Daily Nation – Britain willing to help Kenya try graft cases.
“Help try cases” means provide evidence from ongoing investigations. These corruption matters would still have to be handled by Kenyan judges and prosecutors.
U.N. Experts Get Threats in Inquiry Into Somalia – NYTimes.com.
It seems that anyone looking into anything sensitive in Nairobi is subject to threat these days. This will be a good test of where things stand on impunity. If people can make death threats against people dispatched on behalf of the U.N. Security Council without getting arrested it wouldn’t seem to bode well for the rank-and-file journalist, lawyer or activist.
Republican Senators McCain and Coburn have issued a purported list of 100 wasteful porkbarrel programs getting funding under federal stimulus legislation–one item targeted on the list is a little over $200,000 for exit polling in Africa by the University of California, San Diego.
Is this just a political cheapshot at UCSD for publishing the results of the Kenyan exit poll from the 2007 general election and accompanying research?
For this Kenyan exit poll, McCain’s International Republican Institute (“IRI”), for which I was Resident Director of the East Africa Office at the time, received funding from USAID, along with an extra $10,000 from Dr. Clark Gibson, chair of Political Science at UCSD. The poll showed the challenger Raila Odinga soundly defeating the incumbent Mwai Kibaki. When the Electoral Commission of Kenya announced that Kibaki had won amid disputes and allegations of fraud, the US Ambassador Michael Ranneberger initially called on Kenyans to accept the results and the Bush State Department initially congratulated Kibaki (later retracting), even though the Ambassador had received the preliminary exit poll results on the evening of the vote.
Dr. Gibson and his associate James Long designed the poll under a consulting agreement with IRI and Long supervised the field work of IRI’s Kenyan polling firm Strategic. IRI maintained a six month “exclusive” on rights to publicity on the poll under the consulting agreement and refused to let UCSD or Strategic release or comment on the results. IRI declined to comment on the poll and then began telling journalists and others in Washington that it was flawed, eventually issuing a statement on February 7, 2008 that it had determined the poll to be “invalid” after hearings that day of Senator Feingold’s Africa Foreign Relations Subcommittee in which Feingold called on Asst. Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer and the Asst. Administrator for USAID to explain why the poll had not been released as post-election violence and negotiations between the contestants continued.
After the expiration of the six month embargo, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) sponsored the release of the poll by UCSD on July 8. Gibson and Long presented a detailed rebuttal to the alleged concerns raised by IRI. The UCSD team also presented at SAIS at Johns Hopkins. In August, more than a month later, on the day before Gibson and Long were to testify on the results of the poll before the Kreigler Commission in Nairobi, appointed to review the election under the February 28 power-sharing settlement, IRI released the poll, having found that it was valid after all.
In the meantime, IRI continues exit polling all over on the taxpayer dime–and trumpets the “earned media” it gets for this from publications like the New York Times. But apparently National Science Foundation funding for polling done by actual social scientists at UCSD outside the auspices of International Republican Institute is pork!
As Gibson and Long pointed out in their presentation of their research to the Working Group on African Political Economy last year, the US spends hundreds of millions on democracy promotion, but we don’t even know what motivates African voters. Of course, if we don’t really always want to know HOW they vote, I guess maybe we don’t care why either? And for that matter, maybe we don’t want to learn more about how effective that “democracy promotion” money is?
James Long worked tirelessly under pressure to help execute the Kenyan poll for IRI under difficult circumstances, and even provided substantial free assistance on IRI’s September 2007 pre-election poll (which was quickly released, by the way). File this under the category of “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”.
AFRICOM took over the Djibouti-based Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) from CENTCOM in October 2008. Combined Task Force 151 (CTF 151) includes the US portion of the military effort to combat piracy at sea and commenced operations in January 2009. The Navy ships and sailors in CTF 151 are part of the 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, which is under CENTCOM. CENTCOM is headquartered in Tampa, Florida and AFRICOM is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany.
Presumably this makes sense for historic and cultural reasons, given the greater connection of Tampa Bay to buccanners and such.
For those wondering about the legal role of AFRICOM, the US federal statutory definition for such a “combatant command” is “a military command which has broad continuing missions” and in the case of the regional commands involves more than one military service. The missions are to be reviewed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (in otherwords military rather than civilian leadership) “not less often” than every two years, with recommendations then reported to the President.
Daily Nation’s Jeff Otieno: UK Withholds Kenya Education Funding for Corruption, Wants Prosecution
Update December 14: As Much as 6 Billion Sh. Stolen from “Free Primary Education” Funding–http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/822668/-/vo33eb/-/index.html
“Obama, Oil and AFRICOM” from Daniel Volman in Pambazuka.
No real editorial comment here–lots of key budget numbers relating to AFRICOM, and Defense and State Department military training/assistance/ etc., for African states. Important stuff.
The existence of and significant budgetary “space” for AFRICOM is a fact of life. At the same time, it seems to me that much remains entirely “To Be Determined” as far as how it actually works and interacts with other institutions over the next few years with opportunities for it to be steered various different ways, or to simply proceed on bureaucratic momentum which might well be the worst case scenario in the long run.
Approaching Jamhuri Day, a year after the protests and arrests over the Media Bill at the 2008 celebration, the “Government of National Unity” has now expended 40 percent of the potential time remaining before the end of the second Kibaki term and the next election.
I always agreed with those who felt that a stop-gap coalition government was only appropriate as an interim measure, rather than for a full five year term as insisted on by the US government at the time, and I have remained skeptical about how much of substance can be agreed on by this sort of coalition that goes beyond things that are merely of common interest to all members of the current political class.
To start with, it took a full year to fire the old ECK. In return for severance and impunity–and impunity of the worst kind in that there was no attempt to actually investigate the conduct of the commission and all were treated equally regardless of whether they tried in good faith to do their jobs or not. They even managed to get away with declining to turn over key records to the Kreigler Commission.
Another year later, it certainly appears that the alleged legislative agreement to “implement” the Waki Report is no deeper than a press release. While Annan has stayed engaged and Ocampo has stepped up, the reality remains that almost two years after the election what we have legally are only preliminary steps that might lead to a full investigation that might later lead to legal charges that might later lead to actual trials–and only for the limited category of “crimes against humanity” as opposed to murder, rape, mayhem, bribery, extortion and all the other things that account for what happened with the election and its aftermath. At this point, I am skeptical that the ICC process is all that likely to run its course before the 2012 campaign begins in earnest.
We have seen a successful rebellion against the president’s reappointment of the KACC head, but we haven’t seen new investigations keeping up with the new scandals, much less starting to work on the backlog.
On the positive front, we have the promulgation of the draft proposed constitution and the seizure of a very large cache of weapons. We’ve seen draft constitutions in years past–maybe this will go better, and if so, it has the potential to direct some of the competition in 2012 in slightly different directions than what we have seen in other recent elections, which might be good. Maybe we will have follow up investigations, arrests and prosecutions from the weapons seizure and there will be some accountability for the people involved–if not, at least we will have clarified how badly Kenya is in trouble in regard to the flow of weapons.
On balance, it seems to me that as we enter 2010 people who care about Kenya while remaining committed to democracy in the international community need some fresh thinking beyond the occasional jawboning and visa bans. You can sometimes pressure people into doing specific things that you want them to do–you can’t pressure people into transforming their character and priorities. And surely the US isn’t relying primarily on the ICC since we decline to join.
UPDATE–Some good news of sorts: http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/820330/-/item/1/-/lmlu84/-/index.html“>The Daily Nation reports:
They said they are investigating the theory that a senior security officer and a foreign military base were connected to the illegal military equipment.
One of the leads being followed is that the officer, based at the AP Training College, facilitated the smuggling of bullets out of the institution.
Detectives said they suspected that the bulk of the bullets came from the AP armoury and the foreign military base in Northern Kenya.
Of course, we have a classic example of Kenyan reporting in an era of a partially free press: important news, but “the foreign military base in Northern Kenya” . . . . hmm, which one?
In the Quicksands of Somalia | Foreign Affairs.
I highly recommend this article which I have referred to several friends. The author was the program officer at the National Endowment for Democracy who worked with our Kenya program funding and I met her briefly on the way to Africa in June 2007. From my perspective, she seems to have it right and I would simply add that the consequences of the US support for first the invasion by Ethiopia, and then the African Union force to try to uphold the Transitional Federal Government have included the US incurring debts to be paid to other governments in the region, including Kenya and Uganda.
Speaker of Parliament Marende has called for the enforcement of existing laws as the way to end impunity, in particular calling for MP and former Justice Minister Martha Karua to record a statement with the police to specify her charges that large bribes change hands to influence votes in Parliament. At pains of being prosecuted for making a false statement if she doesn’t in fact back it up.
I agree with the Speaker that enforcement of existing laws is really the key to changing the environment of impunity for politicians. New laws will not help if the law is ignored anyway. Certainly there have been plenty of rumors and more specific stories in circulation about bribery in Parliament. Almost two years in to this Parliament it certainly seems past time to face this head on.
A way to proceed is to have specific statements from those with knowledge and certainly MPs such as Ms. Karua should follow up. But likewise the media should follow up. Corruption issues are continually raised or hinted at in the Kenya media, or even covered in depth initially, but then nothing more. For the Kenyan media to effectively fulfill any type of watchdog role, they will have to learn to start and finish these stories, and to do a lot more actual reporting rather than simply relaying to readers what the various politicians and officials have to say.
Likewise, there is no reason for law enforcement to wait for insiders to hand them the evidence. We see in some areas that the various Kenyan law enforcement agencies can conduct investigations–why do they have to wait for insider whistleblowers?
I must say that I don’t agree with prosecuting a Member for what we in the US would call “speech and debate” in the legislature, but nonetheless, those with knowledge of bribery in Parliament do have an obligation to come forward–and should be protected in doing so.