I will do a series of posts here to accompany my agreement to engage with former Chairman Hassan after reading his memoir Referee of a Dirty Ugly Game: In the Theatre of Kenya’s Elections — an Insider’s Account. This is an introduction.

I learned a lot about the Chairman’s personal background, his family, his personal and professional networks, in particular involving his previous political service in unsuccessful constitutional reform endeavors in Mwai Kibaki’s first term, his law practice and work for the UN on Somalia. I learned his personal opinions about several politicians, and many actors in various positions in the Kenyan government and in the Kenyan social and business establishment.

I learned a lot about Ahmed Isaack Hassan, how he sees himself and wants to be seen.

Certainly Hassan has been presented by some who were involved with him in running, presenting and defending the 2013 election as a hero for getting through a process in which power was passed from Kibaki to Kenyatta and Ruto without Kenya “burning”. It is in this context a memoir of this sort fits.

To the extent that this was what Hassan was appointed to do then he did deliver and this is his chance to box his critics. Undoubtedly he was put “through the wringer” to an extreme degree and treated badly in various respects as so many people trying to fulfill positions of public trust are in Kenya and one has to have empathy for the impossible position. Thank God he wasn’t murdered like IT Director Chris Msando from the successor IEBC in 2017.

Unfortunately I did not learn as much as I hoped to about the questions that I raised in this blog and elsewhere about the specifics of the 2013 elections.

I learned that he had and has dismissive and negative opinions of organized civil society generally and people that I worked with to some extent and have liked and admired but I am not very clear why for the most part. Part of it may be that his deference as an insider himself to Kibaki and his establishment executive branch apparatus leads him to have little empathy for a role for outsiders. In particular he evinces no real concern for fraud in the 2007 presidential tally and no moral qualms – as opposed to concerns of international relations – implicated by the question of the participation of candidates in 2013 who were involved in the 2007-08 Post Election Violence.

In particular, the heavily redacted contract materials for IFES from the initial responses to my Freedom of Information Act requests several years ago were much more informative regarding some issues involved in the mechanics of the election and point the way to other sources.

This is the kind of thing that I would be grateful to engage on with the former Chairman.

Of course, ultimately there is a “glass half full or half empty” problem about the 2013 election that will not be fully reconcilable among Kenyans about their own democracy with their own perspectives and interests. On the other hand, for me as an outsider without a “dog in the hunt” directly it seems unequivocal that the glass is partly full of liquid and partly full of air and it is simply a matter of fact to identify what is what even though the significance and value derived from the facts will be a matter of individual judgment for Kenyans.

Sometimes people just have different values and priorities. But maybe 10 years after the fact there is more room for discourse and persuasion than there was in the heat of the struggle.

TO BE CONTINUED. . . .