Ethnic minorities wedged up in post-election violence in Kenya: a lesson for African governments

Abstract

On 27 December 2007, some ten million Kenyans went to the polls in what were generally anticipated to be the most hotly contested and close-run presidential, parliamentary and civic elections in the country's 45 years since emerging from British colonial rule. The register of voters had been swelled since the previous elections by new registrations, many of them young, first-time voters. The Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) had therefore doubled the number of voting stations to 27 555, and arranged in some 20 000 polling centres. President Kibaki trailed most of the time and only started catching up well into the vote tallying exercise. He was ultimately declared the winner (by an extra 231 728 votes over the Orange Democratic Movement's [ODM] candidate, Raila Odinga) in the late afternoon of 30 December 2007, and then hurriedly sworn in, notwithstanding raucous protests that the results had been rigged. These protests and an ODM press conference were abruptly silenced by a news blackout and summary security clampdown as armed soldiers bustled candidates, party agents, diplomats and domestic as well as international observers out of the Kenyatta International Conference Center where the tallying process was taking place. Some observers were astounded, others who had been allowed into the tally centre were visibly incensed by what they regarded as evidence of malfeasance on the part of the ECK, committed in their very presence. An upward adjustment of already announced results from some populous pro-Kibaki constituencies, ostensibly favouring the president, fanned the flames of suspicion. Televised utterances by the ECK's Chairman, Samuel Kivuitu, only served to make matters worse, as did a hurriedly composed media statement released by four of the 22 commissioners, commenting on the twist of events and calling for calm. Widespread and often ethnically motivated violence erupted and rapidly spread to various parts of the country. (1) Shaken by the turn of events a day after he had announced the incorrect results of the presidential elections, Kivuitu divulged that he did not even know who had won the elections. This further complicated the already muddled situation. Kibaki's move to replace some members of the ECK merely days before the elections--an action which had caused an outcry from ODM politicians--was now understood as a pre-planned approach to ultimately rig the elections. Raila Odinga, who had foreseen this taking place even before the elections, had warned the president on the dangers of attempting to rig the outcome. The post-election violence seemed to confirm suspicions that the aggression had been pre-planned in the event that the ODM lost the elections despite attempts at rigging the results. Violence greeted the country with a magnitude hitherto inconceivable to many Kenyans, and to the external world that had known the country as an island of peace. From 29 December 2007, following a delay in the announcement of the contested results, to 29 February 2008, when the two key principals--Mwai Kibaki (President) and Raila Odinga (Prime Minister, hereafter PM)--signed the national peace accord, the country was burning. It all started in Kisumu, the home town of the PM, and parts of the Rift Valley Province, with his supporters convincingly arguing that their presidential candidate had won, and that the PNU had engineered the results. Odinga's supporters therefore turned their antagonism on the Kikuyu, Kamba (because one of the presidential candidates, Kalonzo Musyoka, who was later to be appointed Vice President, had transferred his support to the PNU), and Kisii, among other minor ethnic groupings that were thought to support the PNU. Mobs looted these ethnic groupings' properties and evicted the people, branding them thieves and renegades. Approximately 1 200 people died within the two months when carnage and arson raged through the country. More than 350 000 people were displaced, with most of them being accommodated in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs). …