarm during and shortly after the events. This state naturally calls for one to fight, run away, or be inactive to counter the danger. When our bodies and minds stay in this state for an extended period of time, our well-being is negatively impacted.

For the first time, many Kenyans may be experiencing physical or emotional (psychological) symptoms. Although these feelings can be frightening, they are normal responses to abnormal situations. These reactions may include:

· Profound disbelief these incidents are happening. Feeling numb and helpless. This may lead to loss of feeling for people, including your children and spouse.

· When disbelief and shock fade, feelings of loss can occur. These may include profound sadness over loss of loved ones or the suffering of loved ones, loss of security, loss of assumptions about the world or your country (e.g., it could never happen here, we do not live in a war-torn or terror-filled world, etc.).

· Recurring unwanted thoughts, nightmares (jinamizi), and flashbacks may emerge, sometimes worsened by watching the media or being exposed to reminders of trauma. Irritability, anger and rage (Hasira), especially when the trauma is caused by other human beings. Angry reactions come from fear and hurt and can lead to aggressive acts, mainly as attempts to take control (e.g., family conflict, verbal arguments, etc.).

· Anxiety (wasi wasi, shauku), nervousness, increased states of alertness to counter danger; such as mistrusting people and suspecting danger everywhere, fear of leaving home, of letting loved ones out of your sight, of other people, etc

· Moodiness (huzuni), loss of interest or pleasure in activities nearly everyday, weight change, sleep problems, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, helplessness and hopelessness, decreased ability to concentrate and crying more easily..

· Guilt (Uaili). Feel guilty for being okay, being in a good mood or having fun when others are suffering. Remember, it is okay to have positive feelings and thoughts.

· Physical problems such as headaches, stomachaches, breathing difficulties, insomnia, high blood pressure, nausea, changes in appetite, etc.

· Not wanting to be reminded of places or people associated with the trauma.

· Symptoms continuing over a month regardless of personal effort to lessen them.

· Forgetfulness and problems doing things you used to do.

· Drug or alcohol abuse – many people will tend to consume more alcohol or drugs in an effort to reduce the suffering associated with their symptom. This only adds to the suffering and should be seen as attempts to self-medicate. If you seek out drugs or alcohol, practice the self-care suggestions below or seek appropriate help if available.

Below are things you can do to help yourself and others:

· Recognize your feelings. These events have had a deep impact on you and affected your community in many ways. Accept that your emotions may fluctuate for a period. Grieving takes time and cannot be rushed.

· Deal with your anger in a non-destructive way. Don’t take it out on others or yourself.

· Reach out to others. Everyone needs reassurance and kindness during these times.

· Remember to do things that feel good to you. Try to eat and sleep regularly. Try not to give in to guilt. We all have a right to experience life to the fullest extent possible.

We realize that many Kenyans are reluctant to seek help, especially when it addresses psychological needs and specifically when it is associated with the word ‘mental health,’ because this implies being ‘crazy.’ But if help is not sought out and psychological needs not addressed, emotions are stored up and like a covered cooking pot, it is only a matter of time before the pressure explodes and spews out hot, dangerous steam.

As you try to resume your daily routines, remember, if you are experiencing the symptoms suggested above, find the courage to seek help. Even secondhand exposure to violence, such as through the media or by living with someone who experienced trauma, can be traumatic. You can find help from a teacher, counselor, pastor, priest, doctor, a nurse, family member or a friend.

Paul Orien and Alice Tindi are clinicians at the Center for Victims of Torture and are from Kenya. The Center for Victims of Torture is a nonprofit whose mission is to heal the wounds of torture on individuals, their families and their communities and to stop torture worldwide.

A talking circle for sharing and mutual support will be held from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, February 17 at St. Alphonsus Church, 7025 Halifax Avenue North in Brooklyn Center.

Breakthrough in talks as both sides climb down

By Fred Oluoch

Former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan appears to be on the brink of clinching a peace deal for Kenya.Getting President Mwai Kibaki to climb down from the position that the election dispute could only be resolved in a court of law was no easy task.

Neither was it going to be easy to persuade Raila Odinga to climb down from the position that the election was stolen and that the only option was for Kibaki to either step down or agree to a re-run of the presidential election.

It is noteworthy that even as a breakthrough was being announced, Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka was in the United States lobbying Congress to press Raila to seek redress in court.

Indeed, throughout last week, temperatures remained high at the Serena Hotel where the negotiations are taking place, with Kibaki’s team making it clear that a power-sharing deal was out of the question.

The standard refrain of hawkish elements on their side of the divide, including Finance Minister Amos Kimunya, was that they were not prepared to share power with “losers.”

In the midst of it all, one other factor was causing positions to harden even further on Kibaki’s side: As international pressure mounted on him, with one diplomat after the other issuing threats to members of his administration, his key players began taking exception to what they saw as bullying by foreigners.

Clearly, getting the parties to agree to discuss power-sharing was not going to be easy for Annan’s team.

Still, agreeing to discuss how to share power was the easy part. As long as the stakes for the hardliners on both side of the divide remain high, an agreement on a power-sharing deal may take much longer to achieve.

One on side, there is a group that fears that the mediation process may expose their culpability in the sins that may have been committed at the Electoral Commission of Kenya during the tallying of the presidential votes.

On the other are hardliners who fear revenge for the killings — especially in the Rift Valley. In the middle of the post-election violence, criminal elements have taken advantage, burnt people’s houses and displaced hundreds of thousands of members of President Mwai Kibaki’s community.

Their fear is that if Kibaki is allowed to entrench himself in power, they may face retribution.

Which is why one of the most important achievements by the Annan team was to get the negotiating parties to agree to a truth and reconciliation commission.

Implemented well, truth and reconciliation commissions have proved to be the best medicine for dealing with the fear of retribution for historical injustices.

What options will be on the table as the teams reassemble for negotiations? First is an interim coalition government that will last for a few years to give space for national healing, agreed constitutional reforms and reconstitution of the Electoral Commission.

Second, a grand coalition of all the major parties in parliament.

Third, where Odinga and Kibaki share executive powers — a compromise between what was stipulated in the Bomas Draft constitution and the Kilifi Draft during the constitutional reform debate of 2005.

Success will, however, depend on whether the principals manage to dissuade their agents from engaging in strident rhetoric.

The decision by the government to lift the ban on public rallies, which was announced a day before the “breakthrough” was a good starting point — as it signalled that the government was keen to implement decisions agreed on and signed off on by both parties at the Annan mediation process.

If parliament is recalled, and as long as the mood of hope is maintained, the country may be on the path of reconciliation.

Africa’s most decorated diplomat, Annan has handled more serious conflicts, where the stakes were even higher than in Kenya.

Before becoming secretary-general of the UN, in 1990, it was Annan who facilitated the repatriation of international staff and citizens of Western countries from Iraq after it invaded Kuwait. Subsequently, he led initial negotiations with Baghdad on the sale of oil to fund humanitarian relief.

As secretary-general, Annan used his good offices in several delicate political situations, including an attempt in 1998 to gain Iraq’s compliance with Security Council resolutions, as well as a mission that year to promote the transition to civilian rule in Nigeria.

In 1999, he helped to resolve the stalemate between Libya and the Security Council, and to forge an international response to violence in East Timor.

He has worked to encourage Israelis and Palestinians to resolve their differences through negotiations based on Security Council resolutions and the principle of “land for peace.”

It is Annan’s stature as former secretary general of the United Nations that has made it possible for the man to mobilise international opinion and resolve to return Kenya to normalcy.

Signs that the Kenyan dispute was likely to assume international dimension because of the country’s strategic importance in Africa came early in the dispute when the European Union made it clear that it was not satisfied with the way the poll tallying was done.

The EU was the first to threaten to impose sanctions on Kenya in case nothing was done to rectify the situation. Now Britain, the US and Canada are talking the same language, threatening to ban any individual who might have participated in rigging or violence from travelling to their countries.

Last week, the US issued banning letters to 10 politicians and business personalities whom it considers to have participated in either promoting violence or subverting the democratic process. The focus now is on individuals taking part in the mediation who may be deemed to have derailed the talks.

It is now apparent that the international community is reading from the same script and fears that the Kenyan crisis could overshadow or divert attention from complex cases like Darfur and Chad.

And, with the Kenyan crisis now being discussed at the UN Security Council, the matter has quickly taken on a global dimension.

In a statement, the Council said the only solution to the crisis was dialogue, negotiation and compromise, and strongly urged Kenya’s political leaders to foster reconciliation.

It reaffirmed its support for the African Union and the Panel of Eminent African Personalities led by Mr Annan in their efforts to stem the violence and requested Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to report on how the United Nations could further support the mediation efforts in Kenya and mitigate the impact of the crisis on the wider region.

Meanwhile, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes arrived in Kenya on Friday. A fact-finding mission deployed by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour arrived in in the country last week.

The team will conduct research for an initial period of three weeks, as it works to assess allegations of recent grave human-rights violations in the country.

Kenya’s election crisis exposes Africa’s flawed ‘democracy’

By Leon Louw


"Power is obtained by ballot instead of bullet only if there are sufficient constraints on what those with power can do to those without it to moderate the consequences of being out of power."


Few analyzes of Kenya's post-election crisis have addressed the fundamental issue of how African democracy can be converted into a peaceful means of transferring power from minorities-in-power to majorities out-of-power. Virtually every ‘solution' boils down to the unhelpful shibboleth that there would be peace if people were peaceful. The problem, as I see it, is a lack of appreciation for the fact that democracy not so much "fails" in Africa but that it hasn't really been tried.


A crude conception of what characterizes ‘Western' democracy has been exported by the West and imported by putative Third World ‘democracies'. In Africa, ‘democracy' is presumed to entail the crude counting of heads, the purpose of which is to find out who has the most support, and then to let them govern as they wish, rather than a sophisticated set of institutions and mechanisms aimed at ensuring good governance.


My contribution to the South African constitutional process, and that of a few other countries where I've been involved, has been to discourage obsession with the concept of democracy as being a process to establish winners and losers, and to focus instead on protecting losers sufficiently for them to surrender power peacefully.


There are 25 or so recognized ‘checks and balances' in the constitutions of most Western democracies, almost none of which have been incorporated in Third World constitutions, including Kenya. One of the most important is the Rule of Law, which has become a largely empty cliché.


The components of the Rule of Law, as opposed to the ‘rule of man', which are of greatest importance are:


Laws must be objective, not discretionary - so that rulers cannot engage in patronage, nepotism and favouritism, and people's rights are a function of law, not the whim of politicians and officials granting licenses, protection, subsidies and government contracts.


Corruption, for instance, is not a manifestation of poor governance, or not ‘clamping down' on corruption and having a ‘clean' administration, but of the formal ability of officialdom and politicians to grant or withhold benefits.


There must be a separation of powers - so that only the legislature legislates (makes laws), the executive executes (implements laws), and the judiciary adjudicates (settles disputes, and imposes sentences and penalties). There is virtually no separation of powers in the Third World, yet it is so taken for granted in the First World as to be virtually automatic.


In Kenya, for instance, countless substantive laws are made by executive decree, and the executive has many tribunals and quasi-courts settling disputes and imposing penalties. These should be functions of a truly independent judiciary working strictly in accordance with the jurisprudential principles of ‘due process'.


There's much more to the Rule of Law, but these two components alone, if understood and implemented in emerging democracies, would go a long way to reducing the intensity of the battle for power, because they reduce the negative implications of losing. What matters in mature democracies is the extent to which those who govern can victimize the governed.


Another well-known constraint on those who govern is a Bill of Rights, which is regarded as ‘democratic', yet its sole purpose is to limit what victorious majorities may do to vanquished minorities. Most Third World countries have Bills of Rights, but they miss the point. Unlike First World Bills of Rights, they are characterized the essential purpose of a Bill of Rights. Instead of specifying what's not voteable, what the majority may not do, they are wish-lists of what governments supposedly must, but cannot do, especially in poor countries, such as provide generous incomes, security, housing, education and health care. What paltry attempts most governments make at delivering on such wish-lists invariably entails making things worse because they claim a constitutional obligation to intensify abuse of elective losers by redistributing more of their wealth to the government's friends, relatives and supporters.


What we should all do at this time of crisis and reflection in Kenya is contribute to a better understanding of why there's conflict - because the price of being out of power is higher than the price of resistance - and how to prevent it henceforth - which is to have unambiguous institutions protecting the governed from those who govern.