Kenya's Past as Prologue

Description

During the run-up to Kenya's 2013 general elections, crucial political and civic questions were raised. Could past mistakes, especially political and ethnic-related violence, be avoided this time round? Would the spectre of the 2007 post-electoral violence positively or negatively affect debates and voting? How would politicians, electoral bodies such as the IEBC, the Kenyan civil society, and the international community weigh in on the elections? More generally, would the 2013 elections bear witness to the building up of an electoral culture in Kenya, characterized by free and fair elections, or would it show that voting is still weakened by political malpractices, partisan opinions and emotional reactions? Would Kenya's past be inescapable or would it prepare the scene for a new political order? Kenya's Past as Prologue adopts a multidisciplinary perspective - mainly built upon field-based ethnography and a selection of case studies - to answer these questions. Under the leadership of the French Institute for Research in Africa (Institut français de recherche en Afrique, IFRA), political scientists, historians and anthropologists explore various aspects of the electoral process to contribute in-depth analyses of the last elections. They highlight the structural factors underlying election and voting in Kenya including the political system, culture and political transition. They also interrogate the short-term trends and issues that influence the new political order. The book provides insight into specific case studies, situations and contexts, thus bringing nuances and diversity into focus to better assess Kenya's evolving electoral democracy.

Sujets

• Politics Magazine
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Political Process

Informations

• Publié par: Twaweza Communications
• Date de parution: 16 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9789966028525
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

KENYA’S PAST AS PROLOGUE

V, V   2013 G E

EDITED BY Crisian hibon Marie-Aude Fouéré Mildred Ndeda Susan Mwangi

Kenya’s Past as Prologue: Voters, Violence and the 2013 General Election

EDITED BY Crisian hibon Marie-Aude Fouéré Mildred Ndeda Susan Mwangi

All rigs reserved. No par of is publicaion may be reproduced or uilized in any form or by any means, elecronic or mecanical, including poocopying, recording, or by any informaion sorage and rerieval sysem, wiou permission in wriing from e publiser.

© Copyrig IFRA, 2014

Published in 2014 by: Twaweza Communicaions Ld. P.O. Box 66872 - 00800 Weslands Twaweza House, Parklands Road Mpesi Lane, Nairobi Kenya websie: www.wawezacommunicaions.org Tel: +(254) 020 269 4409

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KENYA’S PAST AS PROLOGUEVOTERS, VIOLENCE AND THE 2013 GENERAL ELECTION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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13 27 42

56 77

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144 156 165

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190

211

232

247

Foreword

Acknowledgment Introduction: Kenya’s 2013 General Elections: A National Event Set Between ‘The Inescapable’ and ‘The Unforeseeable’

Kenyan Elections: When Does History Repeat Itself and Does Not Repeat Itself? The ICC, God and the 2013 Kenyan General Elections The 4 March 2013 General Elections in Kenya: From Latent Tension to Contained Violence Getting it ‘Wrong’, Again? Wahojiwa vs. Wapiga Kura in the 2013 Kenyan Election On the Political Integration of Minority Communities: The Ogiek of Eastern Mau Forest in the 2013 Elections Bishop Margaret Wanjiru and the 2013 Kenyan Elections, Between Politics of the Spirit and Expanding Entrepreneurship Role of Election Observers: Diplomatic Bias and the Findings of the Kenyan 2013 Election Negotiating History for Negotiated Democracy: The Case of Kisii County in 2013 Kenya Elections Twitting Votes: The Middle Class and the 2013 Elections in Kenya The Quest for New Political Leadership in the South Rift, Kenya KikuyuKalenjin Relations in IDP Camps and the 2013 Elections: An Invitation to ‘The’ Conversation Political Mobilization of Security and Violence by Vigilante Groups in Kisii county: Evaluation of Strategies in Kenya’s Elections 2013 New Constitution, Odingaism and the State of Internal Democracy in Orange Democratic Movement and its Effects on the 2013 Elections in Kenya Luo Women Voters/Aspirants and the New Constitutional Dispensation in the March 2013 General Elections in Kenya: The Case of Siaya and Kisumu Counties The Election Commission and the Supreme Court: Two New Institutions put to the Test by Elections “The Grassroots are very Complicated”: Marginalization and the Emergence of Alternative Authority in the Kenyan Coast 2013 Elections

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Kimani Njogu Katrin Siedel MarieEmmanuelle Pommerolle

Christian Thibon MarieAude Fouéré Susan Mwangi Mildred Ndeda Christian Thibon Hervé Maupeu Mathieu Mérino

Tom Wolf Lisa Fuchs

Yonatan Gez and Tanya Alvis

Mwongela Kamencu

Eric Rosana Masese

Patrick Mbataru Joseph Misati Akuma Susan Mwangi

Wycliffe Nyachoti Otiso

George Odhiambo Okoth and Gordon Onyango Omenya Mildred A.J. Ndeda

Marie Wolfrom

Ngala Chome

KENYA’S PAST AS PROLOGUEVOTERS, VIOLENCE AND THE 2013 GENERAL ELECTION

Foreword

General elections in Kenya have been moments of great expectations and social anxiety. They are tension packed, conict-ridden and passionate-driven processes not only because they offer the prospect of ushering in new sets of leaders and political visions but more so because they confer power and control over economic resources and social opportunities. They have the potential to facilitate transition to more democracy and economic transformation or, on the contrary, undermine social, political and economic change through patronage, corruption and autocratic governance. Academics can contribute to our understanding of such transformative moments through deep reection and knowledge sharing as has been done in this volume.

This book is a multi-disciplinary approach to the 2013 general election in Kenya. It carries research undertaken by Kenyan and French academics and seeks to provide insight into the event itself as well as factors and circumstances that shaped it. Methodologically, most of the papers adopted an ethnographic approach and relied on in-depth interviews and on-site participant observation. These approaches, combined with îeld studies and extensive literature review, provide the writers with the tools they require to share their reections on the key issues facing Kenyan politics. The volume builds on the growing body of literature on Kenyan general elections especially since the reintroduction of multiparty political engagement in 1991. The research project shows how voting is linked to identity, cooptation and patronage, power struggles and economic challenges.

The organizations involved in the production of this book – French Institute for Research in Africa, Afrique Contemporaine, Agence Française de Développement, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, De Boeck, and Twaweza Communications share the belief that although regular free and fair elections are not a sufîcient condition for the evolution of a democratic state, they are a necessary condition. They pave the way for the strengthening of governance institutions that buttress democratic practices.

Another volume on the 2013 general election will be released in 2015 through a partnership involving Twaweza Communications, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and the Goethe-Institut. The book comprises of multi-disciplinary reections by scholars based in Kenya. It looks at the drivers of the general election, sources of the mandate to lead and what needs to be done to make Kenyan electoral politics free, fair, inclusive and democratic. Taken together, the two volumes greatly enhance perspectives of the 2013 general election. We believe that this volume will open up important discussions on general elections in Kenya. It provides analyses and insights on the country’s history and increases our understanding of the political trajectory necessary for greater democracy.

MarieEmmanuelle Pommerolle IFRA

Katrin Seidel

Heinrich Böll Stiftung

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Kimani Njogu

Twaweza Communications

KENYA’S PAST AS PROLOGUEVOTERS, VIOLENCE AND THE 2013 GENERAL ELECTION

Acknowledgment

IFRAwishes to thank the French Embassy in Nairobi for supporting its research project on Kenya’s 2013 elections, notably îeldwork, seminars and publication. Former Cultural and Co-operation Counselor Jérémie Blin and Co-operation Attaché Sarah Ayito Nguema are deeply thanked for their continuous support. IFRA owes a great debt to the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Nairobi and its head Katrin Seidel, as well as to the French journalAfrique Contemporainethrough the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) for supporting this publication. Five articles of this edited volume were originally published in French inAfrique Contemporaine(2013/3, no. 247) and translated to English by the journal’s translators. Raphaël Jozan and Nicolas Court in greatly contributed to the journal’s editorial and scientiîc work, and this edited volumebeneîtted from their continuous help and advice. IFRA is indebted to De Boeck Supérieur for licensing the rights on these îve articles. This project would not have been possible without the commitment of Prof. Christian Thibon, IFRA’s former director, and Dr. Marie-Aude Fouéré, IFRA’s former deputy director. The project owes, too, a debt of gratitude to Prof. Mildred Ndeda from Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology and Dr. Susan Waiyego from Kenyatta University for their involvement. IFRA wishes to express their sincere thanks to the Director of Twaweza Communications, Kimani Njogu, for his enthusiastic and enduring support since the beginning of this project, as well as to all members of the Twaweza team. Finally, all the contributors to this book are thanked for their commitment, diligence and patience since the inception of the project.

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KENYA’S PAST AS PROLOGUEVOTERS, VIOLENCE AND THE 2013 GENERAL ELECTION

Introduction

Kenya’s 2013 General Election: A National Event Set Between ‘The Inescapable’ and ‘The Unforeseeable’

Christian Thibon

MarieAude Fouéré

Mildred Ndeda

Susan Mwangi

This volume is the fruit of joint research carried out by a group of academics drawn from the research network of theInstitut français de recherche en Afriqueor IFRA (French Institute for Research inAfrica). Most of them work in major Kenyan and French universities: some are doctoral students while others are junior or experienced scholars in the humanities and social sciences, mainly political science, history and anthropology. All of them were aware of the tremendous civic issues that were likely to arise during the March 2013 general election. They had also participated in research on the 2007 general elections and post-election violence, or witnessed them as Kenyan citizens or foreign observers. Questions such as whether past mistakes could be avoided this time and what new faces might emerge after the presidential election results were foremost in their minds. They were therefore convinced that a national event of such signiîcance in Kenya’s history 1 and political life was a crucial research topic that needed to be both explored and explained. Their research was completed a few weeks after the vote and thus does not take into account the impact of the Westgate terrorist attack in September 2013 on the Kenyan political scene.

This publication testiîes to the desire to build a research program capable of offering insight into the recent past – by deînition a complex past that calls for an approach at once narrative and explanatory. Exploring the recent past requires understanding the event – or its “momentum” – without, however, being able to view events from the distance normally demanded of the researcher or simply adopting a linear historical, cultural and structural perspective. Integrating all the necessary explanatory factors into an historical analysis can indeed be difîcult at times. And in giving primacy to these explanatory factors, one tends to lose sight of the possibility of accidental trends, disruptions and discontinuities, commonly regarded as deceptive or delusive. All in all, the approach adopted in this volume situates the contingency of the event between the inescapable and the unforeseeable (Rémond, 1984). The general election, by nature a conicting and passionate

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KENYA’S PAST AS PROLOGUEVOTERS, VIOLENCE AND THE 2013 GENERAL ELECTION

process, took place in a heated environment characterised by attempts to make political, partisan, ideological, media and even academic headway. At the same time, they sought to rectify previous political mistakes and justify the need to forgive and forget, a discussion that was – and still is – indispensable for the country as a whole.

The approach and methodologies used in this work are undeniably academic: researchers collected data on the successive phases of the electoral process (the campaign, the political debate, the post-election period) and on the various actors involved. They have undertaken an analysis of the election and its outcome from multiple points of view, paying special attention to their different – though usually intermingled – national, regional and local dimensions. Most of the contributions in this volume draw extensively on îndings obtained with ethnographic methods – in-depth interviews and on-site participant observation. They combine or compare these îndings with data from nationwide îeld studies and data-collection techniques such as polls and surveys as well as scholarly literature on the historical and political scene since Kenya’s independence, particularly the 1992 and 2007 general elections. Reections on colonial memory, especially as it relates to the land question and its attendant tensions, are also part of our understanding of the central issues at stake in Kenya.

Against electoral doommongering

The breaking news that constantly punctuated the election period together with the unknown factors and worrying scenarios that were widely discussed – notably the polarisation of Kenyan society – prompted the academic community and even more civil society, the government and the international community to focus their attention on the places and populations that were prone to radicalisation. These “hotspots”, as they are often called, were targeted as areas in which potential political and ethnic violence had to be managed or controlled. These shared pessimistic scenarios were partly grounded in the trend towards electoral violence and its crescendo since 1992 as well as the workings of the political system and problems implementing the new national constitution. Due to the urgency and risks of the political situation, everyone, including the universities, felt compelled to take part in electoral monitoring. This broad-based engagement had its aws, however: it mostly resulted in a restrained, consensual interpretation of some situations and the distortion of others, as if they were viewed through a magnifying glass.

As a general rule, the sampling of observations gathered in this volume was made randomly. Despite insights into electoral sociology, the analysis lacks a representative sample of places and spaces of the various electoral constituencies, though this could still be done. Such a sample might have served as a useful database for estimating voting patterns based on early electoral results rather than on the results gathered at the polling stations after all the ballots had been cast. In other words, the assessment of voter choices and the electoral process, including electoral irregularities, could make use of other data besides the information obtained from nationwide exit polls (Ferree, Gibson and Long, 2014). We were aware of this gap and did not wish to fall into the trap of catastrophism that had characterised the predominant view of Kenya in the media and among academics during the previous election. More often than not, elections in Kenya and in Africa generally tend to bring out and intensify latent political crises rather than opportunities to overcome them. The research presented here set out to look at the elections differently, tracking the events in two distinct yet complementary directions.

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KENYA’S PAST AS PROLOGUEVOTERS, VIOLENCE AND THE 2013 GENERAL ELECTION

Navigating the inescapable and the unforeseeable

Firstly, the researchers adopted a critical approach that some readers may înd a bit cynical and pessimistic, in the sense that it tried to identify what we call “the inescapable” in the elections. This approach, which distinguishes between the objectives of academic research and political expertise, was focused on assessing the expected fault lines and disputes of the electoral campaign. It examines these issues at the local level in everyday practices, taking a close look at corruption, fraud, manipulation, etc., and at the national level through political actors (e.g. the ethnicising and politicising of identity, the use of violence to achieve strategic electoral goals, etc.). This second level could be called “the prisons oflongue durée”, to borrow the words of Fernand Braudel 2 (1958: 31). As explorers of electoral political life with its political elites and dynasties as well as its political entrepreneurs, researchers are familiar with the structural factors – deîned as stable elements over the long term – that weigh on the course of the electoral event, limiting and shaping the ways it unfolds.

Secondly, the approach took a more optimistic turn by paying attention to the overall trend and attempted to grasp what we call here “the unforeseeable”. It investigated the appeasing, or at least moderating, factors and hypotheses that might promise a happier election outcome. These factors include: cosmopolitan or mono-ethnic spaces, whether urban or rural; the crucial role of civil society; the signiîcance of new, emerging actors – social actors such as the middle class and institutional actors; information and communication technologies, notably social media like Twitter, Facebook and blogs; and lastly, the institutional or practical capacity to manage an election requiring voters to cast six separate ballots on the same day. This approach was pursued against the backdrop of a broad reection on whether Kenyan society could be considered an “electoral civilisation”, i.e. a civilisation featuring electoral civic practices and knowledge, in which voting is a peaceful act resulting from a historical process of self-restraint. Past experience and memory, particularly of 2007-2008 post-election violence, played a crucial role during the 2013 electoral year.

These choices did not preclude an interest in exploring the speciîc challenges facing certain sensitive places (“hotspots”) of the country. The sensitive areas are mostly peripheral, both in the geographical sense, i.e. the pastoral areas and semi-arid regions of the North and the Indian Ocean coast, and in terms of socio-cultural patterns (including in particular the marginalized populations, peoples and ethnic groups of Kenya). They also encompass historically identiîed ethno-political conict areas. This was especially the case of the Rift Valley. In view of the new ethno-political Jubilee alliance between Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, a Kikuyu and a Kalenjin respectively, most of these hotspotsde factolost their potential for conict.

The two-faceted approach being implemented by the IFRA research team became obvious at two interim programme meetings in January and February 2013. The îrst meeting was devoted to mapping the electorate and determining the relevance of opinion polls; the second centred on the ability of “soft power” to inuence the conduct of the elections. The group discussed the increasing concerted efforts in December 2012 and January 2013 to mobilise citizens in the central areas of Kenya on the issue of land policy (which had already been the case for the 2010 referendum), whereas the peripheral areas remained poorly mobilised. This joint reection enabled the research team to revise opinion poll projections that took only demographic data into account. The conclusions from the second meeting were more enigmatic. They addressed the likelihood of a

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KENYA’S PAST AS PROLOGUEVOTERS, VIOLENCE AND THE 2013 GENERAL ELECTION

calm election scenario under the management of civil society and several stakeholders. All these players seemed to tacitly agree that election-related ethnic and political violence loomed large over the election process and that it was crucial to avoid replaying the disputed electoral competition of 3 2007-2008 that had torn the country apart.

But this half-hearted analysis suggested a certain interpretation of Election Day and the post- election period as the country awaited the validation of the results by the Supreme Court. Indeed, the peaceful conduct of the elections, the absence of political confrontation which might well have arisen in such a highly polarised electoral campaign, the voting itself and the settlement of post-election disputes all came as a surprise to many observers and analysts – particularly in light of numerous reports of electoral fraud and the malfunctioning of election-related technology. The questions guiding the group’s collective observation therefore changed in the course of events, conîrming or rejecting the hypotheses formulated at the beginning of the electoral process. 4 This book brings together these observations-cum-analyses, written from July to October 2013, when the terrorist attack on Westgate and its management by the Kenyan government brought the electoral period to a close in an apparent movement of national unity that cut across party allegiances.

Exploring the particular to reach the general

Readers will encounter two different types of texts here. The îrst could be described as “impressionist”. These essays take stock of general or topical issues and highlight the structural factors underlying elections and voting in Kenya, as well as Kenya’s political system, culture and political transition process. They also examine new structural and short-term trends and the core issues at stake in the new political order. The second type of texts could be called “pointillist”. These chapters offer insights into speciîc case studies, situations and contexts and bring nuances and diversity into focus against the background of more systemic analyses in the “impressionist” texts.

The introductory contribution to the volume presents a broad overview of the elections, seen from a middle- or long-term perspective. It provides keys to understand the combination of factors that shaped the speciîc patterns of the 2013 general elections in Kenyan electoral history since 1963. The other contributions focus on speciîc, localised topics. They seek to explore the role of electoral strategies – of individuals, political parties or alliances – at the domestic level but also with regard to international stakes; political loyalties and routine patronage practices; the sense of belonging instilled along clan, ethnic or regional lines; generational and gender dynamics; and patterns of inclusion in and exclusion or marginalisation from the political system. At this stage, such an event-focused, locally grounded approach to the elections may not show how these last elections ît into the broader perspective of Kenya’s long-term electoral and political history. Nevertheless, they do provide us with rich empirical îndings that can serve as a basis for further – and later – theoretical reection on the signiîcance of the 2013 Kenyan elections – whether as a turning point, a mere continuation of the past, or a slight but real change – in Kenya’s history.

The research collection nevertheless remains incomplete, both in terms of the topics covered and perhaps even more in its monographic section. A number of books, special issues and articles published to date (notably Cheeseman, Lynch and Willis, 2014) can serve as a useful complements to make up for the lack of studies on certain issues, areas and stakeholders. This does not mean,

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