The violence that followed Kenya’s recent fraudulent elections resulted in more deaths than any other crisis in the country’s 44 years of independence. The killings have been gruesome, ranging from axe-stabbings to church infernos. The chaos in a country that had, up to this point, branded itself as one of Africa’s “democratic success stories” has left the international community scrambling for answers. Indeed, though the killing has been mostly between members of different tribes, this tragedy is not simply a story of longstanding ethnic divisions. Instead, the conflict is a product of two political factors: Kenya’s historically corrupt government, and the willingness of some politicians to exploit the anger following the elections by encouraging violence. A majority of the population supported the losing candidate, engendering mass frustration that led to violent outbreaks.

A Pattern of Corruption
Election rigging in Kenya is not a historical anomaly. According to the nonprofit organization Global Integrity, former president Daniel arap Moi’s re-elections in 1992 and 1997 were plagued by “allegations of vote rigging.” As Robert Rotberg, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, told the HPR, “The Moi regime was so corrupt [that] there is every reason that his successors stayed corrupt as a way of life.” The habit of corruption continued with Moi’s successor, Mwai Kibeki of the National Rainbow Coalition Party, despite Kibeki’s promises to the contrary.

Two recent instances of government corruption stand out. First, the Anglo Leasing Affair of 2004 implicated top government officials, including Kibeki, in multimillion-dollar illegal contracts for a passport printing system. Second, in March 2006, government forces raided a newspaper company and television network that repeatedly criticized Kibeki. These misuses of funds and infringements on the freedom of the press, combined with documented voter intimidation during elections, demonstrate the entrenched corruption that plagues the state. Rotberg described the system in Kenya as “the government looking after itself and its top tribes more than caring for the welfare of the people.”

Citizens of a stable democracy take to the polls expecting the election results to reflect their votes, but they lose faith in the democratic process upon recognizing that the government has manipulated the contest. In Kenya, citizens participated in the overtly corrupt process, hoping to rectify it from the outside. According to the New York Times, the 2007 election showed record turnout, but Kibeki’s small marginal lead over opposition leader Raila Odinga was the product of “thousands of invalid ballots.” The vote count miraculously changed from 50,145 votes on the Thursday of the election to 75,261 on the following Sunday. The backlash expressed itself in the violence that engulfed the country.

Tribal Ties
The historical trend in Kenya of unequal and unfair land distribution has left Kenyan minorities resentful of leaders’ preferential treatment of their own tribes. Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, took the land left by the British and distributed it among the elite of his ethnic group, the Kikuyu. Tribes like the Luo, of which Odinga is a member, and the Kalenjin were forced by the government to leave the lands of their ancestors, inspiring bitterness towards the Kikuyu government that has continued for generations. In an interview with the HPR, Lynn Fredriksson, Advocacy Director for Africa of Amnesty International USA, affirmed that abuse of government power is at the root of the conflict: “Long-standing discrimination over land and economic opportunity set the stage for much of the violent rage which erupted after the government announced President Kibeki’s reelection.”

The Rift Valley area of Kenya has seen the most violence, which is reflective of the significant number of land disputes, and what the BBC described as political “land grabs,” that the area has witnessed. “Naturally people try to hold onto their resources,” Rotberg told Newsweek, “so people began to lash out and attempt to gain back resources they had lost over decades of rule by the ruling party.” Kenyans turned against neighbors of different tribes as the only visible representatives of the government’s political party. As Rotberg said, “This is not some bunch of Africans being ‘tribal.’ This is violence for political ends.”

Abuse from the Top
Citizens’ frustration, and the fact that politicized ethnic groups are easily manipulated, allow for Kenyan politicians to exploit ethnic divisions to advance their own agendas. “People in political power have used ethnicity as a way of staying in power,” Rita M. Breen, Executive Officer of the Committee on African Studies at Harvard, told the HPR. The endorsement of the chaos by those entrusted to lead the country meant that the Kenyan population had no other outlet for its frustration, nor any other hope for change.

Jendayi Frazer, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, reported that politicians incited violence over the radio in the weeks before the 2007 election. And many human rights groups have reported that politicians instigated and directed the worst violence in Kenya. Such reports align with the country’s long record of organized political violence. In February, according to the International Herald Tribune, a top regional police chief was arrested “on suspicion of financing the torching of homes” during the post-election violence. The manipulation of widespread citizen frustration into violence, combined with the funding of violence by governmental organizations and politicians, has the potential to incite further cycles of conflict.

The international community may assume that the situation in Kenya is analogous to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, or to the current conflict in Sudan. Believing that ethnic tensions alone are the cause of the current violence, however, is only a shallow analysis of the factors that led to this failure of democracy. The current breakdown is a political breakdown and begs for a political solution. Given the opacity of the government process and the corrupt Kenyan leadership, it is unlikely that there will be a recount or a new election.

Rotberg believes that “the best we can hope for is a mild measure of power sharing,” and as of this writing, the two opposing candidates have taken steps to achieve this goal. Such compromise, if successful, would be a significant improvement from Kenya’s current state of political limbo. And even with limited efficacy, such a measure would be an important symbolic step for Kenyan citizens that, for the first time in Kenya’s history, they would be able to hold their elected officials to a higher standard.]]>http://hprsite.squarespace.com/a-corrupted-view-of-the-042008/rss-comments-entry-1800431.xml