Order falters in Kenya following allegedly stolen election

Posted on January 4th, 2008 Jack No comments  Print This Post

The social contract is unraveling in Kenya, where supporters of opposition candidate Raila Odinga claim incumbent president Mwai Kibaki stole an election on December 27. Odinga leads the Orange Democratic Movement, backers of which run a fiery site at www.orangerevolutionblog.com.

Police forces yesterday broke up ODM protests with tear gas, fire hoses and real bullets, report the AP and others:

As the diplomats discussed unity, Kenya’s slums burned.

“War is happening here,” said 45-year-old Edwin Mukathia, who was among thousands of people who poured out of Nairobi’s slums to heed opposition candidate Raila Odinga’s call for a million-man march in the city’s Uhuru Park.

But Mukathia and the others were kept at bay by riot police, who choked off the roads and fired live bullets over their heads. The opposition canceled the march but said they would hold it Friday, setting the stage for another day of upheaval stretching from the capital to the coast to the western highlands.

The conflict has brought condemnation from diplomats across the globe as one of Africa’s top tourist draws and most stable democracies descends into chaos.

The images of burning churches, machete-wielding gangs and looters making off with fuel are common in a region encompassing Somalia and Sudan, but unusual for Kenya.

Le Monde has some lean footage of police breaking up demonstrations. In it, Orange protesters are emphatic about their desire for peace.

But others note an ethnic dimension to the conflict. According to the Guardian:

Some 300 people have been killed and 100,000 left homeless in a week of turbulence that took an alarming ethnic twist, pitting other tribes against Kibaki’s Kikuyu people. Shops and homes have been looted and houses and cars set ablaze, bringing chaos to a country considered an island of stability in violence-plagued East Africa.

And from Bloomberg:

Kibaki is a Kikuyu, which makes up about a fifth of the population and is the largest group, while Odinga is a member of the Luo. In recent years, the country has been regarded as politically and economically stable.

“There is a real ethnic angle to this,” Thoko Kaime, deputy head of the Africa division of London-based Exclusive Analysis, which analyzes political risk, said in an interview yesterday. “The Kikuyus have dominated politics.”

Odinga says the Dec. 27 ballot was rigged and accuses the government of “genocide” in crushing the protests. He postponed a rally in the capital yesterday after police dispersed demonstrators near Kibera, a slum area southwest of the city.

Condoleeza Rice has sent a mediator, and Kibaki says he’s ready to talk. Desmond Tutu has sat down with both leaders individually.

It looks like a tenuous political edifice could collapse.

Odinga campaigned against corruption among the urban poor. Kibaki has been in power since 2002 but stands for decades of political continuity.

He took over for Daniel arap Moi, a political ally who led the country from 1978. As a member of an ethnic minority, Moi agitated for a federal Kenya. Upon independence from Britain, however, he joined forces with the centralist Kenyan African National Union of Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu like Kibaki.

Odinga is the son of Kenyatta’s vice president. His relationships with Moi, Kenyatta’s son and Kibaki have been schizophrenic.

According to IFES, to become president, a candidate must hold a seat in parliament, win a plurality nationwide and garner 25 percent of votes in each of five of seven provinces. No results yet from the Kenyan election commission, but 2002 results from electoralgeography.com show that voting behavior was fairly polarized, except in the Rift Valley province. The region is Kenya’s most economically developed. Moi entered politics there, and Kenyatta brought him into cabinet in 1964 to earn the support of the area’s Kalenjin tribe.

Parliamentary elections use single-member plurality districts that are not necessarily of equal population. Researchers at the Univ. of Iowa geography department have a dated but interesting analysis of Kenya’s election districts and possible alternative arrangements.