It's hard to not sometimes wonder if Africa is permanently fucked.
What kills me is that Kenya wasn't fucked, and there's no reason going forward why it should be, if they can just get through this political crisis without the rest of the society getting wrecked.
My theory of the world is that most places just need a generation or two without everything being fucked up in order to get some kind of stable prosperity going. This is just depressing.
I read that Obama (bigger than a rock star in Kenya) recorded a message urging calm and reconciliation. Presumably this was broadcast over radio/television. I guess LB's proposal is to do this sort of thing more comprehensively.
The problem is that the idea that Kenya has been "pretty peaceful", with ethnicity a kind of atavism that's been successfully bypassed by national and cosmopolitan identity, is a marketing hook in its own right, and basically false. Jeffrey Gettleman at the NY Times is selling this image particularly hard, and it's beginning to be really annoying.
There is nothing unusual in most of postcolonial Africa with ethnic groups intermarrying, doing business with each other, blurring at the boundaries, not caring much about difference. Gettleman implies that this is only true in Kenya, and is a marker of how successful Kenya has been at becoming a modern nation. It was true in Rwanda before the genocide as well--there were many families that had both Hutu and Tutsi members, and in many communities, people didn't care so much about the ethnic identity of neighbors.
At the same time, the central political fact of postcolonial African states is that their architecture and structure is still largely based on colonial rule. One of the distinguishing features of colonial rule was that ethnic identity was formally defined and that it was a basic part of how the state related to you. You couldn't tell a British or French administration that you were half-Luo, half-Kikuyu, or that your ethnicity wasn't important to you, or that you saw yourself more as a Christian, or that ethnicity was a kind of weird and alien way for you to think about your linguistic and cultural identity, etc. You had to be one ethnicity from the state's perspective, and so you were.
As a result, ethnicity is always there as a political language and a politcial structure in postcolonial Africa, even if it's not part of most people's everyday lives. It's there to be mobilized or used by the state or by political parties. Once that mobilization starts, you can't easily opt out or ignore it. You might have not cared whether your neighbors were Tutsi, but when a small group of Hutu partisans come into town with machetes and demand that you help kill your Tutsi neighbors or be seen as a Tutsi sympathizer, all the nuance in your life starts to vanish. This is not really that different from the use of ethnicity or race to mobilize political action elsewhere in the world, including in mid-20th Century Europe.
So this is not a new thing in Kenya. The mostly Kikuyu inner circle of leaders in the early history of independent Kenya were almost certainly involved in assassinating a popular Luo rival, Tom Mboya. When he was president, Daniel arap Moi frequently mobilized gangs of his own Kalenjin minority group to attack political rivals and other communities, usually at election time, so that he could impose strong controls in the name of "preventing violence". The reporters who are telling you the story of how Kenyans didn't think in ethnic terms until suddenly this atavism came roaring back are simply wrong and ignorant about Kenyan history in the last 25 years.
The real story here is a small elite of kleptocrats who engineered massive electoral fraud in order to keep their figurehead in the Presidency, and of an opposition so frustrated by this that they've turned to ethnic mobilization as a way of fighting back--and now that's started to get out of control for both sides, as it often does.
Vaguely...
- The parts of Africa which seem FUBAR are generally diminishing. You don't noticce this from reading the papers, because the fact that Botswana is (relatively) peaceful and prosperous isn't news.
- Never underestimate the level of racism within Africa. Some of this was historically encouraged by the Europeans (Rwanda, Kenya); some of it seems to be self-propelled, especially towards the "hunter/gatherer" peoples.
- The Kenyan election was stolen by the Supreme Court, so people burned shit down. No comment.
What's the lesson of Bosnia here? (That's a non-rhetorical question. I really don't have a well-formed opinion.)
Kenya has always had the social infrastructure to support civil society. One would think that a little help toward stabilization would go a long way.
But you go too far down this path, and you start sounding like a neocon: "A little strategically applied violence can get us unicorns and daisies."
"Can't we all just get along?"
the response to that message -- beloved as it is by faraway, well-meaning people with no actual stake in the conflict and nothing to gain or lose -- would be:
"No justice, no peace"
Sorry, but this post reads like a caricature of well meaning liberal hand-wringing.
What kills me is that Kenya wasn't fucked
Ivory Coast seemed like that too, up until 1999 or so.
OK, forget that, Burke's here.
Funny how violence isn't so exciting once it's outside comment boxes.
sort of pwned by 5 and 6.
Tim Burke's comment is (as usual) great, especially the last paragraph. I'm sure both sides already know that ethnic mobilization in response to resource conflict has serious potential to get out of control. But they seem to be in a game of chicken where whoever gives first loses.
Perhaps some kind of external mediation would give both sides cover to back down? But it is likely that an external mediator would in some way invalidate the election results...
Funny how violence isn't so exciting once it's outside comment boxes.
Yeah. I found the little "burn shit down" phase at Unfogged pretty annoying.
Yeah, simply don't buy the idea that Kenya was some happy multicultural paradise doing very well economically until suddenly today. Kenya was the kind of place where people set buildings on fire with other people inside. It was the kind of place where leaders ordered bullies to set buildings on fire with other people inside, in fact, or ordered political rivals assassinated. It just didn't get reported much.
This is not to say that this is universally true about sub-Saharan Africa, by the way. There are places that are doing quite well economically, or where violent postcolonial ethnic conflict doesn't happen very often. I just wouldn't put Kenya high on my list of places like that. Higher than the eastern Congo or Nigeria or Darfur? Sure. Higher than Botswana or Ghana or even Tanzania? No.
While you wouldn't know it from the post, I'm not completely unfamiliar with the facts in Burke's comment 5. My point, though, which may have been a silly one, is that once you start getting ethnically motivated violence in an area, it's hard to turn that back -- ethnic identity is much more important and a much more serious source of potential violence going forward in the Balkans than anyone would have guessed it would have been before Yugoslavia dissolved, and it didn't necessarily have to happen that way. Once it has, though, undoing it is horrendously difficult.
Kenya was one of the many places worldwide and in Africa where ethnic identity wasn't driving a whole lot of violence, and that seems to be changing as we watch. Doesn't it seem that, parallel to the necessary efforts to resolve the political situation, a shitload of money spent on marketing "Kenya: It Doesn't Have To Be That Kind Of Place!" would be likely to have some sort of positive effect?
15 crossed with 14. So, I'm apparently more ignorant about Kenya then I'd thought, but isn't being not like "the eastern Congo or Nigeria or Darfur?" still something that that the international community should be trying to sell to Kenyan nationals as a status they really need to hold on to, with the goal of progressing toward being more like, e.g., Botswana?
16: But Kenyans have decided that, at least for now, it does have to be that kind of place.
I lack any real knowledge of geopolitics, but I do watch movies. Here's a bit of dialogue from Three Kings, talking about the behavior of Iraqis.
Archie Gates: What's the most important thing in life?Troy Barlow: Respect.
Archie Gates: Too dependent on other people.
Conrad Vig: What, love?
Archie Gates: A little Disneyland, isn't it?
Chief Elgin: God's will.
Archie Gates: Close.
Troy Barlow: What is it then?
Archie Gates: Necessity.
Troy Barlow: As in?
Archie Gates: As in people do what is most necessary to them at any given moment.
I don't know if that's right, but George Clooney made it sound profound.
*Some* Kenyans would identify with LB's posters. Largely urban, cosmopolitan, educated Kenyans, and also, I think, Swahili-speakers from coastal Kenyans, who often seem themselves as outside of these conflicts. And frankly, many Kikuyu-speakers would say, "It doesn't have to be this kind of place" also, but that's because they have had a privileged relationship with political elites for a while. The real trick is for rural non-Kikuyus to hear, "It doesn't have to be this kind of place" and not hear a bunch of urban, cosmopolitan people telling them to get in line and just accept the stolen election and Kikuyu privilege and pervasive corruption, because that's what mature people do.
I see what you're driving at, LB, but it smacks a little of "don't be like those bad Africans," doesn't it?
Also, according to the article, the middle class, who has perhaps more of a stake in not letting the country go to hell, is only four million out of 37 million people. "Don't commit violence because that other guy won't make money" lacks something as a political slogan.
Look, LB is absolutely right that this is threatening to get out of anyone's control. That's what's unbelievably fucking dangerous about the conduct of both opposition and government leaders: they think they can mobilize and direct this kind of violence because they've done so in the past. But there is plenty of evidence both in Africa and outside of it that these are matches that very easily burn you if you play with them. In a way, it may be too late to convince the leaderships on both sides to cut it the fuck out, and to get Kibaki to consider a political accomodation with Odinga, but that's one thing that I'm sure mediators are working hard at. That might well calm everything down if it happens soon. But to convince them, particularly Kibaki, you've got to convince them that they've got something to lose if western Kenya lights up uncontrollably. That's part of what Gettleman is doing with his misleading coverage, pouring it on thick in a sort of rhetorical gambit. "Hey, guys, do you *really* want to lose your connection to the world economy and be seen as a bunch of tribal primitives? You need tourists and stability and stuff if you're going to have any chance of fattening your out-of-country bank accounts." Unfortunately, plenty of political elites in Africa and elsewhere have shown that they're willing to commit long-term suicide in order to protect short-term advantage.
If this really does start to become uncontrollable by anyone in western Kenya, around Nairobi or anywhere else, I don't think there is any simple tool of persuasion that will help.
Burke's 5 is spot on. It's puzzling that this latest spate of violence in the Rift is being portrayed as something new, particularly after there were major episodes in '92 and '98.
There is actually a pretty good predictor of hotspots in Africa and around the world, places that have been driven to crisis and can be expected to blow up in this or similar ways. Basically, it's any place that has structured its economy around being "aided" by the neoliberal anti-development establishment of the World Bank and the IMF, two organizations which overwhelmingly spread poverty, chaos, corruption, violence and kleptocracy pretty much wherever they go. Kenya is ultimately an illustration of this, and it's these organizations that ultimately need a good talking-to and preferably a definitive boot.
I don't know much about Kenya, but an example of a set of politicians trying and failing to raise ethnic strife happened in the nations surrounding Hungary in the early nineties. Mečiar, Tudjman, and some Romanian whose name I forget were all playing up "hate the Hungarians" before the Jugoslav wars erupted. Mečiar at least was a Marion Barry-style politician, playing up "I'm one of you" among people who didn't usually vote to gain support. Jugoslavia's bad example helped make this short-sighted style unpopular there, though pointing out the similarities with Serbia would have been seen as insulting. While things are not that great politically there, the alternative politicians were not kleptocrats, so there was a possible payoff for choosing someone reasonable also.
Having written this, since there are plenty of examples of ethnic strife to warn people off of attacking their neighbors, there's probably no good insight to gain for Kenya.
Which does nothing for Kenya's crisis in the short term, obviously.
A room mate of mine was the scion of an ethnic Indian family that was very succesful in Mombasa. I have long been out of touch with him, but I have often wondered which purge was the one that got him to leave, or if he was still hanging on.
Disconnected thoughts:
1. This feels like another piece of evidence that we humans just cannot fully understand or effectively predict why events come to happen as they do. A year ago I thought we were frog-marching our way to HRC and MR as US presidental candidates. Whoops, maybe not. A friend told me about walking past the charred remains of protesters in France a few years ago; somehow that situation did not spiral into civil war and yet this Kenyan thing might. I don't want to get simplistic here; I felt pretty comfortable thinking the Iraq war was a terrible idea from the beginning, and for mostly pragmatic reasons. Still.
2. I may have mentioned here before that I was speaking to a reporter about a semi-related issue not long after the Kenyan crisis began, and she finished up by asking: "Kenya has always been such a stable country. Did you see this coming?" Of course I told her that I wasn't in any conceivable way qualified to answer that question, but it scared me to think how easy it would have been to spout off an answer and have her take it seriously. Given the media tendency to use each other's stories as Rolodexes, I probably would have gotten more calls asking for my deep insight into the Kenyan situation. ::shudder::
I see Burke has already covered this, but yes, Kenya is not exactly a post-tribal paradise and never has been. An uncle of a very close family friend told me a lot of stories about the battles between the tribes back when he was young, which was probably barely in the colonial period.
The close family friend himself runs a few of the top primary and secondary schools in the country, and one of his big deals is that he asks all the kids to express their identities in terms of nation, not tribe (they're boarding schools, so he has some kids from Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, and a couple other neighboring countries). This all stems from a revelation he had when he came to the US for his masters degree, and there was another Kenyan at the medium-reputation state school he was attending, a Masaii. At first, he was very embarrassed to meet this guy, and he made my mother swear to never tell his family back home, but then he realized that their commonalities as Kenyans trumped their tribal differences. It should tell you something about how strong the tribal segregation is when a guy has to be stuck 10,000 miles from home for 2 straight years to realize something like that. Also, that was a particularly big revelation because the Kambas are a Bantu-derived tribe while the Masai are Nilodic, but entire encyclopedias could be written about the tensions between those two major ethnic groups.
28: Mombasa still has a very large Indian and Arab population. I don't know if you might be thinking of Uganda, which had a horrendous purge of the Indian middle class under Idi Amin. Helped set the country back by a decade or more, easily.
The real trick is for rural non-Kikuyus to hear, "It doesn't have to be this kind of place" and not hear a bunch of urban, cosmopolitan people telling them to get in line and just accept the stolen election and Kikuyu privilege and pervasive corruption, because that's what mature people do.
Okay, part of the reason I put up posts about stuff I don't know anything about is that it will attract people who will school me, because African politics is absolutely an area where I need schooling (so, I really do appreciate your comments a great deal, Tim. I'm trolling for an education here).
But even for the 33 million Kenyans who aren't middle class, the rural non-Kikuyu speakers, don't they still have a lot to lose in a civil war, or a steady-state of violence short of civil war? It does sound like "Shut up and accept corruption", but violence leading to the breakdown of civil society isn't a great way to avoid corruption either.
And pf: But Kenyans have decided that, at least for now, it does have to be that kind of place.
You know, to the extent that's the case, I'm saying that a little international investment into encouraging them to change their minds about that sounds productive. No?
31. No, not Idi Amin, which I remember. Just with Kenya going to shit, and ethnic violence rampant, I assumed, apparantly incorrectly, that "foreigners" would be the first targets. Still sad about the situation.
Sure, everybody has a lot to lose in a civil conflict that spirals out of control. But what they have to lose is asymmetrical, and in both cases, it can be a hard sell. For rural Kenyans in some areas, what they have to lose is their lives and whatever minimal kinds of economic security they've been able to eke out. But they have to set that against the fact that the Kenyan state is usually either indifferent or predatory to those minimal kinds of economic security. Even when someone like Kibaki promises universal free education, most rural Kenyans of any ethnicity figure it's unlikely to happen (and they're right), or that it won't last if it does (and they're probably right too). So people are in some cases hoping that if they fight, they might either get the state to take them seriously or even can a modicum of authority over their own social worlds. Or that they can at least grab a few things from the more prosperous Kikuyu storeowner who set up shop down the road, the one who seems to have a suspiciously chummy relationship with district government.
For political elites within Kibaki's government, you'd have to convince them that if they allow Odinga to be elected, they'll have a chance to get back into power in the future, and that Odinga won't take back some of their ill-gotten gains or replace them with his own cronies, or won't prosecute them. They're probably right to be nervous about all of that happening, and cynical about whether the opposition won't just be kleptocrats themselves. So it looks to them to be safer to hold on at all costs, and compel Kibaki to remain president. If you say to them, "Look, you risk losing everything if Kenya spirals into all-out civil conflict: your life, your wealth, your security", most won't believe it. Even if they do, they may calculate, like political elites all around the planet, that the certain consequences of losing power outweigh the probable risks of total destruction in a collapsing society.
One group has a lot to lose, one group very little, but in both cases, it's hard to get across how unrestrained civil conflict could be worse.
I agree more with LB than with Tim here. The UK's Cabinet was "mostly Scottish" and George Bush's inner circle of advisors was "mostly Texan" up until quite recently, and that's about as important as ethnic politics gets in Kenya - the simple fact that Moi ran the place for so long ought to be a clue that Kenyan politics is not particularly ethnically driven.
Kenya's a violent place, always has been. So's Jamaica - which regularly has election campaigns in which the number of deaths tops 500, and tends to have a much higher murder rate in between times too. But you don't really get much insight into the politics of JLP versus PNP by trying to split up the different regional and political factions into ethnicities and you don't pick up much analytic gain from this in Kenya either.
I don't agree with this marketing campaign particularly, because Kenya absolutely *is* the kind of place where people carry out political murders, all the time. But I think it's really wrong to try and reduce the politics of the country to "tribal" this or that. I don't agree with or like this approach when it's applied to the USA when people try to patronise the Southern states and I absolutely object to it when it's done to African states, because the practical effect is to encourage developed world commentators to think of anything that's going on as "oh, tribal and ethnic conflict, nothing that can be done about it, change the channel".
Some conflicts (like former Yugoslavia or Rwanda) do have an ethnic dimension (anyone referring to Rwanda as a "tribal" conflict is speaking loosely, btw; the Hutu and Tutsi were two castes of the Banyarwanda) and some don't, and even the ones which do (like the Balkans in particular) usually benefit from some serious consideration of the *other* issues which motivated the conflict rather than retreating into an orgy of chin-stroking about "age old hatreds".
This all stems from a revelation he had when he came to the US for his masters degree, and there was another Kenyan at the medium-reputation state school he was attending, a Masaii. At first, he was very embarrassed to meet this guy, and he made my mother swear to never tell his family back home, but then he realized that their commonalities as Kenyans trumped their tribal differences.
this just-so story could certainly have been told about, say, a Jewish New Yorker and a fundamentalist from Alabama.
the Hutu and Tutsi were two castes of the Banyarwanda
Am I recalling correctly that the split was created by a colonial power?
That's one theory (popular with Rwandan nationalists). But the split was basically to do with agriculture and geography - Tutsi were cattle-herders and Hutu were farmers, and farmers tend to outbreed herdsmen.
I think it's fair to say the split was exacerbated by the colonial power. As dsquared says, there were Tutsi and Hutu, but the Belgians chose to privilege one over the other.
The Germans chose not only to drum all the Hutu out of the ruling class, but also to exlipicitly racialize the division, since "race science" was popular in Europe at the time.
charred remains of protesters in France
I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know it was quite this bad -- I knew there were riots and cities on fire, but this? Can you send me a link?
this just-so story could certainly have been told about, say, a Jewish New Yorker and a fundamentalist from Alabama.
Yes it could, and that proves no point apart from the importance of institutions that limit power for keeping diverse democracies functioning. Federalism in the US allows separation of my state's laws from Alabama's laws and very conservative fundamentalists are still a minority in the US incapable of fully exerting their political will upon the populace. These are not the case in Kenya if you replace "fundamentalist" with "Bantu-derived tribesman".
The fact that such a story could be told about an strongly right-wing Alabama fundamentalist and a liberal New Yorker shows the large rift that exists between the worldviews of those two groups, and their innate propensity to not get along. If it weren't for the safeguards I mentioned above, and a fundamentalist government took over illegally and tried to quash any remenents of liberalism, you can bet I'd be trying to leave the country or joining in the riots. Exactly like is happening in Kenya.
40: My friend recounted it to me as an example of French racism. That is, if she hadn't walked past the remains she wouldn't have known it was happening, because there weren't articles about it even in the French press. I think this was in 2003 or thereabouts.
It only came up because I expressed surprise over the vandalism and burning of cars by immigrant youth in France, and she said she was surprised it had made the international news, since it is a more-or-less regular occurrence. The self-immolation was what really horrified her.
I did find a handful of links describing some incidents, but my ignorance of French politics is pretty high and I don't know whether these are even the kinds of protesters she was talking about. This blog seems to give a more recent overview of violence and young immigrants. It claims:
[T]he "youths" have never really stopped rioting, the news media stopped covering it when the worst rioting stopped but nothing much else has changed.
And as further explanation for limited media coverage:
The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.
... The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.
Again, I'm pretty ignorant of French politics, so please don't take this as anything approaching gospel.
Dsquared, your comment did get me to reflect on why I immediately thought that a similar story about a liberal New Yorker and a conservative Alabama fundamentalist would be unlikely to the point of triteness. A major part of the reason my family friend and his Masai classmate got along so well was not just because they were Kenyan, so much as because they were also highly educated enough to be given scholarships to go overseas for graduate education. The fact that it was still difficult to overcome tribal divisions even for people who are national elites shows that those divisions are still critical to understanding the situation in Kenya, just as understanding the tension between social conservatives and urban liberalism is vital to understanding the US political situation.
Now, one thing I certainly do not know is how the feelings I've talked about differ for urban dwellers in Kenya. The people we know mostly had rural upbringings in areas dominated by one tribe. It may be a different perspective for those who grew up in Nairobi with a more diverse local population.
I'm not sure why dsquared thinks his characterization disagrees with mine other than he always thinks he disagrees with me even when we agree. Ethnicity is an idiom placed on top of violent politics in Kenya, and Gettleman is mostly getting his current reporting wrong because he sees the ethnicity and not the violent politics. But an association of that kind can be born out of events in a way that surprises everyone, or overwhelms all previous points of reference. At times, Kenyans do narrativize violence in "ethnic" terms, even if they'll also talk about it in other ways altogether. (Including, in the current impasse, about class and privilege, rather than ethnicity.) The media hears ethnicity, or in Gettleman's case, "tribe", because that's what they think they know about African politics.
pretty sure dsquared has a macro which begins his comments by asserting disagreement with someone or other.
32
"But even for the 33 million Kenyans who aren't middle class, the rural non-Kikuyu speakers, don't they still have a lot to lose in a civil war, or a steady-state of violence short of civil war? It does sound like "Shut up and accept corruption", but violence leading to the breakdown of civil society isn't a great way to avoid corruption either."
I don't think it is corruption per se which is the irritant, it is the favoring of certain ethnic groups. What advice would you have given black South Africans under apartheid?
35: dsquared offers a surprisingly narrow reading of human nature here.
dsquared proposes that tribal affiliations aren't particularly important in the U.S. or Kenya There's a certain class of Americans who might believe this - Colbert jokes all the time about needing to be told that he is white - but in America, you'd have to be pretty blind to hold dsquared's view of Americans.
Likewise, dsquared points out that Moi wasn't a Kikuyu. But Moi's tribal affiliation was a crucial factor in his ability to maintain power. He was able to serve the Kikuyu without arousing too much hostility among the rest of Kenyans precisely because he wasn't Kikuyu. Moi wasn't a Kikuyu, but he wasn't a Luo either. Nor was he a member of any other major group.
dsquared seems to believe that Moi's tribal affiliation was irrelevant to his maintaining power, but the exact opposite is true. Likewise, he gives short shrift to the importance of the Southern white tribal affiliations of LBJ, Carter, HW Bush, Clinton and W Bush. Not to mention Gore.
(We can quibble: HW wasn't much of a Southerner, but he certainly tried to sell his Southern-ness. As did the pair of non-Southern presidents we've had since 1964: Nixon and Reagan.)
Tribal identity is not merely relevant. It's pretty much all there is in places like the U.S. and Kenya.
First, i would like to invite you all to KenyaImagine.com. There you are likely, as the debate goes about to understand Kenya better.
Second, and more importantly, I'd like to point out that for all his posturing, Tim Burke is actually very ignorant about Kenya. Let me set about explaining a few things.
Firstly, only six years ago it was the Kalenjin, a cluster of ethnicities that have fashioned themselves into a single groups, that were hated. It was them and not the Kikuyu who were in favour for the entire 24 years between 1978 and 2002. This is such basic knowledge anyone who comments on Kenya should first acknowledge it.
Now, it is true that Kenyans are generally a peaceful lot, and even now the violence is restricted to the Rift Valley. Among the victims are communities that are not at all Kikuyu, like the Bukusu and the Kisii ( a recent channel 4 report showed this, and the Kisii are actually the victims of the single biggest massacre 40 burned at a tea estate). Now there are wealthy and poor Kenyans, but that has very little to do with tribe, and the struggle in Kenya now has nothing at all to do with class.
It would be useful for Burke, and everyone around here to tell us what they know of Raila Odinga (became a billionaire many times over first when he helped Moi beat down the opposition after the 1997 election-similarly disputed- and was rewarded with a massive massive chemical plant at a throw-away price, and next when he was energy minister and made billions of dodgy oil trades with the gulf states, libya, the sudanese government and the nigerians). Remember that until mid-2002 Odinga was waiting on Moi to anoint him successor and was Secretary General of the ruling party KANU. Raila has a truly dictatorial streak, a maniacal love of violence, one that is well chronicled in Kenyan newspapers down the years.
His running mate, Musalia Mudavadi was Moi's last Vice President, Finance Minister during the multi-billion dollar Goldenberg scandal and the son of a long serving KANU secretary general. He was literally plucked out of university and made a minister in the 1980s. He is, needless to say also a billionaire and a large land owner in the Rift Valley. Their prime ministerial candidate is William Ruto who was one of the youths involved in the emptying of the treasury in 1992 as they struggled to save Moi in the first multi-party elections. When Raila left KANU, Ruto took over as Secretary General and is generally understood even in his own party to be the man behind the Rift Valley violence, his history of violence is the stuff of movies.
The party's Chairman Henry Kosgei is most famous in the Western world for rebuffing an interview request with a Channel 4 journalist (Dispatches, Sorius Samura) with a 'you do not know Kenya,' when accosted about a massive land scam he had pulled off on his constituents. In Kenya he is better known as the man who pulled the 1987 All-Africa mega-scam, and then shcoked us with an even greater feat when he brought the National Assurance Company crashing to the ground. Need I say it was the largest insurance company in the country?
Now, let's see to other officials. Moi's last Chief Secretary, Head of the Civil Service and a major land thief in her own right is big in the ODM. His long time private secretary and co-owner of the second largest media group in the country, and one of the biggest land thieves, is one of the party's main backers, a former judge of the appeals court who was dismissed on corruption charges (and did not bother to appeal is its head of elections), the party's likely chief whip is a former ambulance chaser who was disbarred after defrauding his clients of their compensation money. Are you thinking about land reform? Well the former Commissioner of Lands, and heir to Moi's constituency seat is also sitting pretty in the ODM and was the key witness in the Raila vs Kenya case, regarding the molasses plant that the Odingas defrauded Kenya off.
I could write till tomorrow, but the idea that the Kikuyu are Kenya's problem in any way is plain stupid. Oh, and I am not Kikuyu.
Next, let's see if Kibaki's government has benefitted just the Kikuyu. His greatest achievements have been mainly in the agricultural sector. I'd like to encourage you again to visit with KenyaImagine, you will have a light shone. Kibaki's government has been awarded at least three international awards for governance, it has greatly improved the country's rankings in the World Bank's doing-business standings, the rate of HIV-AIDs in Kenya is one of the top three most radically reduced, Malaria rates are down by half, maize, milk, tea, coffeee and sugar incomes are up by a great degree, milk traded at 8/- a litre when Kibaki came in, and was trading at 16/- minimum and close to 21/- normally by end of last year. The country was exporting it in the millions of litres, maize prices were up by a multiple of three (maize and milk are produced across the country, but the bulk is from the Rift Valley where the violence is most prevalent and where youth burned the largest dairy), the rising importance of Amaranth in Nyanza led to the tripling of incomes in many areas, the sugar sector in Nyanza (Odinga's home province) was revived after the state paid all the debts owed to farmers by the sugar factories, the largest rice scheme in the country, in Odinga's home province again was revived, the Kenya Meat Commission was revived, the Kenya Cooperative Creameries were revived, rural electrification was extended by a great degree, increased access to credit was ensured not just by low interest rates but also by government schemes like the Youth Fund and the Women's Fund, the Roads Levy Fund, the Constituencies Development Fund was created sending 2.5% of national revenue direct to the grassroots, the civil service was given performance contracts (Kenya won an int'l award for this), General Electric, Celtel, Google, Nokia, the whole world and her cousins were transferring either their Africa or their world headquarters to Nairobi, room occupancy at hotels on the Kenyan coast and in the game parks was up at an extraordinary rate and more and more, I could add much more. Oh yes, the banks and the breweries were reporting record profits, there are at least two Kenyan companies now valued in the billions in dollar terms. Remember that unlike our neighbours and many other African countries we do not have minerals, so it is not the commodity boom that explains our growth. Most emphatically, the Kikuyu did not have any advantage other than that which they gained by their own labour.
Now someone above suggests that the district government would favour the Kikuyu trader. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kenya is divided into counties which all have a county council whose officials are elected in the General Elections and are locals, i.e. no Kikuyu will win such a seat away from areas of Kikuyu dominance. Then there are town whose leadership is chosen in the same way. It is only these organisations that can be allocated government revenue from Nairobi, or that can collect it locally. There is a District Education Board, a District Security Council, a District Health Council, and these are replicated at the provincial level. These are appointed positions, for civil servants but again are not dominated by the Kikuyu. Remember we are talking about a country in which close to no Kikuyu was in a position of influence for 24 years!!! This is part of the reason why Kibaki cannot even act on the raiders and murderers, Moi stacked the armed forces with people from the Rift Valley! When you see a Kikuyu shop, or an Asian shop, or a Kisii one, then you are seeing the fruit of an individual's labour and not his ethnic affiliation.
Dear, dear Burke, please do not speak of that which you know nothing. The post election violence was caused by incitement of Kenyans against the Kikuyu in the fashion that Burke adopts with great verve here. There is a lot wrong with Kenya, but the tribal angle is a creation of the most despotic politicians, who again, shockingly perhaps, can rely on the talents of Burke and Co. to back them up. Countless reports have shown that the opposition had pre-planned this violence and that it was part of their campaign for Majimbo, a euphemism for Blut und Boden politics. So much Blut now, too much Blut.
P.S. In spite of the hate campaign, Kibaki won in 4 of the provinces, and were it not for the fact that parties affiliated with him were putting up a minimum of 4 candidates per constituency and therefore allowing the ODM candidate to squeak through, would have had a much greater majority in parliament. In Western province he won 25% of the vote, in Odinga's Nyanza, he won 17% of the vote. Please think and analyse next time.
You will forgive the rant will you not LB? There is a marketing problem in Kenya, the government is not getting the truth out, the ODM rules the airwaves.
You will forgive the rant will you not LB?
Certainly -- as I said above, I'm posting on things I know very little about, in the hopes of attracting people to educate me. Having a local perspective is fascinating.
Let's just say it's a perspective with an interest. You're getting a sense of how intensely felt and argued this all is in the Kenyan context, at any rate.
Well, yeah -- Mr. Wanyama's obviously a Kibaki supporter. Everyone's going to have a position, but it's still a lot more informative reading even a one sided local perspective than trying to figure out what's going on from the NY Times.
Incidentally, he's also perfectly right that Odinga's not exactly the second coming himself--he's as implicated in dirty politics as Kibaki's clique, and his own political organization certainly meant to use violence as a negotiating tactic in the aftermath of the election. But I think it's pretty clear that Odinga won the election, particularly when you look at the parliamentary results.
On the other hand, the question of whether Kikuyu speakers have had a privileged relationship to the postcolonial state or to the ruling party is not a novel one: that goes all the way back to independence. Let's just say that Mr. Wanyama sees the post-Moi period in a much rosier light than many outside observers and many of his own countrymen.
Hmmmm, no it is not as easy as that. Those facts cannot be altered by my political predilection, they remain what they are facts, they are verifiable of course, not that you would bother. You are stuck in a world where all African governments are bad, and all the opposition guys are good. Stands to reason, I suppose.
Would you be happy to have the BNP in office in the UK? Maybe not? Well, the ODM ran a similar campaign, read Human Rights Watch and just keep listening, the perps will be exposed soon enough, there's enough evidence about.
Tim, dear about the election. In a hole, do stop digging. You know nothing of what you speak. Quick question, would the Tories celebrate a 3% win in the popular vote over Labour? Like I said above Moi packed the constituency sizes in such a way that his Rift Valley heartland had an over-size representation in Parliament. Just as an example, Meru Central District has 500,000 people, Baringo in the Rift Valley (Moi's home district has 250,000), West Pokot in the Rift Valley, 300,000 (also 3MPs) they both have 3 MPs each.
Also, the international media has refused to acknowledge this, but everyone running on a ticket other than ODM, ODM-K and NARC was running on a pro-Kibaki ticket. This was the design, announced prior to the election and well understood by the public. So Kibaki, as was clear in the speaker's election, won seats j16 less than the ODM's, although many of them were not on the same PNU ticket as he ran. With the alliance he formed with ODM-K, he now has just one seat less than the ODM in Parliament, which is why the Speaker's election was so close.