For my friends at the African Studies Association annual conference this week . . .
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Category Archives: Development in Africa
Kenyan Opinion Highlights–five columns of note (updated)
These are four five recent columns from the Kenyan papers on different aspects of the current malaise in public affairs. Each makes a general point which I think is of undoubtedly valid, but adds some perspective, analogy or point of fact that struck me as unique and particularly worthy of your attention if you missed it at the time:
“Media bang! NGOs pow! Who’s next?” from Muthoni Wanyeki in The East African.
“We expected better from ‘Defence Force'” from Wycliffe Muga in The Star.
“The Jubilee government’s ‘infantry thinking’ is leading it to intolerance” from Matuma Mathiu in the Daily Nation.
“Religious leaders are letting Kenyans down” from Fr. Gabriel Dolan in the Daily Nation.
“Protect media freedom for development” from Apollo Mboya in the Standard.
The U.S. “official” infatuation with Kenya, in numbers
I’ve spent some time looking at “Official Development Assistance” (“ODA”) numbers for Africa to test my perception that the U.S. seems, for some reason that is hard to pin down, to give an inordinate amount of “development” money to Kenya.
Monkeys at play on UN vehicle
Sure enough. Going through the ODA summaries by country from the OECD, for each of 47 countries in continental Africa, we find plenty of verification of this. The U.S. is the leading bilateral ODA donor for 25 of the 47, including Kenya (Kenya’s number two donor is Japan). Kenya is the number three recipient of bilateral ODA from the U.S. for a 2010-2011 annual average (the most recent listing) of $642M, behind only the Democratic Republic of Congo at $1,053M and Ethipia at $791M.
On a per capita basis this is $15.53 for DRC, $15.43 for Kenya and $9.34 for Ethiopia. What about “need” based on poverty? PIn the DRC the Gross National Income (GNI) per capita is $190; in Ethiopia $400. Kenya, on the other hand, has a GNI per capita of $820, more than double that of Ethiopia and well more than four times that of the DRC.
Across the continent as a whole, Kenya ranks ninth in per capita U.S. ODA. Three countries of those getting more per capita are special cases: Liberia and South Sudan, post-conflict states where the U.S. has a special historic relationship and responsibility relating to the founding of the country itself and Libya, an immediate post-conflict situation where the U.S. government was instrumental in supporting the removal of the prior regime. All of the recipients ahead of Kenya except for the DRC have relatively small populations.
Among the five countries of the East African Community, Kenya receives both the largest amount and the most per capita in ODA from the U.S., even though its GNI per capita is by far the largest:
Country GNI Per Capita U.S. Bilateral ODA Per Capita Rank/Reference
Burundi $250 $48M $5.58 2 (1-Belgium 161M)
Kenya $820 $642M $15.43 1 (2-Japan $139M)
Tanzania $540 $546M $10.74 1 (2-UK $219M)
Rwanda $570 $167M $15.32 1 (2-UK $121M)
Uganda $510 $388M $11.24 1 (2-UK $163M)
————-
And a sampling of other countries of interest:
Somalia —- $90M $9.38 2 (2-UK $107M)
C.A.R. $470 $16M $3.56 3 (1-France $29M)
Malawi $340 $140M $9.69 1 (2-UK $126M)
Mali $610 $232M $14.68 1 (2-Canada $106M)
Niger $360 $97M $6.02 1 (2-France $56M)
Chad $690 $124M $10.75 1 (2-France 45M)
Related articles
- Kenya changes everything (staceyvalley.wordpress.com)
- WADA frustrated with Kenya doping probe (sbs.com.au)
- U.S. quietly ramping up military presence in Africa (thehindu.com)
Is Washington, DC a logical place from which to fight global poverty? (Updated)
I thank those of you who have been reading some of my older posts while I have been primarily away from the blog the past few weeks.
Let me take time now to throw out a couple of “macro” observations as an observer of “development” practice in recent years and a life long observer and frequent past participant in American politics. The first is just how strange it is from one perspective that organizations like USAID and especially the Millennium Challenge Corporation are located “inside the beltway” in Washington, DC.
Don’t get me wrong, Washington certainly has its share of poverty, but in general the Washington inhabited by agencies like USAID, the MCC and the World Bank operates in the thrall of the micro-economy generated by the brokering of the American federal government’s expenditures on the order of $4 Trillion annually. It is a sui generis antiseptic boomtown quite disconnected from the economy of the rest of the cities and towns even of the United States, much less the rest of the world. Especially that of those facing the extreme poverty that the Millennium Development Goals were intended to overcome.
It just seems to me that we might, say, move one of our agencies like the MCC to West Virginia, for instance.
West Virginia is one of our poorer states, and one where we have this terrible problem of conflict between the need for jobs and the immediate and long term environmental harm done by strip mining and “mountain top removal” for coal. West Virginia has an economy rooted in natural resources and agriculture, like most of the world, and unlike the District of Columbia–but it is close by, just a short drive. Long serving Senator Robert Byrd was for many years famous especially for bringing federal agencies outside Washington to his state of West Virginia. While this was widely derided as “pork barrel politics” by people from other states, those federal agency jobs go somewhere. Putting a poverty fighting agency there might directly fight poverty as well as help us learn more about how to be most helpful elsewhere.
Update: On the topic of US aid transparency, here is great piece from Jennifer Lentner (@intldogooder) on Oxfam America’s “The Politics of Poverty” Blog: “More U.S. international aid data released–now what? A user’s perspective”. Jennifer interviews Hon. Albert Kan-Dapaah a former minister in the Ghanaian government and former chair of the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. He finds the current data important but “pretty scanty” toward meeting the needs of public officials and of civil society watchdogs.
New bi-partisan legislation—the Foreign Aid Transparency Act of 2013—would open the books on US foreign aid. More transparency will enable people like Hon. Albert Kan-Dapaah to hold their governments accountable for how they invest US resources. Learn more and contact your representatives here.
And stay tuned to Politics of Poverty to get more user perspectives on aid transparency data!
Party hardly? [but buy these books . . .]
A quick plug for Sebastian Elisher’s new book Political Parties in Africa: Ethnicity and Party Formation from Cambridge University Press. The cover photo is one of my shots from Kenya’s election day in Kibera in 2007. Pre-order now for release on September 30.
Likewise, the paperback is just out from one of the other Oxbridge publishers for “From Parties to Protest: Party Building and Democratization in Africa”, last year’s African Studies Association award-winner from my friend Adrienne LeBas.
The great thing about books about Kenyan political parties: the books and the analysis are always more substantial than the parties themselves. I will hope to develop this theme further and discuss both books here later in the year. In the meantime, enjoy your choice of hard or soft power publishing.
Kenya’s ELOG delivers major report on election
The Elections Observation Group (ELOG) has published yesterday a lengthy report for the first time on its observation of the March 4 Kenyan election. Having criticized the lack of transparency of aspects of ELOG’s observation and Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) program in the immediate post-election period, and cited criticism of their public communications in characterizing the PVT I wanted to quickly recognize the level of their follow-up here in their first release since March 9.
I will need more time with the report before discussing it in detail here as it runs to 78 pages plus attachments (and in the meantime I have recently rejoined the corporate world so I am back to avocational status on Kenya projects) but this deserves real attention and goes far beyond what has been published by the other major observation groups.
In the meantime, here is ELOG’s conclusion:
This report has delved deep into the electoral process starting the journey from the troubled times of 2007/2008 when the country burnt. It has given an insight into the insidious political problems that Kenya has had to grapple with.
The report analyses the ills that the country must heal before it finally gets out of the political woods. From negative ethnicity fueled by the “tyranny of numbers” to weak or unreliable institutions, the country has major problems to fix to ensure free and fair elections that are beyond reproach.
The report also makes it clear that although the restored faith in the judiciary and the fear of the ICC may have averted the violence that engulfed the nation after the 2007 general elections, faith in the IEBC and the judiciary was eroded following the Supreme Court ruling on the presidential petition filed by former Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
All stakeholders need to put in extra work and resources to help enhance the public understanding of their civil rights while enhancing the efficiency of all institutions charged with conducting elections in Kenya.
“After the Dust Has Settled” shiny new Kenyan institutions left dingy
Dr. Stephanie Burchard has a piece in the current issue of the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Africa Watch entitled “After The Dust Has Settled: Kenya’s 2013 Elections”, noting the unexplained failure of the IEBC to release election results that were required in mid-March until mid-July. The key takeaway:
Unfortunately, after all that has happened since, it is unclear how much respect or trust Kenyans continue to have in their political institutions. Politicians seem wary of Kenya’s political institutions. Raila Odinga promised that he and CORD would boycott future elections until changes within the IEBC take place. Even more troubling, public trust in Kenya’s new institutions appears to be eroding. In early July a national survey conducted by Ipsos Synovate revealed that confidence in Kenya’s new political institutions, including the Supreme Court and the electoral commission, had fallen precipitously over the course of the past few months. In particular, confidence in the IEBC had fallen by 30 percentage points–from a high of 62 percent in February to 32 percent less than five months later.
Bonus reading on the American foreign assistance political and policy process: from the Lugar Center, “Lessons for the Next QDDR” by Diana Ohlbaum and Connie Veillette.
“Choosing Peace Over Democracy”
“Kenya’s 2013 Elections: Choosing Peace Over Democracy” has been published in the new Journal of Democracy by James D. Long, Karuti Kanyinga, Karen E. Ferrer and Clark Gibson. Important and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in Kenyan politics or democratic process in Africa or the developing world more generally.
This is the first of formal publications using the exit poll and other polling data that were presented by Professors Gibson and Long at Johns Hopkins’ SAIS on May 2 and widely covered in the Kenyan media. See my post with the video:
“Fraud and Vote Patterns in Kenya’s 2013 Election: Evidence from an Exit Poll”–Gibson and Long event in Washington Thursday.
Long and Gibson were the researchers who also carried out the 2007 IRI/USAID/UCSD Kenyan exit poll that showed an opposition victory.
Are “free and fair” elections passe in Kenya?
Happy American Independence Day–it has now been a full four months since Kenya’s 2013 election, yet the results have still not been released by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.
The 2012 Kenyan Constitution mandates in Article 81: “The electoral system shall comply with the following principles––
(e) free and fair elections, which are—
(i) by secret ballot;
(ii) free from violence, intimidation, improper influence or
corruption;
(iii) conducted by an independent body;
(iv) transparent; and
(v) administered in an impartial, neutral, efficient, accurate
and accountable manner.
Thus “free and fair” is the legal standard in Kenya. So what standard did the international observer missions that issued their reports on Kenya’s elections without waiting for the official results apply?
Note this from Mienke Mari Stetytler’s “Observing the observers: how the Kenyan election was verified” republished in the Daily Maverick this week:
One month after the election, on April 4th, the Carter Center released its postelection statement. “In spite of serious shortcomings in the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s management of technology and tabulation of final election results, the paper-based procedure for counting and tallying presented enough guarantees to preserve the expression of the will of Kenyan voters.”
Kenneth Flottman, an independent elections consultant, noted that not one of the observer missions referred to the elections as “free and fair” in their preliminary or post-election reports. “Holding back on calling the election ‘free and fair’ reflects the reality of the known problems with the election,” Flottman said. “At its most crass, this is a way to say that the government in power cheated some, but the opposition probably would have lost anyway.”He conceded that “there is a tendency to apply lower standards to achieve a ‘free and fair’ election in Africa compared to other regions [of the world]. If anything, this makes the decision not to apply the label to this election in Kenya more noteworthy.”
David Pottie, associate director of the Carter Center’s democracy programme, contested this view. “It isn’t that African elections are held to a different (higher or lower) standard than countries elsewhere in the world,” Pottie said in an e-mail. “Rather, the Carter Center bases its assessment on a) Kenya’s international obligations and b) Kenya’s constitutional and legal framework.” He added that “free and fair” is no longer the “language of choice in international public law”.
Peter Visnovitz, EU election observation mission spokesperson, agreed: “The ‘free and fair’ phrase fell out of use because defining an election as ‘free and fair’ is very black and white—it requires a yes or no answer. Whereas, in fact, electoral processes are complex and it is very difficult to come up with a concept of ‘fair’ that would please everyone.”
Ilona Tip, operations director at EISA’s South African office in Johannesburg, explained that phrases like “transparent and credible” or “the expression of the will of voters” are now preferred.
. . . .
“The long, long vote count” –new reporting from Kenya in Africa Confidential
The new “free article” from this month’s Africa Confidential says better what I have been getting at about the extraordinary delay in releasing the results from the Kenyan election, along with new independent reporting on the facts:
. . . In the longer term, such doubts could prompt a re-evaluation of foreign election monitoring missions in Africa. Some on the European Union mission, for example, had serious doubts about the integrity of the process, but it quickly endorsed Kenyatta’s election. By that stage, the EU had contributed more than 50 million euros (US$66 mn.) to the cost of the elections, reckoned to total over $400 mn. One diplomat in Nairobi joked that it was a case of ‘responsibility without power’, meaning that the EU would be blamed for a messy result due to its financial involvement but had no power to change anything.
The IEBC found that a million more votes were cast in the presidential election than in any other, Africa Confidential has learned, although all were held on the same day. Opposition and civil society activists have raised questions about such discrepancies for several months.
An unnamed electoral commissioner quoted in the Nairobi daily The Star appears to confirm their suspicions: ‘We are having sleepless nights reconciling the presidential results and those of the other positions. Over a million votes must be reconciled with the others and if the requirement is not changed, then it will cast the IEBC in a negative light.’
Kenyatta’s supporters reject the concerns, arguing that it is natural that voters were more worried about selecting the national president than candidates for other positions. Few neutrals see this as credible. In the past, dramatically higher turnouts in presidential elections than in others on the same day have been taken as a sign of ballot-box stuffing.
It seems far-fetched that over a million Kenyans would queue for several hours to vote and then ignore all of the ballots apart from the presidential one, especially since there was great excitement about the contests for new, powerful positions such as senator and governor. None of the many election observers we asked said they had seen significant numbers of voters putting a ballot paper in the presidential box but not the others.
. . . .
Please read the whole piece; this is important for the future of Kenya and for future elections everywhere.
Related articles
- It’s mid-June: another month goes by without Kenya’s election results while Hassan goes to Washington (africommons.com)
- It’s mid-May, do you know where your election results are? (africommons.com)
- Kenya’s IEBC dangles “kitu kidogo” for political parties to avoid publishing election results (africommons.com)