Category Archives: Kenya 2013 election

Kenyan Election Violence: why would anyone expect the Kenyan Police to play a positive role in March 2013?

Posted on by
Reply

(As an aside, here is a headline to pause over from the Daily Nation:  “Sudan’s Islamists need new blood: vice president”.)

On Kenya’s police, Jeffrey Gettleman has an outstanding story in the New York Times: “Police Killing in Kenya Deepens Aura of Menace”.  Gettleman ties a compelling story of what amounts to the “typical” extrajudicial execution of two bothers in Nairobi’s slums to the massacre of new police recruits in Samburu:

The two episodes were hundreds of miles apart and technically had nothing to do with each other. But beneath them was the same rotten root: a spectacularly dysfunctional national police force.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give our police a 2,” said Macharia Njeru, the chairman of Kenya’s new police oversight board, citing corruption allegations, human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, failed inquiries and lost public trust.

“The list is endless,” Mr. Njeru said.

.  .  .  .

“On the face of it, it’s quite clear that the police leadership totally failed,” Mr. Njeru said. “The senior commanders were sleeping on the job.”

Kenya’s news media have characterized the massacre as the single most disastrous episode for the Kenyan police since independence in 1963. Unlike Kenya’s thriving business community, its booming safari industry or its reforming judiciary, Mr. Njeru said, the national police service has intentionally been kept weak for decades so it could be manipulated by politicians.

The concept of the various reforms under the new Constitution is great, but surely it is time to face the fact that it is simply too late for deep substantive change.   Of course every effort should be made by Kenya’s international supporters to intervene and step up as well as possible, but let us not kid ourselves.  It has been almost 59 months since the 2007 election disaster–the Kenyan police are still in the state they are in, with less than four months to go to March 4, 2013 because the Kenyan powers that be chose the status quo instead of reform (and for obvious reasons).

Again, please remember that current Kenyan Police Commissioner Mathew Iteere was the commander of the Kenya Police’s GSU (“General Service Unit”) branch during the 2007 election and its aftermath.

Let’s see what the Kenya Police official website has to say about the status of reforms today:

.  .  .  the Government has made some important steps. A task force appointed in March 2003 is drawing a road map for the Police Reforms. The Commissioner of Police is committed to a Police Force whose members are motivated, people friendly, open, relaxed and honest with one another and the public; know their role and mandate and be proud of their job; appreciated by the public…

The just concluded Constitutional review holds a promise for the establishment of an emancipated Police Service, that will operate in conformity with democratic transformation from the current practice of Regime Policing to Democratic Policing (Community Policing)

These measures augur well with the Police Reforms as well as the goodwill of citizens. An international survey conducted in January 2003 placed Kenyan’s as the most optimistic citizens in the world. The Government will do well to tap into this optimism. It is the energy that will drive the nation’s transformation to Its desired destination.

For citizen’s security:this is the moment.

Yes, 2003 was in fact “the moment”.  Let’s not let 2013 be remembered as a different kind of “moment”.

Related articles

It’s nice to have the American election over with more than 3 months to go in Kenya . . .

Posted on by
Reply

Donkey

Mara Herd

With the same division in Congress and a second Obama Administration to be formed, at least the opportunity for continuity and maximum cooperation exits on the U.S. side in addressing the challenges presented by another possibly controversial and high-risk election in Kenya.

 

Readings to prepare for the Kenyan election

Posted on by
Reply

Kenya Voting: "Curriculum Cooking"

The new report “Kenya’s 2013 Election: A Review of the Environment and Electoral Preparedness”, the latest installment for The Kenya National Dialogue and Monitoring Project from South Consulting was released last week.

No big surprises here, but worth reading for anyone planning to be involved from here forward.  The most unique thing about these reports is monitoring of public opinion in regard to the various reform and election preparations issues.  Takeaways: confirmation that the public nationally has still had a high level of support for the ICC process.  In Central and Rift Valley, support is significantly less than elsewhere, but still nears 50%. Confidence in the independence and expected effectiveness of the IEBC was holding up in spite of the problems with the BVR tender.  The reform process for the judiciary has been well received with a big increase in confidence in the courts versus the past.  On the other hand, nothing of significance has been done in regard to land issues, there has been little done of police reform, and the early pre-election violence has contributed to a large increase in the level of insecurity and expectations for violence around the elections.  Interestingly, however, there has been some uptick in perceptions of the police in spite of the lack of progress in implementing major reform.

A personal observation is that confidence in the IEBC is a double-edged sword.  If the IEBC has a real chance to deliver a fair and fully legitimate election, then a high level of public support going in can have significant advantages in encouraging the public to avoid cynicism, participate in the process, tone down “negative ethnicity” and avoid pre-election violence, etc.  Perhaps most importantly, it could help buy patience in addressing issues and problems that will inevitably arise in the final stages of a close election.  On the other hand, if the 2013 election turns out to be openly irregular as in 2007, the dashed expectations should be expected to be naturally volatile.

More important reading on what happened in 2007-08 from a study, Spontaneous or Premeditated? Post-Election Violence in Kenya, from Dr. Godwin Murunga published last year by the Nordic Africa Institute.

Related articles

List of Kenya’s Presidential aspirants on Social Media

Posted on by
Reply

From the Sunday Nation, the list of Kenyan Presidential aspirants using social media:

Presidential aspirants Raila Odinga, Uhuru Kenyatta, Kalonzo Musyoka, William Ruto, Martha Karua, Charity Ngilu, James ole Kiyiapi, Kingwa Kamencu, George Wajackoyah, Peter Kenneth, Raphael Tuju, Musalia Mudavadi, Cyrus Jirongo, Eugene Wamalwa, and Moses Weteng’ula are now using websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and You Tube to directly interact with voters. Only David Maillu has no Facebook or Twitter account.

 

In the 2007 campaign and aftermath, blogs were a significant source of information and advocacy, but not generally officially associated with campaigns, and SMS text messaging was widely used; otherwise, this is a big shift in how candidates and campaigns can reach, persuade and organize potential voters, especially through mobile internet.

Kenya’s voter registration again delayed . . . [with updates]

Posted on by
1

UPDATED 10/24: IEBC Chairman Hassan spoke to the press Wednesday afternoon Nairobi time.  Bottom line is that he is “cautiously optimistic” that the Government will follow through with a commitment to make a remaining authorization of the outstanding 60% due for the first major shipment of the Biometric Voter Registration Kits. If this happens so that the kits arrive by Tuesday, the IEBC can conduct the voter registration in November.  Any further delay would have “grave consequences” rippling through the election preparations–thus jeopardizing the March 4 date.

UPDATED 10/23:  New development from Capital FM:

NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct 23 – The government has assured that the next General Election will be held on schedule after the Treasury and the Attorney General approved the financing agreement for Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits.

Finance Minister Njeru Githae on Tuesday morning said the delay in approval of the financing agreement was due to its late arrival from France.

He said that neither the Treasury nor the Attorney General was to blame for the setback since the agreement was only received on Monday.

Original post:

Nevermind my previous post about biometric voter registration in Kenya that was to have started almost two weeks ago.  The latest glitch, as reported in The Nation, is the need for the Attorney General’s office to approve a letter of credit so the French manufacturer of the BVR kits will ship them:

According to deadlines set by IEBC in August, voter registration was supposed to be carried out in September and October. However, the exercise was now set to start on November 14.

The commission has been forced to amend its timelines several times over the past three months due to the BVR crisis.

With only 133 days left to the March 4 election, it will take 60 days to complete a proper voter listing programme involving 18 million Kenyans with 30 days being set aside for the actual registration and another 30 days for voter inspection.

The frustrated elections boss revealed that he met Prof Muigai at the sidelines of the Mashujaa Day celebrations on Saturday and pleaded with him to save the country by signing the document.

This is the sort of problem or issue that is going to be testing everyone’s patience for the duration of the process of electing a new government.

Is it necessary and legitimate for questions to be raised in granting legal approval for the letter of credit?  Hard to say;  that some players in the process openly desire to delay the election, in the context of the controversial nature of the Attorney General’s appointment in the first place, means that public and private skepticism are inevitable.

Related articles

 

Kenya to begin biometric voter registration Oct. 11

Posted on by
1

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission announced today that it will open a thirty-day voter registration period on October 11. iEBC Chairman Hassan said the Kenyan government was ready to sign the contract for biometric voter registration kits and an initial shipment would be available to begin by that date. The IEBC expects to register roughly 18 million voters before the March 4 election date. Here is the story from CapitalFM.

 

Kenya Update: election campaigns, teachers strike, Mombasa unrest

Posted on by
Reply

Close to 100 Kenyan civil servants tendered their resignations by Monday’s deadline in order to run for public office in the upcoming elections. The Standard reports.

Perhaps the most conspicuous is controversial Government Spokesman Alred Mutua who will seek the Governorship of Machakos County through the Wiper Party, formerly ODM-Kenya, headed by V.P. Kalonzo Musyoka.

Charity Ngilu, Water Minister from Kitui South, has entered the presidential race, the second female candidate along with Martha Karua. Ngilu was the first Kenyan woman to run for president in 1997.

Kenya’s public school teachers have gone on strike, from the Daily Nation:

School activities have been paralysed as teachers went on strike to demand for more pay.

The teachers defied a court order issued on Friday declaring the strike illegal and failed to report to the more than 30,000 public primary and secondary schools countrywide.

A survey by the Nation established that no learning took place on the first day of Third Term.

In Mombasa, a Muslim cleric, Said Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, suspected of involvement in terrorism has been charged with inciting the deadly riots following the killing of his associate Aboud Rogo.

Related articles

Key current events and questions in the Kenyan Presidential election

Posted on by
1

Waiting for the Hurricane Isaac to visit us here on the Gulf Coast I have been drafting a long post/essay on the potential impact on the Kenyan election of the outcome of the U.S. elections and corresponding with a friend who is getting ready to go to Kenya.

Before polishing that up, I wanted to catch up on the Kenyan presidential race itself.

Under the new Constitution we are seeing the first Kenyan election under a “run-off for majority” rather than a “first past the post” system. Under this new system, any candidate who dominates the Kikuyu vote is almost guaranteed a spot in a run-off as long as there is more than one other candidate of any significance at all in the first round.

For months the polls have continued to reflect a race dominated by Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta. Odinga has a significant lead but less than an outright majority and Kenyatta has a large margin for second place, or the spot in a runoff as the prevailing Kikuyu, anti-Odinga or non-Luo alternative. Among claimants to be the choice of the Kikuyu/Central Province “old guard” establishment, Kenyatta alone shows strongly in the public opinion polls. In this regard the race has remained relatively stable for weeks.

Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi and Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka both have significant support, but do not rival Uhuru in the polling. MP William Ruto running as a fellow ICC “victim” and champion of Kalenjin Rift Valley interests is not getting much national traction and none of the alternative Kikuyu candidates has shown themselves as a threat in the polls so far.

Details of “parties” and alliances and alignments shift weekly if not daily, but the main specific potential “game changer” of the past few months seems to have remained the untimely death in a helicopter crash of Internal Security Minister George Saitoti. Saitoti, on one hand, could be seen as one more candidate among the pack with Kalonzo and Mudavadi–I would see him, however, as a much stronger contender against Uhuru specifically. If I had been advising Uhuru’s campaign (for the record I don’t know who he is using in this capacity outside Kenya this time) I would have been much more focused on Saitoti than the others.

Saitoti was a Kikuyu-speaker of mixed ethnicity representing a near-Nairobi Rift Valley district, with a strong background in the Moi administration, within which he had gotten rich. As Kibaki‘s Internal Security Minister he had a more substantive portfolio and was more of an insider than the Vice President. Kalonzo had run separately in 2007 under the ODM-Kenya splinter and did not publicly endorse Kibaki until after the election. He provided crucial service in the pinch to the Kibaki campaign in that role, but assuming the truth to what then-MP and Kalonzo associate Joe Khamisi wrote in his book The Politics of Betrayal–that Kalonzo cut a pre-election deal with Kibaki through Stanley Murage–it’s hard to see that he would have earned himself a lot of respect. And of course Mudavadi had been against Kibaki (and thus for Uhuru with Moi) in 2002, and then been a member of Raila’s Pentagon against Kibaki in 2007. So its difficult to see that simply abandoning Raila and ODM in 2012 would be enough to give Mudavadi a serious claim on Kibaki’s affections to the point of the President throwing him Uhuru’s base with Uhuru still in the race.

Saitoti, running under the same PNU (“Party of National Unity“) label under which Kibaki claimed re-election, seems to me to have been in a different category of potential even if he had not yet moved out in the polls. Another interesting factor for Saitoti would have been his role as Minister of Internal Security in dealing with the major outside players such as the Western powers and Museveni. PNU was a bit illusive in 2007 as some hybrid of “party”, “coalition” and “committee to re-elect the president”, but nonetheless elected a section of MPs in its own name. With Saitoti dead there have been purported “PNU” endorsements of Uhuru already.

Obviously the prospect of electing a new president of Kenya on the eve of his trial for crimes against humanity by the ICC is disturbing/offensive to Kenya’s ally the United States and the European powers and many of Kenya’s other friends. An article in the Daily Nation yesterday highlights the seemingly difficult spot that Kibaki is in with the competing claims to his support in the context of the ICC indictment against Uhuru.

Kibaki plays his cards close and I doubt most of us will ever know much of what he ends up doing in regard to the 2013 election. I would encourage interested observers to make sure to remember that the Kenyan administration hosted Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir–under indictment from the ICC and with well-established pariah status to celebrate the new Kenyan Constitution and inaugurate the “new era” two years ago.

As for Kalonzo and Mudavadi, assuming that Uhuru stays in the race they are potentially in a position of serving as important “placeholders” to assure Uhuru a spot in a run-off against Raila. But then in the run-off, would they stay lock-step in the anti-Raila position, or could they be peeled away? Obviously it would be very hard personally for Kalonzo to support Raila after 2007 but Mudavadi has supported Raila once. Would their first round voters follow them in a run-off regardless?

And of course the biggest question of all. The stakes are higher in the presidential race than in 2007. Will the IEBC come through with a credibly complete and accurate count of the votes and what will happen if not?

Related articles

Update on Kenya’s Biometric Voter Registration

Posted on by
1

It seems to be “sorted” that the Canadian government will handle the purchase, funded as a “concessionary loan” of KSh 4.6M to the Government of Kenya, relieving the IEBC of the budgeted amount of KSh 3.9M for the procurement.  Here are stories from the Standard and the Star.

Polling Centre at Dagoretti, Nairobi

Related articles

[Updated Aug. 9] Another change–Kenyan Government will obtain Biometric Voter Registration system directly from Canada for IEBC

Posted on by
1

Aug. 9 Update:  It still is not entirely clear what will happen on the procurement of the Biometric Voter Registration kits going forward, and the original failure of the procurement process will continue to be investigated and debated in Parliament and elsewhere.  The Star today has a story some detailed discussion of the Code, Inc., the Canadian company that was the incumbent provider for the pilot program selected under the old Interim Independent Electoral Commission and appears to be set to remain in place through a transaction between the Kenyan and Canadian governments.

————–

The Government of Kenya in a meeting headed by President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga has addressed serious public and international concerns caused by the cancellation of the BVR effort by the IEBC, reports the Daily Nation:

The government on Monday stepped in to buy biometric equipment for the registration of voters.

To protect the credibility of the election and build public confidence, a top-level crisis meeting agreed that the kit will be bought from Canada on a government-to-government basis.

The Elections Act will be amended to make room for registration of 18 million voters, an exercise that has been delayed by the failure of the deeply divided Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to award the Sh3.9 billion tender for the purchase of biometric voter registration kits.

The voter registration deadline will also be extended from 90 days prior to the election to 45 days before the election to allow for implementation of the new system.