KENYA: A Wrong Display of Anger, But Who is to Blame?

By Panther Alier

January 11, 2008 — On December 27th—I was waiting with great anxiety; the kind of feeling one has when waiting for a clean bill of health from a doctor, to see who won the Kenya’s presidential election. I had heard that the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, had promised Muslims in North Eastern Kenya a rule of their own belief: the Sharia law (religious law) in the region once elected president of Kenya. That just turned me right off. He was already bringing trouble to Kenya, since this meant a two competing laws in a country much smaller than its northern-bordering country: Sudan. Sudan has been a victim of this evil law for decades and I would hate to see the country I love, second to my country of birth, go down the same pass.

By now, you should know who I am on their side. So the tallying began and the results were disappointing; the then incumbent president Mwai Kibaki was trailing by about 400,000 votes and it was 75% reporting. At this stage I got naïve and thought no magic would do president Kibaki any good any more. I would like to give you some references, but the sensitivity of the issue has made it even harder to obtain hand-on staff so I hope you can just bear with me. Besides, I am sure many of you were all also watching and following the Kenya’s election so carefully.

But, the next thing you know was president Mwai Kibaki closing the gap and declared the winner and, in no time, was sworn in as the next president of Kenya. In fact, before these sequences of events, the presidents’ constituency was held back to save him from the grave he was about to enter in. At this point if you were “a political detective” you would have a genuine reason to file a report!

Few hours later, there were claims of votes rigging; followed by violence Kenya has never seen. No one anticipated the scale of this violence, not even the president himself. The guilt of having destroyed their beloved country can be inferred from the chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya, Mr. Samuel Kivuitu, when he said “‘I wish to say I did not submit this report or authorise my name to be used for its publication. The use of my name is a falsification,’” http://allafrica.com/stories/200801101134.html

Nevertheless, things got to a point of no return. There were calls of ethnic cleansing by the media and the opposing parties were calling it genocide. The churchgoers where hellgoers at this point: always a good reason to keep God away from politics. The spirit of African communality was broken, not once, but many times. Kikuyus became Kikuyus and Luos became Luos and so many other uncounted tribes became them. But, my own analysis to the dead in Kenya does not spare Kenya’s police and the army. On what side were they? This is a question that only the Kenyans can answer. And this is a reason why I do not believe entirely on politics of tribalism being portrayed. I wish I have a courage to say what happened in Kenya was a right anger displayed wrongly and fell on wrong individuals victims, being Kikuyu or Luo or any other different ethnics people that go hurt by the aftermath of the Kenya’s election.

The author is a graduate student studying Masters’ degree in Sustainable International Development at Brandeis University. He can be reached at [email protected]