Violence and democracy in Kenya: a personal reflection

Celestine Nyamu Musembi from Kenya, an IDS fellow and Cititzenship DRC researcher, reflects on the crisis in Kenya, and raises questions between issues of violence and democracy, two of the themes that cut across the work of the Citizenship DRC.

 On Thursday December 27th 2007 I made my way to Kilimani Primary School, my polling station in Nairobi’s Westlands constituency, and like millions of other Kenyans, cast my ballot in presidential, parliamentary and local government elections. The country then watched and listened as throughout Friday and on Saturday morning the commissioners of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) took turns reading out the results constituency by constituency. This exercise was, for the most part, a perfunctory execution of their duty, since the major TV stations were already running regular updates as they received them from the polling stations. Then just before noon on Saturday it became clear that this was not going to be the usual mechanical exercise; something was not right.

The ECK chairman admitted to the media briefing room packed with party agents and local and international observers that he could not explain why 51 constituencies were yet to submit their results. He even suggested that some Returning Officers might have been ‘cooking’ the figures. He further admitted that ECK headquarters had found it impossible to communicate with the Returning Officers. Up until this moment, the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) presidential candidate, Raila Odinga was leading by just over 300,000 votes. When the ECK commissioners did resume announcement of the remaining constituency results several hours later, they did not get very far down the list. ODM raised objection to the extremely high number of votes announced in favour of the Party of National Unity (PNU) candidate, the incumbent president Mwai Kibaki. After initial resistance, the ECK chairman agreed to an all-night verification exercise and suspended the announcements.

Sunday December 30th 2007 dawned with anxious anticipation. The morning came and went. Sunday afternoon ticked by. Then at about 5p.m. a scene that Kenyans will remember for a long time: without any feedback on the outcome of the all-night verification exercise, the ECK chairman resumed the reading of the constituency results. ODM objected once more. Their attempts to present documents to the commission chairman showing discrepancies between the announcements at ECK headquarters and the results previously declared at constituency level were ignored. Right before our eyes the media briefing room degenerated into chaos, confusion, tear gas, a power blackout, a security cordon of anti-riot police escorting the ECK chairman to his temporary office.

It was from here, before the cameras of the state-owned TV station, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, that Mwai Kibaki was declared winner. Within less than an hour a hurriedly organised swearing in ceremony was held on the State House lawn at dusk with a handful of state functionaries in attendance.

As has been reported in international and local media, these events have triggered an unprecedented level of post-election violence. Local and international initiatives are underway to mediate some form of dialogue between Kibaki’s government and ODM, whose positions at the moment are poles apart. Although the worst of the violence has been brought under control, there are many families with nowhere to bury their dead, nowhere to live, camped out at police stations. There are hundreds still nursing horrendous wounds and dealing with the trauma of sexual violence, and thousands more whose livelihoods have gone up in smoke.

As I begin to recover from the numbness and helplessness of witnessing the killing, looting and torching, I find myself reflecting on what the elections of 2007 have done to the project of building democracy in Kenya. I can’t help but conclude that the clock of democracy has been set back in three ways.

1. Further ethnic polarisation
First, there is definitely a deepening of the negative politics of ethnicity. Our national fabric that was still in the process of being woven is fast unravelling. The elections of 2007 have advanced further a process of ethnic polarization that has simmered on since independence, its most recent political expression being in the November 2006 referendum over adoption of a new constitution. In a pattern echoing the referendum vote, Kibaki managed a majority vote in only two of the eight provinces. The two provinces are in the populous Mt. Kenya region which is his home. Post-election violence has targeted primarily people from the Mt. Kenya communities, flushing them out of cosmopolitan towns and settlements, setting off a spiral of revenge and counter-revenge attacks. The ugly side of ethnicity has now been established as an enduring feature of our electoral process.

We had dared to hope, after a broadly representative coalition of parties won the elections of 2002, that we had finally began to make a dent on the problem. At a personal level it has been very distressing to see ethnically prejudiced views and comments become acceptable and justifiable in day to day interaction.

2. Normalisation of election violence
While previous elections have not been totally free of violence, the violence was always in identifiable pockets and it was often quickly brought under control. The current levels of violence are unprecedented in scale, intensity and duration. Those of us old enough to remember are in agreement that the heavy-handed response of the national security forces is comparable only to the period following the attempted coup of 1982. The current climate of fear has completely wiped out the gains we made in the 2002 elections.

The euphoric elections of 2002 that saw the end of KANU’s 40-year rule (KANU, the Kenya African National Union party had ruled the country since independence in 1963) had assured Kenyans that it was possible for a change of guard to take place without bloodshed. We celebrated this as a milestone in the maturation of our democracy. Now it is clear that the sceptre of violence will hang over any election where it is perceived that a change of guard is likely. I am not sure that any Kenyan voter will wake up next election morning expecting to simply cast their vote and go about their normal lives as usual.

3. Deepened distrust of democratic institutions and processes

Millions of voters in Kenya- including some from the regions that voted for Kibaki- see the election victory as having been stolen. Kenyans demonstrated faith in the democratic process by turning up in large numbers to vote. Kenyans demonstrated faith in democratic institutions by waiting patiently for some 72 hours for the ECK to do its work of supervising the election as an independent arbiter and declaring genuinely elected victors. What we saw instead was an abdication of this role by the ECK, caving in to pressure to declare results that some of the commissioners had no confidence in and had no means of verifying as crucial documents went missing. Five commissioners and the attorney-general have called for an audit of the results. The chairman, in response to a journalist’s question two days after the declaration, said that he did not know for sure that Kibaki had genuinely won the election.

One remark I have heard quite often in the past week from mostly young people is, ‘I voted for the first time and I don’t think I’ll vote again.’ I fear that despondency and voter apathy will result from a culmination of these three issues.

There is, in my view, only one positive thing to come out of this: the 2007 elections have exposed specific weaknesses in the design of our electoral institutions and regulation of the process to ensure transparency. Many of these weaknesses can be addressed through legislative change. For instance, under an inter-parties agreement made in 1997 the president is supposed to consult political parties in appointing the electoral commissioners. This agreement was never enacted into law and so during his first term in office President Kibaki appointed a total of 18 of the 21 commissioners without consulting the political parties.

These appointments laid the ground for the malpractices that characterised the tallying process. Whichever way the dispute over the results of the presidential elections turns out, we now have an aggrieved political party with the highest number of seats in parliament. ODM and its affiliate have won a total of 102 seats compared to a total of 78 won by PNU and its affiliates, leaving 30 seats to several small parties. With such a significant majority the greatest service that ODM could render to Kenya would be to translate their grievance over the 2007 elections into a legislative agenda that takes as a priority the redesign of the institutions that underwrite our democratic practice.