I am too far removed from “the ground” in Kenya to be able to directly answer this question myself, but it is one that has to be asked by the UK and German governments leading this year’s democracy assistance “basket fund”, by all Kenyans of course, by foreigners and ex-pats working in democracy assistance or civil society efforts, etc.
To me, the factual underpinnings for any such belief (regarding election violence) seem conspicuously lacking from everything I know about Kenya, Kenyan politics, William Ruto specifically and his history since 1992’s re-election of Daniel arap-Moi when Ruto was a key KANU “Youth Winger”. That first multi -party and post-Cold War election was observed by the International Republican Institute (“IRI”) with funding from USAID after Moi rejected the request of George H.W. Bush’s Ambassador Hempstone to permit an International Election Observation Mission by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (“NDI”) and US democracy assistance involvement became a permanent feature.
Most recently the normal baseline of extrajudicial killings that appear to connect to issues of political power seems to be increasing. Again, I am at a great distance and not a source of facts or judgment about what Kenya’s main political players are doing just now, just a repository of the inconvenient context of recent decades in the lives of these men, their competition and their country (and mine).
Certainly for IRI, NDI and their funders at the National Endowment for Democracy the unique new context includes “January 6” which they denounced rightly and as was required of them at the time, with a new Trump II administration which “woodchippered” USAID, tried to eliminate NED, and has adopted the previously unprecedented practice of direct POTUS endorsement of some foreign presidential candidates on a seemingly ad hoc basis as to process, motive and timing.
Likewise the role of non-democratic actors in Kenya’s Presidential campaign will presumably be that much greater than in the past; those actors are unlikely to incentivize or pressure Ruto to adopt more thoroughly democratic norms.
[Update: since I have not been actively writing here for several months, I may have been a bit hasty in offering here an assessment of Raila’s immediate legacy in current Kenyan politics upon hearing the news of his unfortunate passing from heart failure in India. Those who grew up with Raila’s role in opposing dictatorship through brutal detention and have stayed continuously emotionally engaged with Kenya over the years—especially Kenyans, who do not have the option of pulling back as I have as an American —will feel the weight of a mighty tree falling and the sudden change of light, landscape and horizon. In other words, this post may have been a bit “too soon” as well as superficial. I will endeavor to do more justice to Raila’s impact ahead after the initial memorials.]
Raila’s primary definitive legacy is Kenya’s 2010 Constitution, negotiated as a result of his 2007 campaign which I believe clearly garnered the most votes and led him to the temporary but critical post of Prime Minister for Kibaki’s second term from 2008-2013 as part of the February 28 peace deal between Raila and Kibaki.
The peace deal did not result in the fully formed power sharing contemplated but it was enough to get to a reform Constitution through the elite establishment gauntlet so long as the sole executive power of the presidency was retained (in other words, the Prime Minister position would go away). Devolution, the Supreme Court and many rights that we can hope will eventually come to fruition for Kenyans did result and have created real change.
Raila’s other legacy is the enduring ODM party itself. The party unfortunately has been in jeopardy in recent years as being without a clear identity with Raila’s handshakes with first Uhuru Kenyatta, then William Ruto. Collaboration with Kenyatta had a clear rationale in achieving Kenyatta’s support for Raila and running mate Martha Karua, intending to stop a Ruto succession. The recent support for Ruto, however, heading into a 2027 re-election campaign, has been hard to square with the notions of the Orange Democratic Movement advertised over the years.
It has been awhile now since Raila was carrying the torch as a reformist leader himself and I will hope that this legacy can now come to greater fruition with younger generations, through a re-tooled ODM and new avenues to compete with ossified elite capture.
“In the wake of last year’s Gen Z protests, Kenyan President William Ruto had two choices. He could accept the youthful population’s rejection of business as usual and get serious about cleaning up corruption in government, aiming to ride the wave of enthusiasm for change to usher in a new political paradigm based on delivering for voters rather than knitting together a coalition of self-serving elites. Or he could revert to darker days of Kenyan history, using political violence to suppress dissent and cow the public. He chose the latter path.
. . . .
The result is, as the Kenyan Conference of Catholic Bishops put it, an attempt to make everyone complicit in a “culture of lies.” In a statement issued last November, the group lamented, “Basically it seems that truth does not exist, and if it does, it is only what the Government says.” It’s a political scenario that deserves close watching. How does a society that has lost faith in its political class but not necessarily in its own ability to affect change react to obvious untruths coming from official sources, to threats and violence, and to an attempt to distort the very idea of truth? How can Kenyans continue to center the ideas that energized a nationwide movement for change while contending with old attempts to divide them and this latest intentional shirking of responsibility at the very top? The answers will matter a great deal to Kenya’s future, and to the prospects for democracies in peril far beyond Kenya’s borders.”
Ruto made his big career move from the 2008 Post Election Violence and being a target of the failed attempts at accountability. So no right to be surprised.
Ruto’s divisive power. In the Continent, Kiri Rupiah reports on the increasing divide in international and domestic opinion regarding Kenyan President William Ruto, noting the disconnect between the U.S. government’s embrace of Ruto and his low approval ratings at home.
His recent U.S. visit was overshadowed by criticism at home over tax hikes, wasteful expenses, and alleged government corruption. Ruto’s political career began murkily: The International Criminal Court charged him in 2011 with three counts of crimes against humanity related to the ethnic violence that followed Kenya’s 2007 election but later abandoned the case, and Ruto reinvented himself as a key U.S. ally. “In a tradition that changes cast but not much of the script, the US has named its new man in Africa,” Rupiah writes.
Personally, I am choosing to be hopeful, not that Ruto is not who he has shown himself to be through his participation in election violence and corruption, but rather that greater investment subsidized and supported by the US will help create badly needed jobs for Kenyans.
A visit to Washington this spring identified Ambassador Whittman as being seen in diplomatic circles as having a conspicuous case of “clientitus”.
After returning home, President Ruto admitted at the Prayer Breakfast that he had hitched a ride to Washington on a chartered jet provided by “friends”, who turned out to be the UAE—the same Emiratis who also back the RSF which is committing murder and mayhem in Sudan and melt most of the illicit smuggled gold from the region, along with hosting all sorts of sanction busting and money laundering. But they have a lot of cash to spend around Washington as well as Nairobi and anywhere else that cash is welcome.
I noted that former President Obama seemed to be staying slightly aloof to “Rutofest”, perhaps because of the Post Election Violence background?
Before the exposure of the Anglo Leasing security sector corruption and other scandals Mwai Kibaki was in quite good books with the Bush Administration in Washington.
Kibaki’s 2002 election victory could be seen at the time as a feather in the cap for Bush’s “freedom agenda” in Africa. Kibaki was a core establishment insider who had served for 10 years as Daniel arap Moi’s vice president during Cold War era single party KANU rule, but had been democratically elected as titular head of a broad “opposition” coalition after the Bush Administration squeezed Moi to honor term limits and allow succession after 24 years and Moi chose his predecessor’s son Uhuru as his intended successor over more senior KANU leaders. (The best of both worlds for us Americans from a strictly diplomatic/foreign relations standpoint.)
Kibaki was used to dealing with the American government going back at least as far as arms purchases during the Gerald Ford Administration with Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State.
A lot has happened since October 2003, but not so much of it has been in Kenya. The biggest single change in Kenya has been population growth (with relatively flat human development). No big fluctuations on corruption or security, etc. and some worsening of an already challenging climate.
Ruto is another first term Kenyan president in very good books in Washington. An establishment protege of Daniel arap Moi who is seen as having had an oppositionist wrinkle to his 2022 election as President as the sitting incumbent Vice President by the fact that the outgoing incumbent President, his erstwhile running mate, Uhuru Kenyatta (also an American favorite while President and close to important Americans before taking office) tried to throw him over for his new “handshake” partner Raila Odinga.
Now, Ruto has a handshake deal of his own to back Odinga for the AU Commission chair as an alternative to domestic Kenyan opposition leadership.
The one big event in Kenya between 2003 and 2024 was Kibaki’s stolen 2007 re-election and the ensuing murder and mayhem as Kenya went “to the brink of civil war”. But as they say, “it’s been a minute”.
And since both the election fraud and the Post Election Violence successfully achieved their objectives it’s hard to find time to remember who was killing whom after so many years.
Externally, the current round of war in Somalia started a little more than two years after Kibaki’s 2003 State Dinner. The Second Kibaki Administration itself invaded Somalia in 2010 and 14 years later the beat goes on. And diplomatically we need Nairobi as a place from which to address any saving of Darfur and democratizing or at least stabilizing Southern/South Sudan as we did back in 2003. A new bonus is the chance to pay to get some of Kenya’s police force out of the country for awhile while also putting African boots on Haitian ground.
I guess the one word that I would choose to fit the Ruto-Biden State Dinner is “predictable”.
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.
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.
Struck me this week that 15 (!) years had gone by since the July and August release of the International Republican Institute Kenya 2007 Election Observation Mission final report and the Exit Poll following my family’s return to the US from my time in Kenya as Chief of Party on each of those USAID programs.
A quick catch up on-line generated a critical document that I had not noted previously. It is a report prepared by IFES for Open Society East Africa for submission to IREC, popularly known as the “Kreigler Commission” which was to investigate the failed election as a result of the February 28, 2008 “Peace Deal” and subsequent processes to implement the basic terms. The Commission reported privately to President Kibaki and then released a public report (see my key document links) that elided actual investigation of the ECK’s tally of the Presidential vote as such.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to infer that a well-orchestrated plan was implemented to ensure a predetermined election result:
a. President Kibaki’s decision to abrogate the IPPG agreement of 1997 on the formula for appointments to the Electoral Commission ensured that all of the Commissioners were appointed by him alone. The IPPG agreement had capped the maximum number of Commissioners to 22 and reserved 10 seats to be filled by persons appointed by the President after recommendations by opposition parliamentary parties.
b. The allegations of questionable procedure in the appointment of returning officers by Commissioners.
c. An offer from the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) to install a computer program that would have enabled election officials in the constituencies to submit results electronically to Nairobi and then on to a giant screen available to the public, making it virtually impossible to change results, was rejected.
d. The use of ECK staff in the Verification and Tallying Center was abandoned in favor of casual staff recruited directly by the Commissioners.
e. The Commission refused to ensure that election officials in areas with large predictable majorities for any of the candidates came from different areas so as to reduce the likelihood of ballot stuffing.
Since opinion polls from the 2007 elections consistently indicated a very tight contest, the neutrality of the ECK was always paramount, particularly in the event of a thin margin and a too-close-to-call election. The new appointments made by President Kibaki to the ECK early in 2007 elicited protests from the opposition that he was fortifying the ECK with his supporters despite the need for the electoral body to be perceived as fair and independent, a perception crucial to political stability in a region where many political systems are unstable. Several actors appealed to President Kibaki to consult the opposition prior to making appointments to the Electoral Commission, with no perceptible effect.
These developments exacerbated problems within the ECK. Although the ECK had improved substantially since 2002 in its ability to manage elections, the commission still clung to many questionable practices. For example, votes were counted at the polling station without transportation to a central tallying center, a process prone to abuse and manipulation by the former regime. The unilateral appointments by the President meant that the ECK was now perceived as subject to control, direction, and manipulation by the government.
Did we do this? I really have no idea factually. Back in 2009 when I attended my first annual meeting of the African Studies Association, in nearby New Orleans that year, I was left with the notion after sitting at the knee of an up-and-coming “scholar/actor” that diplomatic players in the U.S. and/or the U.K. and whomever else might fairly obviously be expected to try to broker a pre-election Kalenjin-Kikuyu coalition.
At the time, the idea of helping put together Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto would have seemed improbably Machiavellian.
Again, as I said, no idea. But if I were to resume taking a look-see into the 2013 election following my initial FOIA request about the IFES program at the IEBC I would be interested to get into the pre-election period as well.
The closeness of the election is somewhat obscured now by the “winner take all” nature of Kenya politics and the quick consolidation of power by Ruto, but it really was very tight under any view. No disrespect to Martha Karua intended because her choice did help revitalize Raila’s campaign when he had persistently trailed in the polls throughout and then moved ahead when she was tapped.
Nonetheless, all politics in Kenya is local/tribal and she was undoubtedly picked in part to try to offset Raila’s weakness versus Ruto in the core Kikuyu old Central Province, as well as a play for “good governance” support from the “international community” and civil society (which had adopted Karua for a variety of reasons in recent years in spite of her understood role as a Kibaki Kikuyu hardliner opposed to the peace deal and power sharing in the 2007-08 ECK and PEV crisis).
At the end of the day, I think Karua was respected but not highly popular, whereas Ngilu was less respected internationally, and perhaps among some parts of Kenya’s more intellectual class, but more popular as a politician.
One thing that I am guessing that happened is that Raila overestimated the practical value of going with a “Good Government” choice in terms of support from Washington and London, and otherwise from “the Western donors”, just as he overestimated the transferability of the support that Kenyatta had in those capitals to him. I think he just may have been behind the times on this: there were years when Ruto or a candidate with his profile would have drawn active criticism internationally for corruption but 2022 was just not such a year for a variety of reasons. Likewise people in Washington that considered Ruto “dangerous” as late as a couple of years ago because of his role in the PEV seem to have gotten over it once they saw him as the long-established frontrunner in the polls and BBI not catching on. I think many were unsure whether Kenyatta was really going to follow through on supporting Raila which made it that much easier to rationalize a Ruto presidency.
“On the ground” among Kenyan voters, Raila could not pull off running a traditional opposition anti-corruption oriented campaign after several years of the handshake and clearly counting on Kenyatta’s support. Too much cognitive dissonance, especially after getting beat in the Courts on a BBI that got larded up and bogged down to the point of becoming notably unpopular in its own right. On that front, the Karua pick seems to have proven too late and too out of step with the messaging from Raila’s other coalition heavyweights.
Given that he was behind in the polls and needed a spark, I do think choosing a woman made sense, but Ngilu as a more traditional Kenyan politician who was a current office holder and a long established vote getter from a “swing” region and ethnicity might have fit the bill quite a bit better. A more obvious choice to match up versus Mudavadi and Wetagula on Ruto’s side and a more congruous fit with the rest the established heavyweights on the Azimio team.
A Kenyan friend recently checked in to ask what I had written about the Kenyan election. I had to say “very little”. I have been committed to my more unique role as a witness to what went wrong in 2007-08 and tried to avoid the risk of being just another opinionated outsider missing the real conduct and motivations of the opaque competition for power through the election.
Nonetheless, I did send a private email memo to a few friends in Kenya and Washington back on May 15, 2022 (shortly before Raila and Ruto chose running mates) titled “A Few Thoughts on the Kenyan Election”:
1. First big election in Africa after the end of the Post-Cold War peace in Europe.
2. In this environment, the democratic Western players are less able to credibly claim to speak for a notional international community.
3. So on balance, not much reason to indulge Kenyatta now the way we did Kibaki in 2007. Unless we can be sure that the Kenyattas have a deal with Ruto to assure no major violence, why would we signal that we would be willing to look the other way if they steal it for Raila? Major violence would be riskier and more unpredictable now than back in 2007. On the other hand, if they do steal it, the last thing we would want to do is risk instabilty on behalf of a few votes for Wm. Ruto.
4. Obviously Obama and Trump and their administrations overestimated Uhuru for 15 years, but if we really cared about the details of Kenyan politics we would have gotten serious about injecting some competence into Kenyatta’s BBI fiasco.
5. There are still a few weeks left in a 4 1/2 year campaign so Raila could get it together, but who really thinks that’s highly likely? Under the circumstances, it isn’t that hard to see why ordinary Kenyans would be attracted to a candidate who is even more corrupt and more ruthlessly ambitious, but presents as having some basic discipline and competence, among the actual choices. Especially if you have lived through recent American elections.
6. The American humorist Will Rogers (from the era of my grandparents on the small family farm in Kansas during the Great Depression) was famous for the phrase: “I never met a man I didn’t like”. We have never met a President of Kenya we didn’t like.
Just my honest, private thoughts at the time, for what it is worth.
