Africa
Development, Vol. XXXVI, No.1, 2011, pp. 13–28
©
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2011
(ISSN 0850-3907)
The Role of
Economic Aspiration in Elections in Kenya
Okello Oculi*
Abstract
The
violence that erupted, following the 30 December 2007 civic, parliamentary and
presidential elections in Kenya is analysed as part of various historical
continua anchored on social engineering by colonial officials who sought to
control social change after the Mau Mau conflict. Presidents Jomo Kenyatta and
Daniel arap Moi built on this colonial strategy for managing challenges by
socialist and pro-democracy forces to their hold on power. Moi’s regime had to
combat challenges to his electoral fortunes from 1988 onwards and left behind a
technology that was a useful investment for 2007/2008 opposition groups.
Both forms
of social engineering gave prominence to tribalism as an organising tool. The
power behind the success of these exercises was economic anxieties rooted in
land, widespread unemployment and elite struggles for control of political
influence. This perspective allows us to propose that stability in Kenya in the
post-conflict period requires a bold counter-social engineering that breaks
down efforts to continue the use of tribalism to prevent re-distribution of
large landed estates in several parts of the country, particularly Coast and
Central Provinces.
Résumé
Les
violences qui ont éclaté à la suite des élections municipales, législatives et
présidentielles qui ont eu lieu le 30 décembre 2007 au Kenya sont analysées
dans le cadre de divers continuums historiques fondés sur l’ingénierie sociale
de responsables coloniaux qui cherchaient à contrôler le changement social
après le conflit mau-mau. Les Présidents Jomo Kenyatta et Daniel Arap Moi se
sont inspirés de cette stratégie coloniale pour gérer les défis posés à leur
maintien au pouvoir par les forces socialistes et prodémocratiques,
respectivement. Le régime de Moi devait relever les défis à ses succès
électoraux depuis 1988 et a délaissé une technologie que les groupes
d’opposition pour 2007/2008 considéraient comme un investissement utile.
* Africa Vision 525 Initiative, Abuja,
Nigeria.
Email: okellooculi@yahoo.com;
afvision525@yahoo.com
14
Ces deux
formes d’ingénierie sociale ont mis en évidence le tribalisme en tant qu’outil
d’organisation. La réussite de ces exercices était sous-tendue par les anxiétés
économiques ancrées dans les problèmes fonciers, le chômage largement répandu
et les luttes de l’élite pour le contrôle de l’influence politique. Cette
perspective nous permet de dire que la stabilité au Kenya dans la période
d’après-conflit requiert une contre-ingénierie sociale osée qui anéantit les
tentatives de continuer à utiliser le tribalisme pour empêcher la
redistribution de vastes domaines fonciers dans plusieurs régions du pays, en
particulier dans les Provinces de la Côte et Centrale.
Introduction
The depth of the crisis that became
linked to the 2007 general elections in Kenya, particularly the presidential
component of it, as well as the enormous demands the crisis made on Africa’s
diplomatic resources, call for special attention. Such a focus may point to new
elements that should capture our attention and give further depth to the views
of those who insist that elections are not to be seen solely as a series of
events, but as an integrative aspect of wider socio-economic and political
dynamics in a society.
The suddenness, intensity and scale of the violence
that swept Kenya, following nationally televised obstruction, by the
opposition, of moves by the Electoral Commission of Kenya to declare
manipulated results of the December 2007 presidential elections, was given more
coverage and visibility by the international media than similar violence in 1988,
1992 and in the runup to the 2002 elections when President Daniel arap Moi was
in power.
The depth and scale of the conflict itself brought
into the open similarities between the roots of the atavistic violence that had
been witnessed in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where ‘Creole’ (or descendants of
African returnees from the Caribbean, South America and North America) had
monopolised political, administrative and economic power and excluded
‘up-country’ ethnic groups. The accompanying social relations of contempt for,
and ‘structural violence’ against, the majority ‘up-country’ ethnic groups, had
denied them a sense of common citizenship and generated latent wishes for
violence as a form of income and a tool for seizing power from the Creole
elites (Adebajo 2002). The Kenyan events raise the issue of similar relations
of conflict being built over time by colonial and post-colonial rulers, and
instructs that strategies for building democracy in Africa must include frank
exposition of structures of conflict that underlie superstructural processes
such as electoral competition for power. Accordingly, an attempt to study the
post-election violence that hit Kenya with enormous volcanic eruptions and
‘after-shocks’ must be anchored on a historical narrative.
15
This article adopts a historical perspective, with
focus on the impact of economic aspirations – rooted primarily in land
ownership – and on orientations to elections as forms of social action in
Kenya’s polity. It draws attention to the need to go beyond the often
propagandistic call for ‘free and fair elections’ in the challenge of nation
building, and the need to build communal political systems in Africa.
Historical Legacy of Kenya’s 2007 Elections
Kenya gained political independence
in 1963 and, with it, inherited a conflictanchored tradition of the intensive
use of the colonial state for ensuring the political, social and economic
welfare and prosperity of a dominant social group (the so-called European/White
Settlers) that shared the same racial and/ or kinship identity with the
colonial rulers in Britain. This dominance over Kenya was achieved, sustained,
ensured and protected by the state for over six decades, at the expense of the
predominantly black population, with the most severe disadvantages afflicting
those ethnic groups that had inhabited the most fertile agricultural lands
(Okello 1976). The group that benefitted most from the colonial state had
enjoyed a monopoly of direct access to officials of the colonial state who,
though not directly answerable to them, were vulnerable to effective influences
through their allies in the British parliament, British companies with
interests in East Africa and high society social clubs. Two key resources that
the state made available to the ‘white settlers’, who became economically
productive in Kenya, were land and labour. Both land and labour were
appropriated from indigenous communities through horrendous and permanent use
of varieties of state and private violence, force and taxation (Clayton 2006).
Over six decades, the ‘white settler’ group was increasingly recruited as
functionaries of the state and acquired considerable experience in economic and
political management, legislation and electoral politics.
To avoid the emergence of a rich, black African economic
class that would become increasingly fired by economic nationalism (that would
be translated into the kind of struggle for independence that the American
colonies had unleashed against colonial control), an Asiatic racial group,
drawn mainly from the Indian subcontinent, was imported into Kenya and became
officially tolerated as a commercial class located one notch below British
firms that controlled banking, agricultural estates and insurance, provided
transport and communications services, and handled the retail trade in
agricultural produce and the import sector. Under colonial governance, this
intermediary racial group (whose citizenship was in a state of suspension) saw
its interests as tied to those of the ruling racial group, while seeking to
increase its numbers by drawing in more family members from India/Pakistan
through immigration, and protecting its share of economic exploitation of the
African population.
16
This political opportunism, in
post-colonial Kenya, continues to be translated into behind-the-scenes funding
of ruling-party candidates, with very limited open participation in seeking
elective positions.
Independent Kenya also inherited the twin political
traits of (1) a narrowly ethno-racially defined political class that, (2) ‘completely
consolidated its hold on state policy apparatus and used the same for advancing
economic and political interests’ (Okello and Owino 85:2006). The colonial
racial political class also left a legacy of a lack of an inclusive orientation
which, under challenge by elites from oppressed and exploited groups, had to be
met with violent struggles to wrestle away that power ‘so as to acquire
development resources’. As noted by some analysts, in post-colonial Kenya, ‘the
notion of “it’s our turn to eat” has thereby become the organising principle of
national politics’ (Kayinga 389:2006). It grew into a new variant of a
violence-rooted and violence-generating political culture.
The Kenyatta and arap Moi Legacies (1963-2002)
President Jomo Kenyatta ruled Kenya
from 1962 until his death in 1978. Daniel arap Moi, his political opponent
turned vice-president from 1966, took over and ruled for 24 years, until 2002.
In 1967, Kenyatta was reported in the
Sunday Times Magazine (London) to have
stated that his wish was to
create an aristocracy in Kenya
because that social class had ensured political stability for Britain. Colin
Leys (1975) noted that soon after assuming power, Kenyatta began to
systematically ignore and whittle down the role of the Kenya African National
Union (KANU), the mass-based political party that brought him to power. Key
policy-making and review structures of KANU (including the national conference
of delegates representing local party branches), were allowed to fall into
political irrelevance and wither away, while periodic elections within party
branches and at the national centre also ceased. Kenyatta’s government,
however, conducted elections to parliament every five years, with selective
electoral defeats of cabinet ministers and members of parliament who were seen
as either short on loyalty or worryingly charismatic and effective mobilisers
of popular support. Potential challengers for succession to the presidency
became most vulnerable to being violently terminated. Following a rift over
public policies, the first vice-president, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and cabinet
minister Achieng Oneko, were detained, while their opposition party, the Kenya
Peoples Union (KPU), was banned just before the elections of 1967. The
opposition’s call for the redistribution of land taken back from white
settlers, to the hundreds of thousands of landless veterans of the Mau Mau
armed struggle, had generated panic in Kenyatta’s governing circle.
17
The emerging political authoritarianism, itself a continuation
of colonial dictatorship, subsequently became a useful tool for achieving the
twin goals of using state power to ensure disproportional accumulation of
economic resources in the hands of a Kikuyu, Embu and Meru elite, and of
suppressing pressures to end poverty by redistributing land previously
controlled by white settlers and foreign-owned multinational corporations.
Kenyatta openly called on landless people who had fought in the anti-colonial
Mau Mau war to ‘suffer without bitterness’. Just as the colonial state had used
the administrative apparatus to ensure the brutalised silence of the
disadvantaged classes, Kenyatta also relied on provincial and district
administrators, directly appointed by him and expected to be loyal to him, to
stamp out protests and agitation in their areas of administration. The
termination of the nefarious role of these officials in rigging elections at
constituency level against opponents and critics of governments (under
Kenyatta, Moi and Mwai Kibaki), became a key demand in the contentious
constitution-reform referendum of 2005.
Under the Moi regime, the post-colonial state in
Kenya administered stateenhanced poverty characterised by lack of access to
land for the landless, massive flight of the landless from rural poverty to the
unemployment-based informal economic sector congregated in rapidly expanding
urban slums, and the use of state resources to empower the post-independence
Kalenjin elite. This anti-poor people stance was in line with Kenyatta’s use of
state funds (loaned by the British government as part of the negotiated
independence package) to purchase land from white farmers and distribute it to
top civil servants and members of parliament under the so-called ‘low-density’
(or large estates) scheme.
In the run-up to independence, the British colonial
government had also adopted a strategy of planting inter-ethnic conflict in the
Rift Valley, Western and Coast Provinces through a ‘re-settlement scheme’ in
which landless Kikuyu, Kissii and other ethnic groups were given loans to buy
farms (either as individuals or as cooperative groups), from white settlers in
these provinces. The Kalenjin, Luhya and Taita groups, who regard the land as
their ancestral heritage, saw the situation as a new form of internal land colonisation
by ‘Black Settlers’.
On assuming power, President arap Moi openly declared
that his ideology was that of ‘nyayo’
(or faithfully following the footsteps of Kenyatta). This translated into
control of state power being taken away from the Kikuyu and their ethnic
allies, the Embu and Meru, and putting it in the hands of Moi’s Kalenjin ethnic
kith and kin and their allies in pre-independence politics. Kenyatta had
concentrated power in the hands of his Kikuyu ethnic elites. As an example,
while in 1976 Kenyatta ruled with 50 per cent of provincial administrators
drawn from the Kikuyu ethnic group (with none drawn from the Luhya and Kamba),
at the peak of Moi’s rule in 2000, the Kikuyu held only
18
13 per cent of such positions (with
the Luhya and smaller ethnic allies of the Kalenjin holding 26 per cent).
Kayinga (2006:354) has proposed that because (according to the 1989 population
census) the top five ethnic groups in Kenya are numerically close (Kikuyu 21 %;
Luhya 14 %; Luo 12 %; Kamba 11 % and Kisii 6 %), there is a sense of insecurity
in politicians seeking power that encourages an intensive appeal to ethnic
loyalty both within the group that controls power and in those seeking access
to state power. The anxiety may be heightened by the fact that out of a
population of 42 ethnic groups, 32 of them constitute a mere 14 per cent of the
total population, while the top five ethnic groups constitute 70 per cent.
Making an electoral alliance solely with the 32 ethnic minorities, therefore,
has little strategic merit.
None of the big five groups would be able to win
political power by making broad, issue-based ideological appeals to the smaller
ethnic groups. Primary focus tends to be on ensuring solid capture of home
ethnic votes and negotiating deals with the other four rival ethnic groups.
Such negotiations would revolve around securing patronage benefits for members
of one’s ethnic base, thereby giving high value to the posts of cabinet
ministers, junior ministers, chairmen of boards of public corporations and
managing directors of these institutions. In 1991, President Moi could assert
the Kalenjin’s hold on power by ensuring that they held a total of 70 top
positions in public corporations, while the Kikuyu held 47, the Luo 37, the
Luhya 30, and the Kamba 24. The 34 minority ethnic groups held a mere 29 posts
(Kayinga 2006:391). Building a trans-ethnic, collectivist and social
justice-based political culture therefore remains a major challenge.
The Challenge of Corruption
Anyang Nyong’o, and others have accused
President Moi of giving access to economic resources held within public
institutions, including parastatals, to the Kalenjin ethnic group and their
allies, but fatally failing to follow Kenyatta’s dictum that beneficiaries must
ensure economic productivity within the framework of state control of
significant shares of the economy (Sessional Paper Number 10, 1965).
Institutions whose top positions were targets of ethnopolitical patronage, were
recklessly looted and paralysed as economic production units, thereby forcing
others into corruption and throwing many out of employment. This explosion of
‘personalisation’ of public institutions also led to the invasion of land
allocated to public institutions. The Ndungu Report, for example, showed that
land owned by the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute was given out to 229
individuals; land belonging to the Kenya Pipeline Company ‘allocated’ to 31
persons; land owned by Kenya Industrial Estates allocated to 572 individuals;
while land along which a ‘by-pass’ road around central Nairobi was to be built,
was allocated to 106 persons. The economic
19
principle of ‘primitive accumulation’
by which ‘white settlers’ on arriving in Kenya had grabbed vast tracts of land
at rates as low as 10 British pence an acre, was thus replayed and extended to
rob and ruin public institutions in post-colonial Kenya (Ndungu Report
2006:24-41). With the records showing which officials allocated the land, it
was easy for the general public to link this land grabbing and accumulation to
ethnic patronage networks. It therefore, aroused intense bitterness among
groups excluded from being beneficiaries; moreso since they lacked avenues for
obtaining redress. In the face of such economic circumstances, the value put on
achieving electoral victory for both challengers and incumbents escalated
astronomically.
Kenyatta and Moi had partially avoided the imperative
of redistributing land to the landless in the core Kikuyu Central Province.
This was either land seized from Mau Mau fighters as the conflict lasted or
landed properties allocated to those considered loyal to the colonial
government. Both presidents, in the main, adopted the terminal post-Mau Mau
colonial policy of settling the landless, mainly Kikuyu, on land bought from
white settlers in Masai, Luhya and Kalenjin areas in the Western and the Rift
Valley Provinces. In Kiambu District, Kenyatta’s home-base, only 234 persons
benefited from the ‘settlement scheme’ that provided land for purchase by the
landless, thereby ensuring that most large estates remained intact. Less
politicallyfavoured Kikuyu districts (according to Kenyatta’s plan for creating
a landed Kikuyu aristocracy) experienced more land reallocation – Nyeri
District, the epicentre of the Mau Mau armed struggle, got 25,028 reallocations
while Thika and Muranga had 3,043 and 2,139 respectively. In contrast, while
46,814 beneficiaries got land in the Rift Valley Province, there were 69,697
beneficiaries in Coast Province and a total of 30,444 in Central Province.
This practice deepened on-going bitterness as
‘primary’ displaced owners expected to enjoy the premier option in recovering
ownership. Moi exploited this emergent condition of ‘tertiary structural
violence’ (the primary one having been the armed robbery of land by white
settlers and the state during colonial conquest), by inciting ethnic violence
against the predominantly Kikuyu, Kissii and other beneficiaries of these
“Settlement Schemes” (Okello 2007).
The Ndungu Report gives the number of beneficiaries
from these schemes between 1962 and 2002. The Justice Akiwumi Commission of
Inquiry noted the following comment by a contented British colonial official on
the conflictgenerating policy of land settlement that colonial officials had
introduced in the run-up to Kenya’s independence:
Inter-tribal tensions
increased markedly as the year wore on. The Kalenjin make no secret of the fact
that they are stock-piling native arms against the inevitable day probably
after independence, when they will have to fight the 20
Kikuyu and perhaps the Luo
for control of their own areas, including the upper and middle Rift. The tribal
antipathies are now so great on some farms that the Kalenjin members of the
Agricultural Workers Union would refuse to take part in a union strike alongside
Kikuyu members and would automatically take the opposite line in any
controversy (Akiwumi 1999:116).
Table 1: Settlement Schemes at Root
of
Post-2007 Election Violence
Province
|
District
|
Time Period
|
No. of
Beneficiaries
|
Western
|
Mt. Elgon
|
2000
|
3,022
|
Lugari
|
1963-2002
|
4,142
|
|
Rift Valley
|
Uasin Gishu
|
1963-1998
|
7,891
|
Trans-Nzoia
|
1968-1998
|
11,738
|
|
Nandi
|
1962-1982
|
1,085
|
|
Nakuru
|
1967-2001
|
13,509
|
|
Laikipia
|
1967-1993
|
5,890
|
|
Bomet/Kericho
|
1962-1967
|
3,120
|
|
Boringo/Koibatek
|
1964-1996
|
3,581
|
|
Nyanza
|
South Nyamira
|
1962-1967
|
1,477
|
Kisumu
|
1964-2002
|
5,164
|
|
Coast
|
Kilifi
|
1977-2000
|
6,872
|
Kwale
|
1962-1995
|
11,699
|
|
Lamu
|
1978-1996
|
5,694
|
|
Tana River
|
1996
|
988
|
|
Malindi
|
1982-1999
|
10,905
|
|
Mombasa
|
1999-2001
|
24,711
|
|
Taita Tavera
|
1982-2000
|
8,828
|
|
Central
|
Kiambu
|
1964-2001
|
234
|
Muranga
|
1967 & 1971
|
2,139
|
|
Thika
|
1969-2000
|
3,043
|
|
Nyandarua
|
1963-1993
|
25,028
|
|
Nyeri
|
1962-1999
|
4,851
|
|
Eastern
|
Machakos
|
1963-1971
|
4,989
|
Makueni
|
1971-1999
|
39,754
|
|
Meru
|
1966-1982
|
3,253
|
Source: Republic of Kenya, Report of the Commission of
Inquiry into the Illegal/Irregular
Allocation of Public Land, Annexes Vol. 1, Government
Printer, Nairobi, pp. 855-875
21
It was, therefore, not surprising
that bitterness about the prospect of President Mwai Kibaki staying in power
(and thereby, the assumed continuing protection of the Kikuyu’s control of
state resources and their use as tools for acquiring economic resources), was
likely to provoke widespread violence in the provinces where ‘tertiary structural
violence’ had been entrenched.
President Moi and Privatisation
Okello and Owino (2006:92) have
argued that specific effects of privatisation as a key component of the
Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), introduced as early as 1980, increased poverty
in Kenya. Trade liberalisation as a key component of SAP brought enormous
increases in the volume of cheaper food items imported into Kenya’s markets.
This crippled market access for local producers and middlemen, thereby
deepening losses of income. Maize imports, for example, jumped from 12,000 to
650,000 tonnes in 1994 while rice imports rose from 37,000 to 93,000 tonnes.
The effect of loss of internal and regional markets
combined with ‘retrenchments’ of workers from government jobs (the latter as a
stipulation by SAP), to reduce wage employment from a high 90 per cent in 1972
to a mere 37 per cent in 1996.
Correspondingly, the informal sector of the economy increased from employing
only 10 per cent of the working population in 1972 to employing 70 per cent in
1996 of those earning incomes. Put side by side with the SAP stipulation that
Kenya’s government should return to the colonial government’s strategy of
avoiding the responsibility of providing social services (health and education)
to the mass of the population and pushing it to local communities and families,
their combined effect intensified the rate of impoverishment of the poor in
urban and rural sectors. This demand on the Kenyan state was bound to arouse an
intensifying sense of loss of legitimacy along with hostility to whoever was in
control of state power; and moreso against the ethnic group whose elites were
perceived to be benefiting from power and percolating it down the ethnic
patronage chain. These hostile energies would be fed into electoral behavior.
Crisis in Education and Election Violence 2007
Kenya’s education sector was a victim
of a colonial legacy of unequal access by ethnic groups and growing
impoverishment of the disadvantaged. One indicator was the disparity in the percentage
of children who completed primary school education. Between 1999 and 2004,
while Central Province (predominantly Kikuyu) achieved an average of 80 per
cent completion rate, North Eastern Province (mainly home to sparsely populated
Turkana and Somali minority groups) achieved only 27 per cent; Nyanza Province
came second with 75 per cent, Western Province 66 per cent, Rift Valley 69 per
22
cent, and Eastern Province 67 per
cent, respectively. Higher up the ladder, Kenya’s universities could admit only
5 per cent of graduates of secondary schools in 1999, with a small increase to
6 per cent in 2003 (Wainana 2006:173). In the 1999/2000 academic year, a total
of 30,243 students achieved the qualifying grade for entering university. Less
than 6,000 got admission. The others most probably flowed into the turbulent
and often poverty-ridden world of the 70 per cent who found employment in the
informal sector.
The combination of those who failed to complete
primary school and those who failed to enter universities would be expected to
constitute a pool of potentially frustrated, disoriented and angry young
persons. They would be expected to be available for recruitment for forms of
electoral politics that blame an ethnic group’s perceived misfortunes, deprivations
and socioeconomic failures on assumed ethnic enemies (Adebajo:2002). To this
must be added the historical reality that ‘some areas of the country such as
NorthEastern, and parts of Nyanza, Western, Coast and Eastern Provinces are
poorer and have much lower indicators of life expectancy, health facilities,
safe water, sanitation, communication and transportation’ (Okello and Owino:
2005). From 1966 when Oginga Odinga and thirty members of parliament formed the
Kenya People’s Union (KPU) to protest about Kenyatta’s policies and to defeat
the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) in the impending 1967 general
elections, this geography of poverty became the primary focus of inter-ethnic
struggles for power. This politicized ethnicisation of poverty would lead to
highly visible political violence.
The Luo ethnic
group was on the receiving end of inter-elite politicallymotivated violence. In
1969, Tom Mboya, a charismatic political campaigner and past trade union
leader, was assassinated in broad daylight on a Nairobi street at peak shopping
time. His ethnic Luo people saw his death as the culmination of a Kikuyu plot
to block his ambition to succeed the ailing Kenyatta. In 1986, Kenya’s Foreign
Minister, Robert Ouko, another charismatic Luo politician, was also
assassinated. His murder was also seen as a plan to end his prospects of
succeeding President Moi who had survived a 1982 military coup and whose
leadership was associated with Raila Odinga, also a Luo.
The political rift between the Luo and the Kalenjin
is partly traceable to political lobbying by white settler politicians led by
Michael Blundel and Bruce Mackenzie, who applied the familiar device, used in
all de-colonising countries, of arousing fears in minority groups in Kenya
about impending domination by larger ethnic groups after colonial rule had
ended. The Kalenjin leader, Daniel arap Moi, was a prime target for efforts to
stop the nationalist
23
momentum of alliance between Luo and
Kikuyu politicians. This alliance was later torn apart when Kenyatta was
persuaded to draw in the leadership of ethnic minorities if he was to avoid
electoral defeat of his policy of building a local aristocracy at the expense
of the landless and the unemployed. The political class around Kenyatta turned
to borrowing a social technology that Mau Mau fighters had used with enormous
effect, namely, building solidarity among Kikuyu fighters by administering
oaths of secrecy and loyalty to hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu. Politicians
competed over numbers of truckloads of people from their constituencies brought
to oath-taking rituals. It was a strategy which sought to wield the power of
ethnic conflict over that of class conflict. The Luo were defined as enemies
who were out to take power away from the House of Mumbi (the Kikuyu). The
Kikuyu must unite to fight them. The fact that the Luo do not have circumcision
as rite of passage into adulthood was exploited as a factor that disqualified
their men from holding leadership over “true men”. This new political culture of
ethnic warfare would finally explode on a much wider scale after the 30
December 2007 elections.
The Mwai Kibaki – Raila Odinga Deal
It could be argued that Mwai Kibaki
and Raila Odinga both came into Kenya’s politics with debts to collect.
Although Kibaki was the first student to earn a First Class Bachelor’s degree
in Economics and Political Science at the prestigious Makerere University
College (at the time a College of London University), he had been humiliated by
the ‘Kiambu’ political group around Kenyatta by being appointed a junior
minister to Tom Mboya, a secondary school graduate. This slap on Kibaki’s face
was said to be due to his coming from Nyeri District, home of the leader of the
Mau Mau revolution, Dedan Kimathi. It was noted by British colonial officials
that the largely youthful leaders who had launched the Mau Mau revolution had
reacted with much scorn when Kenyatta returned from England and proposed an
anti-colonial strategy based on holding tea-party negotiations with colonial
officials in Kenya, as opposed to their preference for armed struggle
(Nottingham 2007). It is noteworthy that Nyeri was the only town whose
municipal authorities declined to name their central street after Kenyatta, but
instead, gave that honour to their ‘son of the soil’, Dedan Kimathi. In 2007,
Kibaki also surprised Kenyans by unveiling a sculpture of a combative Dedan
Kimathi in the centre of downtown Nairobi. During the dedication ceremony,
Kibaki told the crowd that his own blood brother had died fighting in the Mau
Mau revolution. Perhaps Kibaki is driven by a secret ambition to use his
presidency to reverse Kenyatta’s vision of building a Kiambu-based aristocracy
in
24
Kenya. That would have driven him
towards seeking a collision-prone but constitutionally legitimate two-term
tenure.
Raila Odinga is the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga,
the Luo traderpolitician who had fallen from being the leader of the
nationalist struggle to serving term in detention and getting banned from
electoral politics by Kenyatta. The latter was the direct beneficiary of
Odinga’s noble struggle – when the outgoing British Governor invited Odinga to
become Kenya’s first post-colonial Prime Minister, he had insisted that
Kenyatta must be freed from prison to lead Kenya into Uhuru or independence. The politically charged deaths of Tom Mboya
and Robert Ouko (both younger than Oginga Odinga) had given birth to a widely
broadcast dictum that ‘a Luo will never be president of Kenya’. Raila had come
into politics with that ‘glass ceiling’ to crack. In 2002, he was confronted
with the reality of contesting against Moi’s chosen successor, Uhuru Kenyatta,
while all non-Kikuyu politicians chose to vote for Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu who
had turned against his political alliance with Moi. Not supporting Kibaki would
have run the risk of pushing Kikuyu voters into alliance with Moi’s Kalenjin
votes. This political barrier was crossed at the price of getting Kibaki to
promise to hold office for only one five-year term, while cabinet posts and
other patronage-based public office would be equitably shared out among the
various ethnic groups that would vote for him. Kayinga reports what would
become a key theme in Raila Odinga’s campaign in the run-up to the 2007
elections:
The government that was formed after the
election (2002) did not reflect this understanding to the letter. The
president’s own ethnic party plus his own political party got some of the most
key ministries both in the Cabinet and in the civil services. Appointments of
permanent secretaries appeared to favour the Kikuyu and the Meru than any other
group. Out of 25 permanent secretaries, 11 were from the Kikuyu and Meru ethnic
groups…..Other large ethnic groups had about 2 each (Kayinga 2006:393).
Kibaki, a man who had been in
government since 1962, was criticised for being too deeply rooted in the
politics of ethnic dominance to embrace effective reform towards equity
politics. Raila, on his part, had younger politicians biting at his heels,
their eyes fixed on overtaking him in the race to succeed Kibaki. More worrying
for his political allies was the prospect of Kikuyu, Embu and Meru elites (who
had under Moi’s regime lost power to the Kalenjin alliance), rebuilding their
economic base and consolidating their ‘ethno-mafia’ politics. The election
campaign rhetoric of the Odinga-led Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) contained
bitter accusations of pre-election plots to sell majority shares of key public
enterprises (like Safaricom, a mobile telecoms provider with eastern African
outreach) to favoured ethnic elites. Such a
25
consolidation of Kikuyu economic
power was likened by ODM campaign rhetoric to the situation in post-apartheid
South Africa in which black Africans won political power in 1994 but the
economic power remained in the hands of the minority whites. A sense of panic
had been built into the election campaign. The power of this panic was
reflected in comments in a document used for the campaign in the
anti-government constitution referendum thus:
There is an overwhelming
feeling among the non-GEMA (Gikuyu, Embu and Meru Association) communities that
the Kikuyu are selfish bigots dedicated to a tribal hegemony and will never
share the spoils of government with other communities (Kabukuru 2008:21).
This sense of panic was also fanned
by a record of high performance by Kibaki from 2002 to 2007. The media reported
improvements in access to funds for small-scale businesses and the
rehabilitation of institutions that allowed this economic group to increase
their incomes (PNU 2007). This was particularly evident in the dairy sector,
and tea and coffee production. The return to ‘free’ primary school education
nationwide, a policy first implemented by Kenyatta’s government, had earned
Kibaki considerable support. Another source of growing legitimacy was Kibaki’s
retreat from the brutal authoritarian culture of the Moi era. Mazrui
(2008:16-17) wrote as follows:
Although inter-party
relations in Kenya subsequently deteriorated, the Kibaki regime created a more
open society. The Press became much freer, both printed and electronic, in
spite of periodic harassment by the police. Preventive detention of political
opponents became more and more rare, though Muslims were targeted more often.
The government encouraged an annual accountability of performance in human
rights, including the equivalent of National Ombudsman, in Kenya. The Kibaki
regime attempted to deal with judicial corruption by sacking certain judges.
President Kibaki vetoed parliamentary legislation which would have forced
reporters and journalists to disclose their sources for stories about
corruption. The particular veto by President Kibaki put Kenya ahead of the
United States in the protection of the sources of journalists and reporters.
The main exception was each time
Kibaki’s government was sporadically challenged by mungiithi terrorism. In the run-up to the elections, for example,
the police may have slaughtered over eighty members of the group in response to
fatal attacks on policemen and matatu
(small bus) drivers, and others.
A Nairobi newspaper noted that a phenomenon
colloquially known as ‘accidenting’
political opponents had apparently vanished from governance. The term ‘accidenting’ referred to deaths of known
critics of government
26
through planned motor vehicle
accidents. An early victim was Ronald Ngala, a key ally of arap Moi in the
leadership of the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), the political party
that championed a federal constitution (or ‘majimboism’)
as a safeguard for the interests of minority ethnic groups.
All these elements were likely to win growing
political legitimacy and support for Kibaki and, accordingly, erode the anger
and hunger to be churned up by the opposition into a winning source of
political and electoral support.
Displaced Aggression
President Kenyatta was an
accomplished anthropologist. His commitment to the creation of an aristocracy
to run Kenya as a stable polity was severely shaken by the Mau Mau armed
struggle which threatened to bring the angry and violent underclass, and
‘levelers’ of inequality to power. The defeat of the movement by British
military power combined, with a plan to create landed gentry with control of
political power, provided an opportunity to turn Kikuyu social values,
particularly their notions of achieving manhood through enduring raw pain at circumcision,
into a tool for political solidarity and competition against other ethnic
groups. By a twist of history, the
horrendous, widespread and long-lasting violence used by British police and
troops against hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu detainees held in concentration
camps during the Mau Mau armed struggle, and the forced labour inflicted on men
and women in villages, could be presented as a form of collective circumcision
and rite of passage into political domination of Kenya. A process of orchestrated
socio-ethnic drama in which Kikuyu, Embu and Meru adults would take oaths to
commit themselves to keeping political power against challenges by the Luo,
provided a medium for this ‘conversion’ of collective trauma under colonial
oppression into a form of religious rebirth (Likimani 2004).
The import of the phenomenon was the strategic
displacement of class aggression in the political consciousness of impoverished
Kikuyu and Luo ethnic groups away from ‘combating intra-Kikuyu and intra-Luo
class exploitation into mutual inter-ethnic and classless aggression’. Intra-Kikuyu class conflict had been a
significant component of the Mau Mau struggle. Ngugi wa Thiong’o has presented
it in several of his literary works as the struggle between revolutionaries and
a ‘home guard’ of ‘comprador’ collaborators who served as allies of British
forces. This situation has increasingly deepened political silence about
intra-ethnic inequalities in the political rhetoric of leaders of Kenya’s major
political parties (Thiong’o 2007).
This matter
has assumed dramatic dialectical relevance as the vast majority of the 650,000
displaced victims of post-election violence need to be
27
reintegrated into the land from
which they had been evicted, mainly in the Rift Valley and Western Provinces.
The knotty problem that the ‘coalition government’ of the Party of National Unity (PNU) and the opposition ODM must
confront is the matter of redistributing land owned by beneficiaries of
Kenyatta’s ‘landed aristocracy’ policy who are to be found on both sides of the
political divide. Failure to confront this economic wall is likely to give full
reign to the manipulation of ethnicity, igniting inter-ethnic violence to
divert focus away from intra-ethnic class-based inequalities, poverty and injustices.
It also leaves land-based ‘structural violence’ inherited as a legacy and reality from colonial rule deeply
entrenched in Kenya’s polity, a socio-economic bomb ever ready to be exploded.
Conclusion
It is important to use historical
analysis of the economic condition of Kenya to get to the roots of the
horrendous violence that shredded the country’s social and economic fabric
after the 2007 elections. We have looked at conflict-generating racial and
ethnic relations over land; conflict-generating failures of the educational
sector; conflict-generating growth of poverty as a result of the implementation
of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP); and conflict-generating use of state
power for grabbing access to economic resources as well as undermining civic
morality by ‘personalising’ public institutions.
We have indicated how creative responses by
politicians to electoral challenges left Kenya’s leaders unable to escape the
hold of a brutal colonial legacy of using the state as an instrument for
entrenching ‘structural violence’ in relations over land; promotion of economic
prosperity for a racial or ethnic group at the cost of deepening the
impoverishment of others; domination, neo-genocide and dehumanisation of
opposition ethnic ‘others’. President Kenyatta’s novel vision of creating an
ethnic aristocracy increasingly led
him into integrating Kikuyu ethnic solidarity with conflictual relations with
Luo challengers for political power. The assassination of Tom Mboya, J.M.
Kariuki, Pio Gama Pinto, and probably Ronald Ngala, gave a new dimension to
interelite political violence as a tool of governance. This integration of
violence into inter-ethnic electoral competition increasingly assumed
widespread use from 1988 to 2007 (Akiwumi 1999).
Ethnic-based administration also facilitated a level
of economic corruption that, under the Moi regime, crippled and eroded public
institutions. Sustained accusations by the opposition of corruption in Kibaki’s
government competed for public attention with official efforts to fight it.
Corruption intensified inter-ethnic conflict as it threatened the economic
security of its victims.
28
The merit of this perspective is that
it locates the issue of conflict beyond the mere absence of physical violence
and highlights the value of building friendship relations at interpersonal
levels in nation building.
Petro Nenni once accused Charles de Gaulle of doing
‘great harm to Europe’ by defending French ‘particularism’, thereby retarding
Europe’s unity and progress towards building a counterweight power to the
United States and the Soviet Union (Fallaci 1976:258). Kenyatta and the white
settler lobby around him were accused of inhibiting the realisation of the East
African Federation, including possible collusion in the 1971 military coup
against Milton Obote’s government in Uganda that escalated into its collapse.
It could be argued that a wider East African political space may have dispersed
the political and economic ambitions of Kenya’s elites and limited the power of
reliance on ethnic votes and patronage networks.
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