The Kenyan Electoral Crisis: Troubling Political Propaganda in an Intellectual Garb By Godwin R. Murunga

Troubling pieces of literature of varying levels of intellectual quality and credibility on the pre- and post-election developments in Kenya have come my way recently. None of these pieces has come with the supposed weight of an author as that by one, Peter Mwangi Kagwanja, formerly of International Crisis Group and now director in the Democracy and Governance research programme at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa, “where he leads research and analysis on policy and intellectual issues relating to peace, security, conflict and governance in Africa.” Kagwanja is the founder and president of the Nairobi-based Africa Policy Institute (API). His academic credentials provide something of iconic weight that should add value to the idea of a Policy Brief, which is what the document he authored titled “Breaking Kenya’s Impasse: Chaos or Courts” purports to be [the document can be downloaded at

http://africapi.org.temp.wadns.net/dnn/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx].

The document is however a badly-crafted and hardly disguised anti-ODM propaganda, couched in a language that reveals more by what it insinuates and fails to say than what is actually says. It is based on half truths, innuendo and a number of factual errors, and has the potential to embarrass board members of the API many of whom are solid scholars with consistent pro-democracy records. Above all, the document is a mockery of the idea of a Policy Brief and should not at any rate hoodwink the international community that it aims to inform. Fortunately, its first reading in the UK was in a forum most likely to be frequented by sober Kenyanists who have written their own versions of the post-election situation that contrast markedly with Kagwanja’s vain and ahistorical defence of the status quo [see, for instance, John Lonsdale’s “Kenya: Ethnicity, Tribe, and State” at

http://www.opendemocracy.org/article/democracy_power/kenya_ethnicity_tribe_state].

Ultimately, it should be easy to see through the embarrassing effort Kagwanja makes to defend Kibaki’s illegitimate usurpation of the presidency. This fact alone commands the tacit support of most consistent pro-democracy activists and governance analysts. It would have been expected that as a director of a democracy and governance programme, Kagwanja would have made greater effort to see beyond the blinkers that cloud him from taking a panoramic view, if for no other reason, then for the sake of maintaining the integrity of his research domain. Yet, he makes three major moves in his piece that are flatly designed to defend PNU to the hilt.

First, he tries to paint the ODM camp as a primordial movement engaged in an “ethnic assault on the civic Nation” that Kibaki has ably governed. This dichotomy between the ethnic and the civic is not innocent. It is not simply meant to give the moral high ground to Kibaki, but also to foist a unilinear argument in which the modern is identified with Kibaki and the traditional with ODM; the picture of violence being associated with the latter and the threat of ODM’s leadership resting in their ability to re-traditionalise society by creating disorder. Thus, in strategic places, he throws in notions like “pre-modern chaos,” “tribal militia”, etc., to produce the desired ghastly effect in the western audience that he seems eager to address. Kagwanja perceives all the violence in pre-and post-election Kenya as emanating from ODM and directed against a defenceless, innocent and civil PNU; a coalition that is not only multi-ethnic in Kagwanja’s skewed narrative but one whose moral probity he elevates beyond reproach.

It does not matter to Kagwanja that six of Kenya’s eight provinces voted ODM and that of the remaining two, Kibaki only won convincingly in one province. That even the cosmopolitan Nairobi largely voted ODM are details Kagwanja considers too irrelevant to be discussed. It does not also matter to him that close to 80 per cent of Kibaki’s cabinet lost in the election and that close to half of PNU members of parliament come from the Mt. Kenya Region, Kibaki’s home base. My point is not to present contrasting examples to invalidate Kagwanja’s set of examples but to wonder aloud whether these facts can nuance Kagwanja’s interpretation in such a way that his idea of a Policy Brief becomes much more meaningful instead of remaining a simple polemic against ODM, Raila and the Kalenjin mafia?

Equally unimportant to Kagwanja is that ODM and its ally, NARC, command more seats in parliament than all the other parties combined. Finally, that all election observers agree that Kibaki’s win could only be a product of a massively flawed election and that only one group, the PNU, have seen the election as credible does not mean much for this Policy Brief. All respectable civil society organizations in Kenya have called the election into question including the Kenya Human Rights Commission where Kagwanja was once an associate researcher, Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, Mars Group Kenya, Centre for Democracy and Governance, etc. Previously credible observers like the European Union are all bundled up into a perceived conspiracy to misinform and favour ODM as Kagwanja argues that because the EU “entered the scene too late” they were unable to “grasp the intricate processes of electoral flaws that characterized Kenya’s protractedly and heavily mined electoral field.” Since the above-named local organizations were present throughout electioneering and they do not fit this conspiracy theory, Kagwanja does not mention them. Instead, he accuses the EU of “one-sided perspective” that might have contributed to “the almost nihilistic tendency to stoke rather than prevent fires arising from disputed elections in Africa.”  That the chairman of the electoral commission of Kenya is on record admitting that he did “not know whether Mr. Kibaki won the elections” is hardly convincing to Kagwanja. For him, all these can be explained through some conspiracy theorising in which only ODM is guilty of crimes against PNU.

Second, Kagwanja drums up the bogey of ‘ethnic mafia’ to puncture ODM’s appearance of a multi-ethnic movement and hopes to clinch the argument by re-introducing Moi as a factor that explains the violence that has engulfed the Rift Valley. There is no doubt that the Moi factor is important, but its forms of expression in the 2007 elections is left out of Kagwanja’s narrative [for a slightly better rendering of this, see Wandia Njoya’s “Daniel arap Moi: An Essential Link Between Kenya's Past and Painful Present” at www.zeleza.com]. Kagwanja’s main strategy is to demonise those around Raila in ODM as discredited and corrupted Kalenjin politicians and Raila himself as wedded to a violent political ethos. This was a huge PNU campaign argument which, coupled with the idea that an uncircumcised person cannot lead Kenyans, failed to convince voters in two thirds of Kenya and boomeranged against one of Raila’s main rival, Kalonzo Musyoka, of ODM Kenya who came a distant third in the elections and hurriedly took up the position of vice-president in Kibaki’s illegitimate government.

The success of Raila in crafting a multi-ethnic coalition is derided as “a publicity stunt” and ODM’s success in galvanizing voters outside Central Province is re-interpreted simply as “a solid anti-Kikuyu plank.” From the bag of history, Kagwanja suddenly discovers Moism at work in the political manoeuvrings that have influenced current developments in Kenya. Both Moi and Raila are presented as sharing an “obsessive anti-Kikuyu sentiment that has come to pervade Kenya’s ethnic fabric.” Without mentioning that Moi actually ended up supporting Kibaki’s re-election (a development that endorsed the perception of there being some commonality of interests between the Kenyattas, the Mois and the Kibakis), Kagwanja then goes for his killer argument:  “the motor driving the Pentagon’s anti-Kikuyu alliance was the so-called “Rift Valley” or “Kalenjin mafias” consisting mainly of wealthy Nandi, Kipsigis and some Maasai elite who called the shots in the Moi regime.” This is notwithstanding the fact that Kibaki himself was part and parcel of the Moi machine who only crossed over to the opposition after democratic forces had successfully pushed Moi to allow for multipartyism – forces that Kibaki derided as trying to cut down a mugumo tree using a razorblade!

This argument is illuminating not only because of what it says but also what it does not say. For instance, Kagwanja hopes to show the world that the dreaded KAMATUSA mafia of the Moi years is still a valid threat to innocent Kikuyu; that the Kikuyu are more sinned against by Kenyans than they sin and that the ghost of the Moi years still lurks in every trouble zone in Kenya than might be realized internationally. The first of these three observations has some credence since it is plausible that the violence that has rocked the Rift Valley may represent calculated moves to kill, maim and displace the Kikuyu. This however is simply a description not an explanation. As David Anderson of Oxford University interjected elsewhere, to point to “tribalism is [to provide] a description of the [unfolding] events, not an explanation.” While Kagwanja’s Policy Brief remains at the level of innuendo when called upon to give an explanation Anderson calls attention to the “deeper history of past conflicts over land and economic resources.”

That Kagwanja does not have any conspiracy to propagate about all the other non-Luo and non-Kalenjin regions of Kenya that voted ODM is revealing. Knowing how much the Western and Coast province factor can complicate and even challenge his argument, he intentionally refuses to bring in the Luhyia factor while the popularity of Raila at the coast is strategically related to the MoU Raila signed with (note his choice of word here) “militant Islamic grouping to ‘protect’ Muslims from harassment and abuses linked to the US-led war on terrorism.” As such, while the Luhyia factor is best left unsaid because it can easily nuance, if not, challenge Kagwanja’s ‘Kalenjin mafia’ conspiracy generalizations, the coast issue is cavalierly designed to appeal to the conservative pro-Republican US sensibilities. One wonders if Kagwanja is aware of the backlash such fundamentalist anti-Islamic sentiments have aroused across the world and especially in the US where George Bush’s lame duck presidency is now very apparent to be a credible reference point for any appeal for sympathy. The argument he deploys, the choice of reference notions like “political Islam,” all feed into the half-truths, innuendo and factual errors contained in this Brief. Violent protests and clashes at the coast, Kagwanja knows, have complex historical origins and political Islam has not occupied such a central place that he accords it in this disturbing so-called Policy Brief.

In other words, and this is his third move, Kagwanja’s message to the international community is that they should not be surprised with the ongoing violence in Kenya. It is in Raila’s DNA to be violent and the corrupt Kalenjin elite have always had something against the Kikuyu. The anti-Kikuyuism of ODM, Kagwanja assumes, should be apparent from the inferences he develops. It is not far-fetched, therefore, to conclude that Kagwanja’s main line is to dismiss ODM’s protests on election rigging by appealing to ‘stick holders’ [sic] to see the primordial instinct that drives the ODM-authored violence as contrasted to the civic/civil nature of PNU’s Kibaki.

Through this circuitous and unconvincing route, Kagwanja aims to endorse the Kenyan court system. Where else can one uncritically go for a cheap analogy than the US to cement his argument? He refers to the US Supreme court ruling of 2000 that (s)elected George Bush president of the US. He refuses to recognize, as Mugambi Maina has argued in The Standard, [January 24^th 2008, p 7] that Kenyan courts are themselves on trial; that any comparisons between the US and Kenyan courts amounts to “a massively flawed and false analogy.” This reference to the US example has been around for some time now; what is often conveniently ignored is how undemocratic that example turned out to be. The lesson that this case reveals, which most people who have used it refuse to see, is that the Supreme Court ended up selecting George Bush as US president contrary to the popular vote that had given Al Gore the win. One only needs to read Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy to appreciate and understand that the US example is counter-productive to the Kibaki argument of favouring the court. It is likely in the Kenyan case, just like the US one, that the court will end up selecting Emilio Stanley Mwai Kibaki as president, contrary to the wishes of the Kenyans who voted.

In short, the title to Kagwanja’s Policy Brief is illuminating; chaos is the stuff of which ODM is made, the court is where Kibaki’s civic Nation is authored. If the idea of a Policy Brief is to illuminate the many-sidedness of issues while providing an enlightened roadmap through the forest, Kagwanja’s piece is a despicable version.

Let me conclude this critique by pointing to the need for better analysis that is not captive to the momentary passions of the contending parties in the Kenyan political stalemate. If this piece appears as a defence of one side, it is because it was motivated to critique an overly biased report. The focus for better analysis must illuminate the myriad sources of conflict in the Kenyans society and how these fed into the post-election violence. The violence has to be described and explained not simply as capricious actions of unthinking hoodlums lazily following ODM’s rallying cries to commit unprovoked murders but as consequences of inequalities and injustices embedded in Kenya’s history that found a trigger in the flawed declaration of Kibaki as president of Kenya. There are minimum facts that are incontrovertible in the ongoing discussion and these cannot be denied. There are other broader issues that require rigorous analysis. We plan a special issue of a journal on the theme Post-Election Protest Violence in Kenya: Historical Antecedents and Contemporary Manifestations in which we hope pursue these lines of inquiry.