Political movements and coalition politics in Kenya: entrenching ethnicity

Abstract

Like most African countries, Kenya has faced enormous obstacles in building political parties that transcend individualistic, idiosyncratic and ethnically based politics. Throughout most of the post-colonial era, patronage and the division of political spoils helped Kenyan elites to manage the fissures of ethnicity. With the resumption of competitive politics since the early 1990s, the growth of political parties has remained stunted, hostage to the pervasiveness of coalitions-cum-political movements. These movements parade as parties, but they lack the inner organisational coherence and ideologies that would qualify them as genuine parties. Moreover, in the absence of fundamental constitutional changes that will establish stable competition and undo the legacy of strong executive power, political movements will persist as a fundamental feature of ethnic mobilisation. In the short to medium term these movements furnish a modicum of political stability, but in the long term they contain the seeds of ethnic conflagration on the lines that Kenya witnessed in the 2007 elections.