Instead of "the coalition of the killing" a "coalition of the stealing"? Let us review the next presidential election campaign after Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga shook hands on February 28, 2008 to end the 2007 election crisis and the…
Could one make a case that perhaps it was not me after all, but more the Ambassador and/or others at the State Department who "went native" in Kenya over the 2007 election controversy (and in other situations)? Interesting to think…
Macharia Gaitho seems to have been of late the designated Kenyan columnist to convey certain background perspectives from the American Embassy. His April 8 Sunday Nation column provides in interview form a review by outgoing Ambassador Godec of his tenure and…
[Update Feb. 2: Here is a good overview from Martina Stevis-Gridnef in the Wall Street Journal, "Kenya Crackdown on Media, Opposition Deepens"; Fr. Gabriel Dolan explains how the Kenyatta government has popularized the "National Resistance Movement by banning it, with…
I originally sought this document in a separate FOIA in 2009 because it seemed to me in Nairobi in real time as Chief of Party for the USAID-funded exit poll and election observation programs that this Rice/Solana conversation marked a…
I was pleasantly surprised by the previous statements from the State Department both from Washington and in Nairobi, calling for "national dialogue" in the wake of Kenya's fraught and objectionably violent environment in the wake of the boycotted October 26…
Still no more documents from USAID from my 2015 request for material involving our support for the IEBC in the 2013 election, from which I finally learned in April of this year that USAID had tasked the American International Foundation…
“Kenya’s election rerun could be a major setback for African democracy” a new Washington Post editorial was published Monday evening in the United States. I suspect The Post here has fairly well reflected the general view of the Kenyan situation in…
[Update: Here is an Oct. 3 Daily Nation story on the status of negotiations and demands among Kenyan politicians and Western diplomats: "Envoys threaten travel bans to politicians derailing poll plans". The International Crisis Group meanwhile offers a good brief: "How…
This is a straightforward lesson. We have acted in this movie in Kenya before.
(To refresh, here is my piece “The Debacle of 2007: How Kenyan politics was frozen and an election was stolen with U.S. connivance” in The Elephant.)
Mistakes will be made when we are out and about involved in our way in the world. (Most conspicuously, per Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This recognition of error obtained consensus among at least the top dozen Republican candidates and the top four Democrats so it seems to be a rare “given” that we should not have to argue about now.)
We cannot undo the past but at the very least we have a moral responsibility to take cognizance of (very) recent history in Kenya involving many of the very same Kenyan ethnic/commercial/political leaders and a continuity of institutional and individual players and assumed interests of the United States as well. Our choices have consequences, too.
We are in denial if we pretend that we did not fail abjectly (to the extent we even tried really) to effectively foster any type of justice in Kenya for the 2008 Post Election Violence. If we can excuse our asserted complacency in 2007 on the argument that the full magnitude of the violence was unprecedented (in spite of the 1992 and 1997 “campaigns”) we certainly do not have that excuse this time.
You cannot but hear bitter strident speech about Kenya’s presidential election from Kenya’s politicians, and from Kenya’s journalists, lawyers, pundits, publishers, moguls, ranchers and hustlers (of whatever ethnic or national origin or income). Compared to 2007 it is more aggressive and open and it is coming in some key part directly from the President and even more so from those very close to him and from the Deputy President.
In 2007 Mwai Kibaki and Moody Awori were not using the “bully pupit” of the Presidency and Vice Presidency to openly disparage and ridicule those with less power (even though Kibaki was obviously not in hindsight of any mind to actually risk being found to have lost the election by the ECK).
Likewise, during that campaign Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, on opposite sides of the presidential campaign once “retired President” Moi realigned to support Kibaki mid-year, were far more restrained in their widely public statements as candidates
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