I’ve promised myself to go ahead and hammer home more of the details about the election fraud and cover up in Kenya in 2007 in more installments of my “War for History” series before saying much more about the next election or the latest trend in development assistance fashion or other things that would be more fun to write about now.

Part of what has happened is that I made a conscious choice to “turn the other cheek” when I was attacked by and on behalf of the International Republican Institute back in 2009 for being a former employee “whistleblower” of sorts or violating the “omerta” of that branch of the government organized NGO world.  I did not want to attack IRI for reasons both substantial and sentimental.  Sentimentally, I had friends there and still do and aside from meaningful relationships I liked pretty much everyone I worked with and it makes me sad to address painful subjects in this context.  More substantively, I believed in and invested in American democracy assistance through IRI and I do think that such assistance can be effective and of value in the right circumstances (if we conduct ourselves in a principled and committed way and hold ourselves accountable as necessary in any serious endeavor).  Thus, I have been circumspect in fighting back to try to defend or recover my own reputation recognizing that at some level that is part of the collateral damage associated with coming into contact with the sort of political “perfect storm” that hit Kenya and Washington during my time in Nairobi.  With the far far greater harm that came to those millions of Kenyans who had their vote misappropriated and those killed, maimed and displaced by the violence, whether state-sponsored, privately instigated and funded or spontaneous, getting a black-eye from some operatives in Washington is not something of consequence one way or the other.

After returning home from Kenya at the end of May 2008 I did over the months and years ahead a variety of interviews with people undertaking writing projects relating to that Kenyan election of 2007 (none at my instigation, but I would invariably say yes when asked).  I always assumed that someone would eventually publish their book tackling the hard story of what really happened with the election and de-cyphering in some real fashion what U.S. policy at the time was intended to be.  Unfortunately, that has still never yet happened, and here we are, in 2016 with yet another election notionally (and by law) only a year away.

So I have concluded that at this point I really need to go ahead and hit the rest of the key high points of what I know first hand as well as what I have teased out from FOIA. In particular, anyone working for IRI/NDI/IFES and any of the other organizations running election support operations or any type of observation-related endeavor for the 2017 Kenyan election really needs to know the ins-and-outs of what happened in 2007-08, especially since almost all the key players in Kenyan politics are the same (although perhaps half or so have switched sides between Government and Opposition).

I do need to call attention to two rules that I have continued to abide by in my role as a “witness” here: 1) I uphold the Code of Conduct I agreed to in working for IRI by not disclosing my political conversations with Kenyan politicians during my IRI service in any way that is recognizable to the individuals involved 2) I have not published or quoted stolen classified documents or otherwise violated any U.S. national security rules (as I have mentioned, I had a security clearance from my job in the U.S. based defense industry contemporaneously with my time in Kenya, but my clearance was unrelated to my unpaid “public service” leave for the NGO job in East Africa and I did not work on any classified programs or endeavors of any sort as an IRI employee.  My security clearance was renewed back home several months after Ambassador Ranneberger and I contradicted each other in the New York Times about his interactions with me in regard to the Kenyan election–I have assumed that this was because I told the truth).  I have noticed that it seems more and more people who do a lot of sensitive work for the U.S. government at taxpayer expense do cite some material from the “cablegate” leaks, but I have not crossed that threshold myself.

The Mississippi angle comes in from the fact that the experience of Hurricane Katrina (which made landfall on the Mississippi Gulf Coast eleven years ago today) had a great deal to do with me finding myself in the wake of the election disaster in Kenya in 2007.  The idea of taking leave from my job primarily supporting Navy shipbuilding to work in foreign assistance took shape from the Katrina experience.  I won’t try to explain in any depth now, but the point is that I took leave of my job as a middle-aged mid-career lawyer and moved my family to Kenya temporarily (at the expense of my wife’s job, by the way) with the serious expectation of doing work that was at least in some meaningful if incremental way beneficial to people who were less fortunate (as opposed to because it was the best job I could find in the Republican Party at the time, or because I needed to lay low and get out of the country for while, or some such).  Thus, I remain unrequited as I see democracy in Kenya continue to slog in the mud and the alleged benefits of the February 28, 2008 “peace deal” pissed away in favor of impunity for corruption as well as for killing.

Solo 7 — Toi Market