Causes and Consequences of Post-Election Violence in Kenya

The study investigates the relationship between Kenya's electoral management system and post-election violence, which has persisted despite numerous reforms since the country's independence in 1963. The primary aim was to identify structural issues within the electoral administration that contribute to violence following elections. The research analyzed key components of the electoral management system and the causes of post-election violence. Utilizing consociationalism theory, voting theory, and rational choice theory, the study employed a historical design with both qualitative and quantitative methods. The research was conducted from July to December 2022. The target population included eligible voters (260), politicians (50), IEBC officials (40), political analysts (60), humanitarian-aid organizations representatives (10), local election observers (5), international election observers (5), security personnel (10), and county administrative staff (10). A stratified random sampling method was employed to collect data using both questionnaires and interviews. The targeted population established the strata of 641,396, and a random sample was taken from each stratum, arriving at a sample size of 450 respondents. The findings revealed that Kenya's electoral system is primarily based on the First Past the Post (FPTP) model, which is a plurality/majority system. The study identified several key factors contributing to post-election violence, including the "winner-takes-all" nature of elections, disputes over election results due to perceived bias in the electoral management body, and voter incitement by politicians. A statistically significant correlation was established between the electoral management system and post-election violence (β=.685, t = 16.225, Sig. =.000). The findings indicated that the self-interest and impunity of political leaders, along with ethnic divisions and mistrust, hinder the IEBC's ability to conduct fair and credible elections. A significant association was also found between the causes and consequences of post-election violence (β=.757, t = 19.088, Sig. =.000). The study recommends exploring alternative electoral systems, such as proportional representation and mixed-member models, to promote inclusivity and fair representation. By establishing a connection between the electoral management system and post-election violence, this research contributes to peace and conflict studies, addressing a relatively understudied area in Kenya and the broader region.

During and after the 2007/8 post-election violence in Kenya, media monitors, human rights groups, politicians and journalists accused sections of the Kenyan media - notably local vernacular radio stations - of broadcasting messages of hate and inciting ethnic hatred and violence. Some observers went so far as to suggest that certain radio stations had acted like the infamous Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in Rwanda, during the 1994 genocide. This article looks at the context of the violence, the inflammatory and at times violent nature of political discourse in Kenya, the role in that discourse of vernacular radio stations, and the ways in which we identify and define hate broadcasting and propaganda. The behaviour of the stations is viewed in the context of Kenya's political environment, language of political discourse, and media structure and history.

For a long period, Kenya was rightfully branded “Island of Peace” in the tumultant Eastern Africa Region. After the December, 2007 General Elections, the country plunged into civil war and rebellion especially in the region west of the great rift valley. Provinces located in the region: Rift Valley, Nyanza and Western witnessed: murder, looting, eviction, rape, arson, burning of food and food stores, destruction of homes, animals and crops, emotional harassment and other kinds of human abuse. Most survivors ended up in concentration camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Effects of what happened between December 2007 and February 2008 were felt not only in the whole of Kenya but the entire Eastern Africa Region and beyond. At the intervention of the United Nations Organization through their previous and current secretaries, Dr. Kofi Anan and Dr. Ban Ki Moon respectively, a peace accord between the warring camps: Party of National Unity (PNU) and Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) was signed. Although many IDPs have been resettled, the talk of the day in Kenya is Forgiveness for peace building to enhance acceptance. Forgiveness is most associated with religious faiths. Within the secular realm, the term amnesty obtains. Regardless of whether we opt for forgiveness or amnesty, various challenges are anticipated. This paper attempts to provide an understanding of the post-election violence in Kenya with a view to find ways to contribute to the peace building challenge. The paper is divided into seven parts. The first part deals with the concept of peace followed in the second part by an elucidation of some peace theories. Importantly, each theory provides a basis upon which critical reflection and observation regarding the post-election violence in Kenya are made. The third portion of the paper deals with some vivid causes of the violence. This diagnosis is logically followed by the fourth part which addresses the role of the church in enhancing forgiveness and neighbourly love as a panacea for peace. In the fifth section, a discussion on the amnesty dilemma is undertaken followed by the sixth section containing conclusions to the discussions. The seventh section contains suggestions on the way forward. It is recommended that the grand-coalition government should encourage forgiveness and reconciliation among all Kenyans in order to attain lasting peace. Key words: Conflict, peace building, forgiveness, amnesty.

BackgroundAs a contribution to ongoing research addressing sexual violence in war and conflict situations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Rwanda, this paper argues that the way sexual violence intersects with other markers of identity, including ethnicity and class, is not clearly articulated. Male circumcision has been popularized, as a public health strategy for prevention of HIV transmission, although evidence of its efficacy is disputable and insufficient attention has been given to the social and cultural implications of male circumcision.MethodsThis paper draws from media reporting and the material supporting the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court case against four Kenyans accused of crimes against humanity, to explore the postelection violence, especially forcible male circumcision.ResultsDuring the postelection violence in Kenya, women were, as in other conflict situations, raped. In addition, men largely from the Luo ethnic group were forcibly circumcised. Male circumcision among the Gikuyu people is a rite of passage, but when forced upon the Luo men, it was also associated with cases of castration and other forms of genital mutilation. The aim appears to have been to humiliate and terrorize not just the individual men, but their entire communities. The paper examines male circumcision and questions why a ritual that has marked a life-course transition for inculcating ethical analysis of the self and others, became a tool of violence against men from an ethnic group where male circumcision is not a cultural practice.ConclusionThe paper then reviews the persistence and change in the ritual and more specifically, how male circumcision has become, not just a sexual health risk, but, contrary to the emerging health discourse and more significantly, a politicized ethnic tool and a status symbol among the Gikuyu elite. In the view of the way male circumcision was perpetrated in Kenya, we argue it should be considered as sexual violence, with far-reaching consequences for men's physical and mental health.

Culture encompasses, without being reducible to, values and norms that underpin a people's way of thinking and doing things. Development on the other hand can be analyzed as any progression toward a goal. If this is the case then we instantly appreciate the nexus between the two concepts. A community will have a certain perception of the world (culture) and how it would like to transform that world to its own good (development) through various initiatives and processes. Some scholars argue that development should be anchored in a people's culture. It cannot be brought to them from the outside because that would be someone else' idea of development (Boukary 2003). Others might argue that development can be introduced from outside to create awareness, then the culture of the people accommodates and domesticates it. In market studies terms, development should be a felt need by a community to develop a product in the case of the first theory or a product introduced into the market that people learn to appreciate in the latter scenario. We believe the two models are complementary. This paper discusses the concepts of culture and development with respect to the post-election violence in Kenya that left 1,200 people dead and another 400,000 displaced from their homes. We recast the violence within the wider context of the history, cultural diversity and economics of Kenya. How can an island of peace for 45 years plunge into senseless killings overnight that negate a sound development record of 7% GDP growth? Key words : culture, development, violence, ethnicity, values

BackgroundFollowing the declaration that President Mwai Kibaki was the winner of the Kenyan presidential election held on December 27, 2007, a period of post-election violence (PEV) took place. In this study, we aimed to identify whether the period of PEV in Kenya was associated with systematic changes in sexual assault case characteristics.Methods and FindingsMedical records of 1,615 patients diagnosed with sexual assault between 2007 and 2011 at healthcare facilities in Eldoret (n = 569), Naivasha (n = 534), and Nakuru (n = 512) were retrospectively reviewed to examine characteristics of sexual assault cases over time. Time series and linear regression were used to examine temporal variation in case characteristics relative to the period of post-election violence in Kenya. Key informant interviews with healthcare workers at the sites were employed to triangulate findings. The time series of sexual assault case characteristics at these facilities were examined, with a specific focus on the December 2007–February 2008 period of post-election violence. Prais-Winsten estimates indicated that the three-month period of post-election violence was associated with a 22 percentage-point increase in cases where survivors did not know the perpetrator, a 20 percentage-point increase in cases with more than one perpetrator, and a 4 percentage-point increase in cases that had evidence of abdominal injury. The post-election violence period was also associated with an 18 percentage-point increase in survivors waiting >1 month to report to a healthcare facility. Sensitivity analyses confirmed that these characteristics were specific to the post-election violence time period.ConclusionThese results demonstrate systematic patterns in sexual assault characteristics during the PEV period in Kenya.

The post-election violence in Kenya in December 2007 through to April 2008 was reported extensively but erratically in the British media. While BBC News Online, the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent gave regular coverage with online updates on their websites, other mass circulation media like Sky, the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail were more sparing in their coverage. But a common factor to all was a tendency to rely on simple, all-encompassing descriptive and analytical language to frame the reporting of the conflict – focusing on tribal and ethnic issues to the virtual exclusion of broader and deeper analyses of factors involved. This paper examines the coverage and compares and contrasts that coverage with some of the more thoughtful and in-depth analyses produced by experienced journalists and academics. The paper looks, too, at the journalistic processes and habits that may have led to this concentration on, in particular, the “tribal” and ethnic explanations of the violence. The study will draw on an analysis, quantitative and qualitative, of the content of British media coverage from December 2007 to April 2008 and on the author's first-hand experience of covering Africa as a BBC journalist and a writer for specialist African publications over 30 years.

Violence between various ethnic groups when sudden and out of context may not be about ethnicity at all. In this paper I seek to unveil the causes of the violence in Kenya after the 2007 elections by examining Kenya’s economic and political history. I begin, in Section I, with a brief overview of the post-election violence in Kenya, noting the overly simplistic approach taken by many Western Media sources in pointing to ethnic hatred as the root cause of this violence. In Section II, I review the history of Kenya’s economy during colonialism, and the level of inequality among Africans under the colonial regime. Next, in Section III, I explain the independence movement in Kenya, noting that the Luo and Kikuyu represented the two major poles of influence in the anti-colonialist movement. In Section IV, I then document how ethnicity politics came to dominate Kenya’s post-colonial political economy, first with Kenyatta and then with Moi. In Section V analyze ethnicity politics, arguing that the colonial policies set the stage for a competition over resources, which evolved into ethnic competition. Finally, in Section VI, I reassess the conflict in Kenya by incorporating Kenya’s economic and social history and the nature of ethnic politics. I conclude that ethnicity is only a superficial cause of the violence in Kenya, and that fundamentally the violence is the result of an inadequate state capacity to ensure the basic needs of its citizens. In Section VII I summarize the historical factors that have influenced the violence in Kenya.

In a multi-party democracy, it is expected from both the elected and appointed government officials at all levels of the political system to render periodic accounts of their stewardship to the population. There has been recurring post-election violence in Kenya due to disputed elections. The announcement of the disputed 2007 presidential election results in Kenya on December 27th, 2007 led to what could be described as the worst political crisis in Kenyan postcolonial history. This study was guided by the following specific objectives; to assess the effect of Candidate Registration System (CRS) on the credibility of the Electoral System in Nairobi County and to evaluate the effect of Results Transmission System (RTS) on the credibility of the Electoral System in Nairobi County. The study was anchored on Technology Acceptance Theory and employed a descriptive research design. The target population was 2,251,929 registered voters in Nairobi County and 40 Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, technical officials. A sample size of 351 respondents was used determined using Fisher’s (2007) formula. Primary data for this study was collected using structured questionnaires. The analysis involved both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. The inferential results showed a positive correlation of (r=0.554, p=0.000) between Candidate Registration System (CRS) and credibility of electoral systems. Findings on Results Transmission System (RTS) and credibility of electoral systems showed a positive correlation of (r=0.648, p=0.000). Furthermore there was a significant effect between Candidate Registration System (CRS) and credibility of electoral systems (?=.152, p=0.000), and on Results Transmission System (RTS) and credibility of electoral systems (?=.155, p=0.000). The study concluded that Candidate Registration System (CRS) and Results Transmission System (RTS) are critical in producing high-quality, tamper resistant voter ID cards and electoral results. The study recommends that there should be adequate policy and strict protocols for supervision, management, transmission and storage ofelectoral data.

Violent place-making: How Kenya's post-election violence transforms a workers' settlement at Lake Naivasha

This article explores the peacebuilding contribution of the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), following the post-2007 election violence in Kenya. Faith-based organizations are increasingly taking an active role in peacebuilding in conflict prone and affected societies. The paper presents research findings that the NCCK perceived that it was positively involved in areas of humanitarian assistance and building of bridges among communities divided by the violence. The paper contextualizes the triggers or the causes of the post-election violence in Kenya after the December 2007 elections and offers suggestions for peaceful co-existence.

Forced male circumcision has not yet been recognized as a specific gendered human rights abuse in international humanitarian law. This article takes the first step towards assessing these acts by considering them in the context of post-election violence in Kenya in 2007. This case allows for the exploration of how forced male circumcision was used in a context of political violence and militia-led—and often state-sanctioned—terror. The article thus considers multiple legal issues and concerns that arise from this sort of violence in different contexts. I situate the case within a larger framework of conventional understandings on gender and violence as a means to question them and render them problematic. Specifically, I argue that understanding sexual violence as exclusively targeting women prevents appropriate prosecution of forced male circumcisions in Kenya and of sexual violence against men more generally. Sexual violence against men involves forms of emasculation in which perpetrators seek to feminize their victims by rendering them weak, violated and passive, in contradistinction to stereotypical masculine ideals. If one's relationship to femininity is a crucial issue in sexual violence, whether the victims are men or women, then being able to properly account for cases like Kenya, in both a political and a legal sense, is crucial to legal accountability for sexual violence more broadly.

The 2007/8 post-election violence in Kenya brought the nascent Kenyan democracy to the brink of collapse. It anachronistically demonstrated that old ways of managing elections were being antiquated by new realities, such as a growing population, the need for technological support, and the immediacy of a supportive electoral legal regime. A decade and a half after the posthumous murder of Kenyans during the 2007 disputed election, Kenya is leapfrogging and sauntering to establish a vibrant democracy, albeit with specific challenges. Firstly, the presidential elections have been disputed thrice after the promulgation of the constitution in 2010. And secondly, the allegation of voter fraud against the electoral body is imminent. Further, public trust in the electoral body is low and has been so since the advent of pluralism politics in 1991. Besides, the electoral body gets overwhelmed by the number of elections they manage during the general elections, and technological failures have been a significant impediment. Ostensibly, these challenges compound an existing problem of mistrust among political players and gather moss, especially during the period between the end of the voting exercise and the announcement of presidential results by the electoral body. Erstwhile, such a fragile situation manifested and threatened public safety after the 2013, 2017, and 2022 general elections. However, despite scepticism, the finality of the supreme court process as an arbitrator of the disputed presidential elections has played a role in quelling violence and settling such matters. In this article, the author argues that the maturation of digital democracies and the incorporation of blockchain technologies can modernize grassroots elections and resolve allegations of voter fraud.

We study the impact of post election violence in Kenya on the food market ain Mombasa and find empirical evidence against predictions of high volatility of prices following violence. Using a data set of flour producing firm, we identity the degree of persistence in prices and quantities by means of techniques based on the concept of long term memory or long range dependence. Prices are found to be highly persistent in both wheat and maize flour, with orders of integration which are around 1 or even above 1, implying permanent effect of the shocks. On the contrary, quantities, though also persistent, appear to be fractionally integrated, with orders of integration in the interval (0, 0.5) pointing towards stationarity, long term memory mean reverting behaviour. Violence is associated with an insignificant increase in prices of both products and a significant decrease in quantities.

The significance of music as a healing agent permeates across the cultural spectrum. Hitherto, we find people of many cultures incorporating music to transform those unhealthy individuals into healthy ones. This paper extrapolates from the events that led to Kenya's post-election violence of 2007 and enumerates how a Kenyan community musician embraced the therapeutic qualities inherent in the cultural music of the Kenyan people to help the violence victims who developed post-traumatic stress disorder following the disputed elections. The story adds nuance to our understanding of how community musicians are still an invaluable therapeutic resource albeit their lack of professional training.