Trying to explain Kenyan trouble in Swedish

For those of you who understand Swedish and want to hear some Kenyan ranting on Sveriges Radio, please go to the Konflikt page and tell me what it is being said other than the parts in English. Same applies to this much shorter interview also in Swedish.

Kenya still burning

Have pasted in four opinion pieces below that have run in the East African and elsewhere in the last month. Trying to restart blogging but my brain feels leaden and uncooperative.

Generation Disaster

This opinion originally run in the East Africa on January 28, 2008 under the title,

‘The problem with Kenya’s politics is the old guard‘

The next revolution in Kenya will not be a violent one, contrary to the bloodletting presently underway. Rather it will be the rejection of the generation of men from whom the leaders of this country have been drawn.

The major politicians were in politics long before the majority of Kenyans were even born and who even today enjoy inordinate sway in the country. President Mwai Kibaki was born in 1931. Ex-president Daniel arap Moi was born in 1924.

They are still doddering on, unable to relinquish the reins of the power they have held onto tightly for half a century.

Theirs is a generation steeped in tribal arithmetic, in a cynical nationalism; their values have infected those thousands of young people who are roaming the countryside in a killing frenzy.

The young men throwing stones and shooting arrows and the youthful riot policemen opposite them lobbing tear gas and firing live ammunition are fodder for the failed politics of a generation of old men who may just take all of us to the grave with them.

I was raised to respect my elders and there are many whom I indeed respect. But the time has come to assess in the broadest and most personal terms how the generation of leaders that took this country from independence to the bloody and dangerous present has performed.

The oldest were born in the 1920s and the youngest of the lot in the 1940s — opposition leader Raila Odinga, who was born in 1945 is the youth wing of this generation. They can be counted as a single generation in the sense that their vision of what constitutes Kenya and their role in it is widely shared.

This generation has played and continues to play a prominent role in politics, in our intellectual life and in the business community.

While there are many among them who are capable and well intentioned, the defining characteristic of this generation is failure in leadership.

It is not enough to lay the blame on a few individuals. These prominent wazee (old men) have defined for us the content of our politics and the ethics of governance. They are our very own Boomer Generation except that the boom in this instance is the sound of our dreams and aspirations exploding. It is time we named them Generation Disaster.

It is a popular pastime to compare Kenya’s performance in economic and human development terms with that of the Asian Tigers such as South Korea and Malaysia. How often I have heard it said that these countries in economic terms were neck and neck with Kenya in the 1970s, only for them to surge ahead in the past three decades while Kenya trod water and in many instances retreated on the advances it had made.

The approximately 3 per cent of Kenyans who are above the age of 65 and from whom the bulk of Generation Disaster is drawn, have led us to an average life expectancy of 55 years compared with South Korea’s 77 and Malaysia’s 72 — according to the online Institute World Guide, which allows country comparison of economic data.

The economic numbers are even more dire. Kenya’s gross domestic product of $38 billion as of 2005 is only a fraction of Malaysia’s $287 billion and South Korea’s $1 trillion. Per capita, Kenyan citizens have only 12 per cent of their Malaysian counterparts’ income and 6 per cent of the South Korean GDP per capita of almost $23,000. At the turn of the century, 40 per cent of Kenyans were unofficially unemployed compared with fewer than 4 per cent of Malaysians and South Koreans.

These statistics, we can suppose with reasonable confidence, have deteriorated in the past three weeks and they mean that Kenya can count itself first among equals only if compared to the Congos and Guineas of this world. Our leaders’ vision is only to be lauded if compared with countries that have experienced genocides and decades-long civil wars.

Yet this generation, which touts its anti-colonialist credentials, its Kennedy Airlifts (the US scholarship programmes of the 1960s), its Makerere (university) pedigree and its ambassador-at-30 mentality has only managed to take us from one disaster to the next.

I grew up hearing about the inferiority of one tribe as against the other, in jokes that now seem like macabre warnings of a day when they would become deadly serious. My elders were ever focused on their belly buttons. Not for them to learn from the experiences of other countries — especially the disasters that were unfolding around us and sending refugees by the thousands into our country.

Their language was a curious construction. “The Kikuyu are now in power,” they would say even though I hardly saw a penny from this so-called power. “The Kalenjin have taken power,” they complained as President Moi stepped into State House, “They will finish us now for sure.” “The Luos can never rule this country; the Kikuyus are thieves; the Luhyas don’t know how to take power…”

This language is what has given birth to the present crisis and has underpinned the governance of this country since Independence.

Such a leap into the illogical, for our generation of leaders, is the very basis of logical thinking when it comes to apportioning power and privilege among themselves. It has served them well, this spokesman-of-the-tribe role.

It is the position that has enabled all those Mercedes Benzes to be bought from the proceeds of Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing and the dozens of financial schemes to rob the Treasury in the name of fulfilling the privileges of tribal mandarin.

Though they developed these roles before the majority of us were even born, their thinking has infected us all. Say what you will about the opposition, it too is a gathering of “spokesmen of the tribe” challenging a government largely constituted from similar material.

The one thing that such politics will not deliver to this country is the kind of vision and leadership that led South Korea and Malaysia from poverty to wealth. We may continue chasing “those people” from one area or the other and supporting the powerful on the basis that they are “our people,” but perhaps we only need to remember that the cost in lives is borne by individuals.

What does it matter that there is a Kikuyu president when you are a Kikuyu living in Nairobi’s Mathare slum? This generation of wazee has infected the country with its self-serving obsession with ethnicity as politics and politics as ethnicity. It has lived longer than most Kenyans can expect to live and yet it refuses to exit the stage.

Generation Disaster has repeatedly turned down opportunities to appeal to our better natures. It has chosen advancement from enmity rather than from strengthening our bonds.

Fear and suspicion are its stock in trade. These wazee sap on the blood of the young and seek gratification of their lust for power even if it leads to the destruction of this fragile, injured thing we call Kenya.

Why exactly should we respect this generation that has lived longer than most of us can expect to live and yet refuses to exit the stage, like an ill-mannered guest who insists on staying an extra night?

Kenya can avoid years of civil strife by sharing power

Kenya can avoid years of civil strife by sharing power

(This editorial originally run in the East African on January 21, 2008)

There is no great mystery about what the future has in store for Kenya.

Other nations, too, have trodden the path of contested electoral outcomes, the formation of winner-takes-all governments, mass protests, mass violence, civil war and their breaking and shattering before they are put back together laboriously.

Still others have shied away from the abyss after an initial period of bloodletting similar to the one that has been experienced in Kenya during the past three weeks. They have been blessed with wise statesmanship and have embraced reforms that enable power sharing, empower their citizens to emerge from poverty and embrace a politics that promotes cohesion as opposed to discord.

Kenya’s choices are simple: life or death, penury or prosperity, a cohesive, well-governed nation that counts its diversity as strength or a suspicious, hateful one governed by the cynical and awash in the blood of its young. The leaders too must now decide whether they will be remembered as the men and women who destroyed a nation or as those who rescued it and set it on a glorious path that will be remembered for generations.

Raila Odinga has a right to call for peaceful mass protests. If that right keeps being denied, we cannot continue to consider our country a democracy. But the opposition should not assume that it has enough of a national mandate to force the government out through extra-constitutional measures or to try and use violence by its alleged supporters as a stratagem to force the government’s hand.

Unfortunately, Raila Odinga, who promised the country transformative leadership, must begin leading before he occupies State House. President Kibaki can choose to govern a country that is unravelling or bring about reconciliation by pushing for genuine power-sharing measures that will allow for the gains of Vision 2030 to be his permanent legacy. Other countries have been at a similar crossroads.

In December 1980, Uganda held its first presidential elections. Milton Obote was declared the winner of a poll that international observers monitored and declared to be far from free or fair. A losing aspirant by the name Yoweri Museveni, refusing to accept the decision, led 27 men into the bush to wage a bloody six-year guerrilla war that brought him to power, where he remains more than two decades later.

The government of Milton Obote, on its way to defeat, killed over 300,000 Ugandans. Kenya looked on, refugees crossed its borders, and many Kenyan children were taught by Ugandan teachers on the run from a country that had become the bone over which men of outstanding viciousness and cynicism fought.

Lesson to Kenya: Beware those thwarted by the ballot and refused the right to organise peacefully, come to believe that the only course of action open to them is the bullet. This may not be decided by the opposition of the day but perhaps by one of the millions of now-unknown Kenyans who feel left out of the process of governing. Perhaps we should learn also that power-sharing is national survival and not merely a procedural choice.

For three decades after independence, Ivory Coast was the Kenya of West Africa. It was ruled over by the authoritarian Felix Houphouet-Boigny, but nevertheless distinguished itself for generally harmonious relations between its ethnic and religious groups, and its strong economy.

In the mid-1990s, this island of calm turned away from cohesion and openness to destructive difference, as Henri Conan Bedie, Houphouet-Boigny’s successor, turned to a policy known as Ivoirité to maintain his tenuous grip on political power.

Ivoirité initially referred to the country’s common cultural identity, but in the cut and thrust of politics came to exclude many northerners whose origins were in neighbouring countries but who had acquired citizenship. What followed was a period of coups, cancelled elections, rigged Supreme Court decisions, bloody riots in Abidjan targeting “foreigners” and a decisive turn toward the politics of difference.

This unfortunate period culminated in a mutiny in 2002 carried out by soldiers of northern origin. It escalated into a full-scale civil war whose main bone of contention was how the definition of a citizen affected who could hope to govern the country.

The fighting lasted five years and cost many lives as well as bringing that formerly vibrant economy to its knees. The northerners’ exclusion from government led them to lose hope in politics as an arena that they could usefully participate in; they concluded that the best course for them was to attempt to topple the system that had judged them ineligible.

Last year, the conflict appeared at an end when President Laurent Gbagbo signed a power-sharing agreement with Guillaume Soro, the rebel commander.

Lesson to Kenya: Power sharing will be the way of governing whether we wait to fight a civil war to realise that point or enact it immediately and render it as law in a new constitution. Neither Gbagbo nor Soro or any of the other leaders in Ivory Coast had the support of the majority — just like the situation in Kenya today — which ultimately meant that they did not have the mandate to force their version of government on the entire nation.

A further lesson is that discrimination, whether in the form of Ivoirité or in the Kenyan version of cobbling together alliances to exclude one tribe or the other from the table of government very rarely delivers a lasting political victory. It should also be noted that armies and police forces reflect the feelings and identities of their fellow citizens. To promote the politics of difference risks ultimately splitting the security forces, with disastrous consequences that are visible throughout the continent.

South Africa, even as it came out of decades of the brutal apartheid system, had the benefit of having leaders of vision and courage. Rather than push for a “winner-takes-all” system, Nelson Mandela and the ANC, which could have secured the two-thirds parliamentary majority to force any constitutional changes it wished, instead chose to form a government of national unity. This government included the Nationalist Party that had championed apartheid and the mostly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party whose supporters had fought a brutal low-intensity war against the ANC’s supporters in Kwazulu-Natal.

That Mandela and his colleagues could share power with those who had detained them and brutalised millions of their fellow countrymen is a testament to their profound understanding that the path of governing alone would lead them to further misery rather than a healing democracy.

Today, South Africa remains mired in the legacy of apartheid but there are few in that country who believe as they did in the mid-1990s that the country will come apart at the seams and degenerate into a widespread civil war between its internal nations.

Surely, if Nelson Mandela could share power with the Nationalist Party, then it is not too much to expect President Kibaki and Raila Odinga to do the same. It is not their individual ambitions that should now concern Kenyans. Rather, citizens must now push to overhaul the brutal machine inherited from the colonialists, designed as it is to maintain the power and privilege of the few by turning us against each other.

It is up to Raila Odinga to show Kenyans that he will not stand by as Kenya disintegrates, that the love of country that distinguished his years of struggling for democracy and enduring detention and torture will rise to the fore. He must allay fears, however unfounded, that many in the Mt Kenya region have of him as a leader, and he must castigate violence with feeling and conviction.

For the rest of us Kenyans, we must rally to a Citizen’s Agenda that rejects leaders who do not bring about a closure to the election either by a re-tallying or a re-election after an appropriate length of time. We must agitate for a government of national unity to deliver us a new constitution that improves mechanisms for the transfer of power, enables the equitable regional distribution of state resources and trims the powers of the executive.

We must demand the restoration of the lives of the displaced, and their rehabilitation and reconstruction. We must act on past injustices in the allocation and ownership of land while acknowledging that not to deal with these matters will forever threaten our peace.

Finally and most importantly, Kenyans must teach politicians that they are leaders to serve and not be served, and that we shall reject them should they appear to take positions that bring our country to ruin.

A country created by grand theft, ruled by a clique

A country created by grand theft, ruled by a clique

(Originally printed in the East African on January 14, 2008)

Robbery has thrived in Kenya for many decades now. The very creation of Kenya a century ago was an act of grand theft. Our country won its independence but has never broken free from the idea that political power is a license to rob by means fair or foul.

For decades as colonial subjects we were not allowed to vote freely. When we finally won the right to vote, most of the subsequent elections were stolen from us. The 2007 poll thus found a people rooted in a history whose course, twisted by the machinations of brutal thefts and shady backroom deals, had meted out injustice and indignity to more people than it enriched or empowered.

Yet Kenyans, despite this chequered history, had in the years since the early 1990s become bigger than their circumstances. They had begun believing that they could indeed change their country for the better. The ballot had become, despite the best attempts of their erstwhile leaders, a way to impose their will on a political elite whose most prominent members had been part of the old boy’s club that ruled with an iron fist for decades.

The election results, when they were announced by Samuel Kivuitu, the formerly much-respected chairman of the Election Commission of Kenya, rather than appearing to express the will of a large section of the electorate, seemed to many to be one more act of robbery. Others who had rallied around President Mwai Kibaki, who was now quickly sworn in to a second term, felt that justice had been done. Yet Kenya in 2007 is not the Kenya of 1987.

Young men who felt that their vote had been rigged turned on their neighbours who they believed had been supporters of the president’s Party of National Unity. They thought that they had been witness to an act of robbery that released all their latent resentment over other perceived past injustices.

They burnt down houses, they beat many and killed some, they looted and destroyed shops — most belonging to Gikuyus who as a bloc had been solidly behind the president.

Machetes swung, rapes happened, a church containing dozens of people seeking safety within its premises was torched, cars were burnt, and roadblocks manned by angry, bribe-demanding young men peppered roads across the Rift Valley province.

Now you hear it said boldly, no longer whispered as it was before the election, that ethnic cleansing or even genocide is underway. Senior members of the government have publicly stated that they have evidence that the attacks were planned by people associated with the opposition.

The truth of these claims or their counter-claims will become apparent with time. But the allegation alone, coming as it does in an atmosphere of rumour, innuendo and conspiracy theory is a danger to the country.

If there is a repetitive pattern to mass violence through history, it is that victimisers usually begin as the victimised or at least perceive themselves as such. We should beware our fears because they can turn us into monsters. This is especially true among those with a great deal of power, since their fear can lead to a worse conflagration than any we have witnessed so far.

Returning to the young men who have burnt and killed in the Rift Valley and elsewhere in the belief that they were acting to right the wrongs of stolen lands, ethnic chauvinism, government neglect and a rigged election, their acts of violence, rather than bringing them closer to gaining justice, have only driven them to join the great Kenyan tradition of robbing and dispossessing the perceived enemy. They have raised a mighty fear in the moneyed classes, especially in Nairobi.

What do you own in the elite neighbourhoods of Kileleshwa and Lavington when violence erupts in Kibera’s slums? The large screen television remains in its usual spot, except that this time it is reporting fire and death in Nairobi and not the Gaza Strip. Cars stay in their driveways.

The bank vaults holding the billions of shillings that the government had proudly proclaimed were the creation of its policies stay unopened for the days while Kenya burns. The expensive paintings in Nairobi’s luxurious malls are seen by no one and the imported designer clothes remain undisturbed on their hangers.

The only things that spread are fear and rage. They fill all spaces. The violence is dispossession by remote control. The political and economic elite that had celebrated the steady rise of the Nairobi Stock Exchange Index, which marched alongside their fortunes, cower and wonder whether their security guards will protect them or join the rage coming through the radio and television.

Paranoia rules. Streams of refugees leave the Rift Valley and Kisumu and Mathare and Kibera. Violence is a form of language, one that speaks the world into two camps: the merchants of violence and their victims. The results of the election were being invoked as a reason by the rioters but their point went deeper.

They were screaming to the world that they too could rob and take as so much has been taken from them; they were rendering the objects of power and privilege impotent. They succeeded for some days before a lull set in. But the anger and frustration remain present.

Those young men are watching for the backroom deal. They have their eyes focused on men and women in suits meeting in secret places and whispering secret things and agreeing on how to keep that Nairobi Stock Exchange Index continuing its happy rise to the heavens.

They see a lot more than the politicians believe they do and now that they have had a taste of the paralysing power of violence, they will man their powder kegs waiting for the betrayal that has always issued out of the backrooms where power has been cobbled together and distributed among a very small group of people.

Yet because the rich and powerful, especially those who are in possession of the reins of state, have been scared by the violence, they may become even less partial to sharing power.

It would do well to heed the fire, for it has only been damped down for the moment.

It will not go out at the orders of government spokesmen. Rather, real peace will only come from acknowledging our history of betrayal and robbery and heeding citizens’ demands that a fundamental change be made in the way the country is governed.

Ethnic strife: How Kenya’s politics was tribalised

This piece appeared in the East African in the second week of January 7, 2008 as Kenya continued to burn.

Ethnic strife: How Kenya’s politics was tribalised

It is Friday, December January 4. I walk through the lobby of the Serena Hotel in Nairobi. Packs of politicians and their entourages hurry past. Most have mobile phones into which they whisper urgently. They brush shoulders with white men and women lugging large cameras, trying to arrange for taxis to take them to the nearest scene of carnage and bloodletting. I get the impression that the more the politicians whisper into their phones, the more images the international press will capture.

Kenya at the moment must look to those watching CNN or BBC what Zimbabwe or Nepal looked like to me in the past. But then I know that the country is not in the grip of atavistic hatreds, images of machete-wielding, church burning men notwithstanding. This is a political crisis fuelled by ethnic differences that in Kenya are now, as never before, political differences.

Growing up, tribal stereotypes were the source of much shared humour among friends and family. Difference was funny. But underneath the jokes, in the same way that we say that there is no smoke without fire, was the recognition that our differences, no matter the friendly way we tossed them out, were actual and lasting.

In the 2007 campaign season for parliamentary and presidential seats, what had previously been jokes morphed into paranoid and even hateful mobile text messages. The intention was to drive the country into tribal camps from which votes for the particular candidates would issue.

I am a Gikuyu like President Kibaki and therefore expected to automatically be ready to vote along these lines. In many political conversations that I had with relatives, the opponent increasingly was not only the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) as a political party but rather the Luo tribe of Raila Odinga.

The opposition’s intention (many Gikuyus believed) was not only to win the election and lead with different ideas and policies but rather its aim was to destroy the country and us along with it. I was told that we were in a fight to the last, that the winner would take all and damn the loser. The opposition too was driven by similar ethnic mathematics even though the trend – which was confirmed in the 2005 constitutional referendum – was of the rest of the tribes aligning themselves against a perceived Gikuyu determination to hold onto power at all costs.

Three years ago, I interviewed a woman who was imprisoned in Rwanda for participating in the 1994 genocide. She has remained vivid in my memory for a curious remark she made when I asked her how far back the genocide’s planning started.

“The war,” she said, “started when I was a little girl in the 1970s and other children would tease me for having Tutsi legs?” Two decades later, the length and thickness of your legs determined who died and who lived at a roadblock. Imagine for an instant one of those children that did the jeering and teasing, now an adult with machete in hand faced by an ID-less girl with long, thin legs.

To the men huddled around the poolside tables at the Serena Hotel, political parties are not expressions of ideological or policy differences. Instead, political leaders are in a fight to our death for a politics they envision as a system of spoils.

This fight to get a larger slice of the “cake” has been growing in divisiveness and hateful rhetoric. We are like infants drawn to touch a flame or driven by a horrid fascination with what lies beyond the cliff’s edge, curious perhaps to test the limits of our peace after decades of tut-tutting at the many wars in our neighbourhood.

Kenyans for the past few years have worn tribal lens when looking at the political landscape. In this decoding by many of my fellow Gikuyu, ODM is perceived as an existential foe, not just an electoral one.

To be anti-Kibaki, or at least opposed to him, as was the case with a majority of the country’s provinces and at least 45 per cent of the voters, was going to be regarded by many Party of National Unity supporters, particularly those from the Mount Kenya communities, as inimical to their existence and survival as a collective.

A similar sense of drastic opposition applied to many ODM supporters. The stage was set for the violence seen across the country during the past week.

In politics, perception is reality. And the reality of politics, its fundamental meaning, at those rare moments when it enjoys the greatest clarity to the greatest numbers, is that it is a pitched contest between friends and enemies.

Many Kenyans have chosen their friends and enemies on the basis of tribal loyalty and identification. Beyond the much-repeated admonitions against such politics, let me suggest that we have dipped our toes into dangerous waters. That politics will fundamentally continue to be the struggle between friend and enemies and will not cease.

This is a struggle that is subject to the principle of escalation. One side’s paranoia is matched by that of the other side, one rumour with another, and text messages are sent out which appear to mirror each other in the claims of victimhood and outrage.

This escalation, which is already much in evidence, holds out the frightening possibility of a “war of all against all.” If indeed politics is friends versus foes, then how we define who are our friends and who our enemies are, is of the essence. This is the abyss into which the country is staring.

The campaign period turned the ethnic map into a political one. The individual Kenyan, despite his membership of and loyalty to different identities is now more strictly enfolded (perhaps imprisoned is a better word) in a single tribal collective that owes loyalty to those within – no matter their crimes or failings.

Its character is oppositional, its language that of the victim. Societies that have become engulfed in political violence rarely get much warning. The lead-up to conflagration is characterised by the political rhetoric of reasonableness on all sides when they speak into the larger public space.

But in their asides and coded messages to “their side,” foaming-at-the-mouth, hateful messages are uttered to secure the vote. Suspicion and rumours of fantastical conspiracies have been all the rage in the past year of campaigning.

A pamphlet that was found in Rwanda immediately after the 1994 genocide had this to say about how to motivate Hutus to loath their Tutsi neighbours and countrymen:

“Never underestimate the strength of the enemy, and never overestimate the intelligence of the target audience. Strive in your language to identify the enemy with everything feared and loathed. Lies, exaggeration, ridicule, innuendo — all ably serve the ultimate aim of winning over the undecided, sowing confusion and division among the opposed. And this freedom from the confines of truth opens up a powerful technique for sowing fear and hatred: ‘accusation in a mirror.’”

Accusation in a mirror. This is Kenya’s leading political tactic. Accuse the other side of rigging the vote while you do just that. Accuse the other of intending to rob the treasury while you do just that or prepare to have that very privilege on ascending to office.

Both sides pronounce themselves victim and the cynical acts of manipulation they utilise are framed to look like reactions to the “enemy.” Across the Rift Valley, in Kisumu and Nairobi, young men are roaming machetes in hand to finally destroy the enemy.

What many of these young men do not know is that the Serena Hotel and similar founts of privilege and wealth are the home of the very political class that has defined the friend and the enemy in Rift Valley and Central Kenya.

On Thursday last week, as people who had tried to assemble for the opposition rally in Uhuru Park were chased back and forth by the police, just beyond the Serena’s fence, I was seated next to groups of politicians who were certainly not ethnically cleansing each other off their sodas and croissants.

They were muttering into their mobile phones the messages that were driving those young men across the country to violence on behalf of a political class that is willing to sacrifice our lives on the altar of their lust for power and privilege.

Kenya is burning

Everyone reading this blog must know that Kenya is aflame. We have burnt churches with dozens trapped in them, we have seen a peaceful election with the highest turnout in our history end as farce and the number of displaced citizens has risen to more than 100,000. I wrote a piece last October that I hate reading and that I did not believe a few days after writing it. Too pessimistic I thought. Take a look at it and let me know what you think:
http://bulletsandhoney.wordpress.com/2006/10/10/kenyas-coming-fire/

Will be back with more.