Kenya: A Landmark Presidential Election
Free of violence and corruption, Kenya could continue to set a course for the New Africa. Or not.
Continuing my pledge that Andelman Unleashed will chronicle every presidential or national leadership election around the world this year, we are turning this week to the presidential election in Kenya. Next up: Angola on August 24.
UPDATING: The Kenya Supreme Court has ruled (7 am EDT / 2 pm Nairobi) on Monday September 5) that William Samuel Arab Ruto has been elected Kenya’s president, rejecting all eight petitions from supporters of his challenger Raila Amolo Odinga. The confirmation of Ruto’s victory was issued by Chief Justice Martha Koome who said it was a unanimous decision of the court’s seven judges. She added that no credible evidence had been presented that the electronic voting transmission system had been tampered with by "a middle man" and that Ruto had won at least “50%+1” of the nationwide vote.
For the 57 years since Kenya won its independence from Britain, three dynasties have ruled. But it is the Kenyattas who for nearly half that period ruled this dominant nation of East Africa. Jomo Kenyatta was the father of his country—one of Africa's greatest anti-colonial heroes who then became his new nation's president from its birth in December 1964 until his death in office in 1978. His son Uhuru came along a generation later.
National elections last Tuesday marked the debut of what at first blush seems to be a landmark transition—one without bloodshed and by all appearances with little of the deep corruption that has marked previous presidential transitions: from Jomo Kenyatta to the 24-year rule of Daniel arap Moi, to his successor for a decade, Mwai Kibaki, finally to his successor Uhuru Kenyatta whose 10-year rule has come to a term-limited end.
Now for the first time, Kenya has chosen—narrowly and only after six days of tension while 14 million votes were tallied in 46,232 voting places from remote jungle villages to the modern, sprawling capital of Nairobi—a new president with few ties to the past. William Samuel Arap Ruto, 55 years old, who once hawked live chickens and who served as vice president under Uhuru Kenyatta, will be Kenya's new leader with 50.5% of the vote. Unless the tally is overturned in the courts.
He defeated, narrowly, Raila Amolo Odinga, the 77-year-old son of Kenya's first vice president, who was standing for his fifth try and what he has said was his last try for the presidency whose official tally was 48.9%.
Tuesday morning, after the results were announced, Odinga declared the election “null and void,” said he would appeal the outcome to Kenya’s Supreme Court, but urged his supporters to “let no one take the law into their own hands.” There had been some scattered protests particularly in some of Odinga’s strongholds overnight, but so far none of the large scale rioting that has marked some previous contested elections in Kenya.
Last Tuesday, 65% of the nation's eligible voters went to the polls in what appeared to be the first truly successful election in decades. Of course, success is relative and depends heavily on how you define it—especially in a Kenyan or even a broader African context. Author and political commentator Nanjala Nyabola told Reuters that the lack of violence should not be the standard for a success. "People are just looking for the absence or presence of violence and as a Kenyan it's a really demoralizing standard to be told we should only aspire to the bare minimum," she said. "We are trying to hold ourselves to a higher standard."
But as the final results were being announced, chaos did break out at the National Tally Center, the vice chairwoman and three commissioners of the electoral commission telling journalists gathered to hear the results that they were unable to support the "opaque nature" of the process. “We cannot take ownership of the result that is going to be announced,” vice chair Juliana Cherera said. Police were pressed into action to control the crowds who surged into the center. The split in the commission came after Odinga’s chief representative said his party could not verify the results and made allegations of “electoral offenses," without elaborating. The hope is that the kinds of violence that has left hundreds dead in the wake of previous elections can be avoided. There was scattered violence, however, as word spread of Ruto’s victory and supporters of Odinga burned tires in the streets.
Cherera, the vice chair of the voting commission, herself urged all sides to pursue any disputes through the courts rather than in the streets. Odinga is expected to take his loss to the courts, which have annulled previous elections that demonstrated flagrant irregularities. He has seven days to file his challenge and the Supreme Court has 14 more days to rule. This time, however, international monitors, particularly from the European Union, pronounced the voting as largely free and fair.
The complex, at times chaotic vote counting mechanism began at the level of polling places and extended to the National Tallying Center known as Bomas run by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, where the military was called in to restore order after scuffles broke out briefly last week. Indeed, its twitter page pleads in Swahili, "Dumisha amani kabla na baada ya Uchaguzi" (maintain peace before and after the Election).
A peaceful transition is important on so many levels—as an object lesson to other African nations still burdened by the seizure of power and leadership of military juntas, not to mention corrupt politicians, all too often prepared to sell out their nations' birthrights to the highest bidder. These days that is all too often Russia or more frequently China, both of whom arrived in Africa in recent years with the singular intention of looting the continent of its lush resources, strategic location or both. In other words, latter day and scarcely enlightened colonial powers themselves.
Above all, Kenya has been, and increasingly demonstrates itself to be, a paragon of stability and prosperity—in a dangerous, corrupt and impoverished neighborhood, surrounded by such problematic even failing states as Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania. Kenya and its president Kenyatta are leading a process jointly with Angola as well as Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to open a dialogue with armed rebel groups that have been sweeping through large stretches of the latter countries. Indeed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on a visit to Rwanda last week that "President Kenyatta has now been designated by the East African Community to carry on that mission, even when he is no longer in office as president of Kenya." Blinken added that "President Lourenço from Angola is also very engaged."
Lourenço himself will be standing for re-election in Angola on August 24 in what is shaping up to be a highly-charged contest—described by the Foreign Policy Research Institute as "the most competitive in Angola’s post-independence history." Come back here in 10 days to follow this next presidential contest.
The Economist rightly calls Kenya "the third most important democracy in sub-Saharan Africa," (after Nigeria and South Africa) which considering their checkered history isn't saying much, but is still worth preserving. A number of western corporations and organizations including Google's parent Alphabet, BASF, Bosch, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Diageo, General Electric, IBM, Intel, Nestlé, Nokia, Pfizer , Sony, Toyota, Visa, as well as the World Bank and several United Nations units have all chosen Nairobi for their regional headquarters.
For all these reasons, this transition of power in Kenya should be of deep interest to the United States and to much of Europe, which until the second half of the last century ruled vast stretches and innumerable nations of Africa as colonial powers themselves.
Last week's presidential election in Kenya has pitted not only families and tribes against each other but generations as well. On the one side was Ruto, the outgoing vice president of Kenya. On the other, a generation older, was Odinga. The last time, five years ago, Kenyatta ran with Ruto on the same ticket as his vice president before falling out with him. Now, apparently counting on being able to continue behind-the-scenes power of the Kenyatta dynasty, he endorsed Odinga. In the end, even in Kenya—or especially in Kenya—deep-seated tribalism is still a very potent force indeed. But clearly, given the success of Ruto, membership in a rival was not enough to keep him from a win at the polls. The first hint that the final vote-count for the presidency would be for Ruto came Sunday when his fellow party leader Johnson Sakaja, won the governorship of the capital Nairobi, the wealthiest and most densely populated of the nation's 47 counties.
At least some of the reason for Ruto’s victory may be Kenyatta's own toxic legacy—a nation burdened by debt from extensive infrastructure projects, many of Chinese origin, and a still-corrupt bureaucracy that has permeated all facets of the government at every level. Lately, sharply rising food and fuel prices in the wake of the war in Ukraine and blockade of shipping there has only multiplied the widespread discontent. According to the World Food Program, at least 3.5 million Kenyans are at risk of outright starvation as a result of the blockade of Ukrainian grain, a situation that could be eased by the first dispatch to Africa of a grain-carrying ship from a Ukrainian port last week.
Until this election when there were widespread breaks in this pattern, suggesting the broad discontent, Kenyans have demonstrated repeatedly their proclivity for voting along tribal lines. Uhuru Kenyatta and his father are Kikuyus. So, comprising a dominant 20% of the nation's 53 million, the Kenyatta support for Odinga should have been enough to assure him of the win that he was persuaded he was deprived of four times before by corruption or related violence.
The Kikuyus have no candidate among the four vying officially for the presidency—an unprecedented occurrence. But they did have a vice presidential candidate, Martha Karua, seen as honorable and principled, who would have been not only be the first woman vice president in the nation's history but also next in line should Odinga, hardly in the best of the health, have succumbed to the demands of office. As an added insurance policy, no matter what happens at the polls or in the aftermath, Kenyatta was likely to be slotted in as chairman of the ruling party under an Odinga presidency. So, while Odinga is from the Luo tribe along the shores of Lake Victoria, his people combined with the Kikuyus around Mount Kenya, remain a potent political force, even now in opposition. By contrast, Ruto is a member of the Kalenjin tribe in the remote Rift Valley.
"I sold chickens at a railway crossing near my home as a child," Ruto once said. "I paid (school) fees for my siblings. God has been kind to me, and through hard work and determination, I have something." That something is a fortune now said to run into millions of dollars, with investments ranging from hotels, real estate and insurance to a vast chicken farm.
Along the way through government service as Minister of Agriculture, Home Affairs and Higher Education, Ruto assembled his own political army. It now crosses tribal and geographic lines across the nation, penetrating villages and cities, even into the capital of Nairobi whose principal thoroughfare as well as its international airport is named for Kenyatta. The core of that army, transcending tribal lines, is the nation's youth in a nation with a median age of 20 and its endemically poor underclass. It's to them he has appealed throughout the campaign. Calling himself a "hustler," having risen from impoverished beginnings, along with Kenyatta he managed to avoid conviction by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for masterminding the violence that erupted after the elections of 2007, leaving 1,100 Kikuyu dead. Most witnesses simply did not materialize.
Harvard professor Robert I. Rotberg believes that it is issues like these that compel the creation of an entirely new entity, an International Court of Corruption, noting in his Robert's Conflict Mitigation Newsletter that both Kenyatta and Ruto, "the latter especially, have grown immensely wealthy while in office," with Ruto owning "swaths of land, several hotels, and a major chicken-processing factory, while his vice presidential running mate,” Rotberg continues, is "accused of having misappropriated or purloined nearly $2 million." Still, Ruto’s appeal has been significant to his electorate, though it is not always reliably prepared to turn out and vote. Fewer than half of the 5 million new voters that the nation's electoral commission had hoped to register actually signed up.
A third candidate was the one considered possible to throw the election into a runoff. In the end, George Wajackoyah, with his bizarre platform of legalizing marijuana and exporting hyena testicles to China for their medicinal value, appealed to a far smaller minority than early polling suggested.
Then there are the other powerful forces at home but especially abroad. Foremost among them is China. With the economy in desperate shape, a top scapegoat has been China and especially the deep ties the Kenyatta regime seems to have built with Beijing. “Chinese nationals are roasting maize and selling mobile phones. We will deport all of them,” Ruto pledged at an economic forum in June as the campaign was heating up. Chinese funding has also been behind several large, visible public works projects including the staggering $4.7 billion Standard Gauge Railway linking the capital with the port of Mombasa as well as the billion-dollar Nairobi Expressway.
If Kenya cannot repay these loans, it is unclear but potentially breathtaking what the next steps might be. In the case of nearby Djibouti, unable to repay Chinese largesse, Beijing simply took over a strategic port dominating the Horn of Africa right next door to the American military's Camp Lemonnier. Of course, China continues to make nice, for the moment. Earlier this year, visiting Nairobi, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi rejected the “debt trap” accusations as "malicious hype-up by some people," dismissing Kenya's debts to China as "mainly concessional loans."
It will be up to the new president to resolve such issues, and more, for which mammoth temptations loom in a society that has hardly proven itself immune from the lure of corruption at a scale unimaginable in the West. What is essential, however, is that all of Kenya's partners and friends do their best to make certain that the behavior of its leaders is carefully monitored and clearly disclosed. Only then is it possible for all these improvements to make a real difference among the Kenyan people who installed them in office in the first place.