Tag Archives: Raila Odinga

Diplomatic engagement from Western Democracies stepped up on Kenya protests

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The observation in my last post that diplomats in Nairobi and Western capitals were unusually quiet about the Azimio opposition protests and the Government response in Kenya has been somewhat overcome by events.

My sense is that with Ruto touring Western Europe and the Biden Administration running its Summit for Democracy and the Vice President Harris tour (Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia) and the U.S. hosting business investment promotions in Nairobi, there was a previously unusual desire to avoid getting sucked into Kenyan politics and rather to stay “on message”. The countries for whom democratization is somewhere in the mix diplomatically—in particular the United States—presumably hoped initially that opposition demonstrations would not generate a critical mass of disruption/instability to warrant official attention.

That did not turn out to be the case as neither the Kenya Kwanza Administration nor the Azimio opposition were willing to minimize provocation and escalation and were presumably playing to a global as well as local audience (as in the election last year and previous years). So now we have a variety of statements and comments from U.S. Ambassador Whitman and a formal joint statement from a raft of embassies of Western democracies in Nairobi as well as the dispatch of Delaware Senator Coons to engage the two Kenyan “sides” in “informal” diplomacy.

I am far removed at this point in my life from Washington diplomacy and bilateral international political engagement, so I will be uninformed about various things important within that circle, but I do not detect any deflection from the baseline U.S. Kenya policy as it was explained to me for the 2007 election after the fact: support the determination of the ECK/IIEC/IEBC.

In 2007 the “capture” at the ECK and accompanying malfeasance was too obvious and was called out after the voting by the EU and by other European democracies — and ECK Chairman Kivuitu publicly acknowledged his regret at being pressured to go along with certifying a Kibaki win. So the U.S. quickly pivoted withdraw congratulations to Kibaki, to declare the results as “unknowable” and to push a requirement for Kibaki to share power.

As I have explained here on this blog years ago and in The Elephant from my FOIA reviews, Ambassador Ranneberger’s cables to Washington before that 2007 election had argued that it would be “enormously damaging” for U.S. interests to “be forced” to acknowledge election fraud because of the magnitude of our relationship with Kenya, even though both Raila and Kibaki were “friends of the United States”. But part of the reason for the initial approach to “look and point the other way” at election fraud at the ECK was Ranneberger’s assessment (in his December 24, 2007 cable) the Courts were well understood to be corrupt:

14. As long as the electoral process is credible, the U.S.-Kenyan partnership will continue to grow and serve mutual interests regardless of who is elected. While Kibaki has a proven track record with us, Odinga is also a friend of the U.S. . . .

15. It is likely that the winner will schedule a quick inauguration (consistent with past practice) to bless the result and, potentially, to forestall any serious challenge to the results. There is no credible mechanism to challenge the results, hence likely recourse to the streets if the result is questionable. The courts are both inefficient and corrupt. Pronouncements by the Chairman of the Electoral Commission and observers, particularly from the U.S., will therefore have be [sic] crucial in helping shape the judgment of the Kenyan people. With an 87% approval rating in Kenya, our statements are closely watched and respected. I feel that we are well -prepared to meet this large responsibility and, in the process, to advance U.S. interests.” END

The one thing Kenyans as a whole—as opposed to the successful politician perpetrators—got out of the 2008 Post Election Violence was a partially reform-oriented 2010 Constitution that created the Supreme Court that changed the equation to challenge presidential vote tallies.

This time after 2022 it is sort of the opposite extreme from 2007—a general diplomatic unanimity that in spite of the actual closeness of the vote and an overt power struggle within the IEBC the conduct of the voting and results reporting were in substance greatly improved as well as upheld by the Supreme Court. Thus zero sympathy for the notion that Azimio and Raila in particular have any entitlement to relitigate on the streets after months of what can be seen from the outside Kenya as political stability and positive diplomatic interaction with the new Government.

My sense in 2017 was that there was a certain grudging admiration for the Opposition in winning at the Supreme Court (in the first round; a quorum could not hold against Executive pressure on considering terms of the re-run) on the basis of the IEBC irregularities, accompanied by some resentment for Raila’s claim that he had “actually” won, which was widely seen as dishonest and without substance, or at least a serious attempt at proof.

I think that any diplomatic support the Opposition can muster from the U.S. or European democracies will be based strictly on pragmatic immediate stability interests—diplomatically “we” do not care about Ruto’s past record and now see Raila as having spent his capital on being “the People’s President” in 2008 and on to the Handshake with Uhuru. Of course “we” would presumably prefer all other things being equal that Ruto bring Raila in for the same reasons that “we” supported the Building Bridges Initiative at conception but I am skeptical that official Washington will see it as necessary to strongarm Ruto or otherwise spend our own political capital on this.

I really don’t think it has a lot to do with Raila personally, one way or the other—I think if he was President we would flatter him the way we flatter Ruto, having no genuine or sincere misapprehensions about the character or track record of either man. Just as Trump and Biden were big “fans” of Uhuru as President of Kenya, the same status would have been enjoyed by Raila had he been certified by the IEBC.

I can see why this would be hard to swallow for Raila and his close confidants—“how does Kenya end up in the hands of someone like Ruto with Riggy G instead of us when we won in 2007 in the old system and finally made a preemptive deal with Uhuru for 2022 after the 2017 mess?”.

My personal answer to Raila would be that you let BBI turn into such a fiasco that you let Ruto, of all people, run as if he were “the opposition” while you ran as in effect the defender of much you had been in opposition to in the past. Yet you and Uhuru still failed to actually get any of the original “fixes” envisioned for BBI passed. You let the IEBC sit open without quorum without real protest. You should have known well that Ruto was more energetic, more wily and more ruthless than both Kibaki and Uhuru, with each of whom he aligned in facing corruption and ICC charges from the early days of the 2nd Kibaki Administration. In spite of all that it was an extremely close election, but you had the opportunity to win convincingly with a few better choices it seems to me. Regardless of all this, when you did not follow up to closely examine in public what happened at the ECK in 2007, or after the Supreme Court rulings in 2013 or in 2017, what is it you expect now?

“Seller Beware” – diplomatic community quiet on Kenya. No one outside Kenya believes Raila’s claims to having won a dominant majority in 2022; but all know that Ruto is corrupt and violent and that diplomatic credibility was undermined by attempts to sell previous bad elections.

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Raila Odinga Kenya president campaign

A variety of openly extralegal gambits by the Ruto Administration to centralize and consolidate power, including waivers of corruption cases, accompanied by severe economic pain for the majority of Kenyans and fiscal crises sets the stage in which the Odinga led opposition has initiated debilitating protests against the “cost of living” and the conduct of the last elections.

Given that Kenya is more and more “the last man standing” as a potentially arguable multiparty democracy in all of East Africa, the expanded EAC, the Greater Horn or however one might define the region, you would think diplomats would be all over this situation if you had been listening over the past 15 years.

Instead, “crickets”.

Presumably that has at least something to do with the fact that both “sides” are so clearly in the wrong and generally unsavory, yet with real power through the paramilitarized police, illicit funds and “the street” that it is best not to risk being seen as saying anything that could be used by one side or the other.

Kenya’s election was very close – would Raila have won with Ngilu instead of Karua as running mate?

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Raila Odinga Kenya president campaign

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 Few Thoughts on the Kenyan Election”

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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.

UhuruRuto Kenya 2013 billboard Nairobi

Just my honest, private thoughts at the time, for what it is worth.

Raila owes me for keeping the vote count verification Exit Poll showing him leading in 2007 from “going away”, but I did not do it for him personally

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Over the years carrying my torch as a witness to what happened on my watch in democracy assistance in Kenya in 2007-08, I have always tried to be mindful of the notion that it has not been my business who Kenyan voters chose, including how they voted in the subsequent 2013, 2017 and 2022 elections in which Raila has continued to be a leading candidate. Rather, my job in 2007-08, and my purpose since, has been to address the facts honestly and support the democratic process so that the choices actually made by Kenyan voters themselves would be honored.

Thus, keeping the 2007 Exit Poll from meeting an untimely demise because it was diplomatically inconvenient was not a matter of “supporting” Raila versus Kibaki as a candidate or politician, but rather doing my job to support the democratic process and “observe” the election with integrity.

There was a little bit more involved in preserving the hope that the Exit Poll would be released and published during the early months of 2008 when I was finishing out my “public service leave” as International Republican Institute Resident Director for East Africa than I have written about over the years.  It is probably time to tell the story.

In summary, after the decision was made in Washington to my surprise and disappointment not to release the Exit Poll showing Raila winning by almost six points, there was still the notion that the original polling forms would be sent to Washington and the original data evaluated and re-entered in digital form to determine whether there were actual doubts or anomalies to justify the announcement that the poll was “invalid”. Initially, this was going to happen when staff from our Nairobi office traveled to Washington in March for IRI’s annual global meeting.  The meeting was intended to be mandatory for me as a Country Director and I was asked on behalf of IRI’s President to prepare a presentation on the process of dealing with the Exit Poll and the release decision.  I explained to my boss, the Africa Director, that this was a terrible idea since I emphatically objected to the decision to say the poll was “invalid” and not release it, but I did not want to get up in front of a bunch of young idealistic IRI employees working around the world and say that, nor surely did “the front office” want me to. I also had a major family conflict for the meeting which had been moved because someone in Washington had forgotten to make hotel reservations.  Since my leave from my job in the States was up June 1 and I had to move back in May anyway, I was comfortable declining and was able to beg off.

The original survey forms, which were in locked storage at the Country Director residence near our office, were going to be delivered to Washington by the other staff members making the trip for the March meeting.  But then those instructions were cancelled and there was no operative plan to re-enter the data or otherwise review the original forms in Washington or elsewhere.  The researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) who were the critical consultants for the USAID-funded poll and had contributed additional funding supplementing that provided by USAID, wanted to do the data work, but IRI Washington did not want to let them without modifying their contract.  IRI would pay  $10,000 as compensation for the additional work, the same sum as the funding Dr. Clark Gibson of UCSD had provided pre-election, but UCSD would have to surrender the right to publish the results after a six month exclusive period for IRI that was provided in the original pre-election contract.  Dr. Gibson, as he told the New York Times declined because he thought “they were trying to shut me up”.

Given the fact that there was no path forward to complete the polling program and answer the questions that had been raised back in Washington without reference to the original data, I had to make a choice as Chief of Party for the polling program between honoring the existing contract with Dr. Gibson of UCSD or breaching it to follow instructions from my IRI superiors.  I elected to honor the program and the contract (and the election process itself as I saw it) and allowed the UCSD graduate student researcher to take possession of the survey forms (I had sent him, along with my wife, to retrieve them from the polling firm and bring them for safekeeping at the residence once things got “hot” when IRI announced from Washington that the poll was “invalid” and would not be released.  (As but one example of what I was concerned about, the possibility of a re-count of the underlying vote in the December 27 election had been eliminated, allegedly, by a fire in the warehouse where the ECK stored the ballot boxes just after the vote.)

Thus UCSD was able to verify the poll and release the results in presentations in Washington at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Johns Hopkins University in July 2008 after the end of the six month embargo. And USAID reported in their Frontline newletter that the exit poll “disclosed that the wrong candidate had been declared the winner”.

The personal drama was that in April when I was working from the residence (my successor was in place running the office by then but had not yet been approved by USAID as Chief of Party so I was still needed for public meetings and reports and such) when I got a call from my Africa Director in Washington that my successor had not been able to find the survey forms in the office.  I explained that they had never been taken to the office, which seemed obviously less secure, so we had taken them to the residence.  That was a satisfactory answer and nothing further was said.  The fact that the forms were in San Diego at that moment was a “didn’t ask, didn’t tell”.

In May I was to turn over the residence to my successor.  The UCSD researcher was bringing the survey forms back from San Diego with him and put the boxes in checked baggage which was tied up in a big delay at Heathrow in London, so he arrived without them as I was getting ready to vacate the residence.  In the context of the tension between myself and the Ambassador and the non-release of the Exit Poll, I threw myself my own going away party with my family and the staff that reported to me, but I did get invited to a farewell dinner by the Serbian Ambassador and his wife who managed our IRI office for both the East Africa programs and Sudan. Starting out with a homemade Serbian aperitif I felt a bit woozy after a sip and excused myself. I woke up a few minutes later on the floor of the restroom with a bit of blood on the tile from striking the sink on the way down.

A cab was called to take me to Aga Khan hospital where I recovered for a few days while my wife and kids scrambled to finish getting everything out of the residence for turnover in my absence and I hoped that the boxes of survey forms would arrive in time to be back in the residence for my successor.  After a few anxious days the boxes arrived in the nick of time and I was soon out of the hospital and off with the family for a couple of weeks in Uganda before going back to Mississippi and my job as a lawyer in the defense industry. Testing at the hospital indicated that I did not have malaria, just some similar but completely temporary symptoms of who-knows-what.

At some point, IRI ended up hiring a survey firm in Oklahoma to review the Exit Poll and released it themselves in August 2008 just before the UCSD researchers testified about it to the Kreigler Commission which was conceptually charged with investigating the dispute as to the facts of the vote for president.  Raila wrote about how important the Exit Poll was to him in his autobiography, “The Flame of Freedom”.  He got part of the story wrong, but since he has continued to be a candidate for president over the succeeding elections, it has been in his interest not to be overly fastidious about all the details, just as the important thing for current democracy assistance efforts is keep learning and adapting from the lessons that become available.

If Raila ends up being president this time, I hope he does a great job in the spirit that his most loyal friends and supporters, some of whom are also my friends, have always hoped.  I also hope it is because he gets the most votes in a free and fair election that is not marred by violence or more corruption than we have already seen.

The long view – 15 years ago I was preparing to move my family to Kenya for six months public service leave to work for IRI

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In May 2007 I was getting ready to move and reading up on Kenyan politics and history, and talking to people associated currently or previously with the International Republican Institute who knew something about the practical aspects of living and working in Nairobi, which was not as common a thing for Americans then as now.

At my job as Senior Counsel with the big defense contractor Northrop Grumman I was working to close a “Gulf Opportunity Zone” bond issue for “facilities modernization” at The State (of Mississippi) Shipyard at Pascagoula which was under long term lease to the company with rent tied to bond debt.  We were recovering and improving in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  I was also Program Counsel for the Amphibious Assault Carrier program, in which we had a series of contracts for a low “ten figure” sum to build a Navy ship that carried a Marine Expeditionary Unit to wherever they might need to go, with a few helicopters, airplanes and landing vehicles, a hospital and such.

The idea of doing non-profit foreign assistance work was influenced by several things, most especially living through the Hurricane Katrina disaster.  A few weeks before the hurricane hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast I had served as an Election Observer for IRI in Kyrgyzstan, and as the youngest and most expendable delegate I had had a grand adventure in Batken in the Ferghana Valley and found the experience of supporting a peaceful election in a troubled region as a counterpoint to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be inspiring.  Spending some time in an area that was poor and economically regressing also gave me a different perspective on the context of the devastation we soon faced back home from Hurricane Katrina, where in spite of the initial failures we received billions of dollars in assistance.  Even though it was all grossly inefficient, Washington turned on the spigot.  More importantly people from around the country and even around the world came to help “on the ground”, sacrificially, and many of my friends, in particular in my church congregation, did wonders helping those in need while most of my impact involved my work at the shipyard.  All told, I was primed to “do something” intended to be helpful and in particular in the “less rich” world.

It was in this context that I asked for “public service leave” to take the position of Resident Director for East Africa for IRI.  I asked for 18-24 months of unpaid leave, with the expectation that I would have to hope that a spot was available somewhere within the company’s law department after concluding at IRI. I got 6 months of job-protected leave instead, extended at IRI’s request that fall to a full year.

If I had had the background and experience, I might have sought to work in some other area like agriculture.  I had a background in practical party politics which had led to the opportunities to volunteer with IRI.  There was another context for working in democracy assistance specifically though, which was the Iraq war.  I was one of those that had not really been persuaded by the case to invade–it seemed like a “hail mary” so to speak that only made sense in the face of the kind of clear imminent threat that did not seem to be demonstrated.  Likewise, the general “Bush Doctrine” did not seem to me to be consistent with the weight of decisions of war and peace that were required by my Christian values.  By 2005 most Republicans from Washington could admit when they let their hair down overseas that we had made a mistake even if it would be another eleven years before they felt willing to say so publicly in response to Donald Trump’s campaign in the Republican primaries.

At some level, I thought we made the mistake on Iraq because too many of the people who really knew better in Washington in 2002 and 2003–the kind of people who had the experience and regional knowledge that I knew outside of Washington–“went along to go along” rather than exercise their best judgment.

So given my reasons for being in Kenya in the first place, and my own experience watching policy trainwrecks in Washington from the field, I was never going to be the guy to delegate my own responsibilities to do my own job to others, such as the Ambassador, who were not in my chain of command and had different roles to play and different perspectives about the Kenyan election. Nor was I going to willingly personally implicate myself in communicating things that I did not consider to be true when my job as Chief of Party for democracy assistance programs did not countenance “looking and pointing the other way” for extraneous reasons when confronted with election fraud.

I have found some agreement from a range of people in Washington with my observation that “the soft underbelly of American national security is careerism”.  Since I wasn’t in Kenya for IRI because “it was the best job I could get in the Republican Party” or because I wanted to switch careers to try to climb the ladder in U.S. foreign policy in Washington, I did not have the same temptations that others might have had to let myself get steamrolled by the Ambassador or others who did not want to recognize inconvenient facts about the Kenyan election that I had a responsibility to deal with.  Likewise, being an experienced middle aged lawyer used to dealing with government contracts made a great deal of difference, as did being the father of young children whom wanted to be able to explain myself to in years to come.

P.S. In case you have come to this piece fresh without being a previous reader here, the best “witness summary” of my experience and subsequent research is my longread in The Elephant from 2017:  “The Debacle of 2007“, in addition to my Pages with my “War for History” series and my “FOIA Series–Investigating Kenya’s Election“.

Kenya 2007 PEV Make Peace Stop ViolenceA Chaotic Kenya Vote and a Secret US Exit Poll in New York Times

 

 

 

As preparations for Kenya’s elections lag once again, cut the fog of time and remember what happened in 2007

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Polling Station Olympic School Kibera

Flashback to the night of Kibaki’s twilight swearing in . . .

“Kenya could be facing its greatest crisis”, The Telegraph

By Adrian Blomfield

Analysis

Five years ago yesterday, close to a million people watched as Mwai Kibaki was inaugurated as President of Kenya in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park.

Daniel Arap Moi, the authoritarian strongman who had ruled for a quarter of a century, was gone, his hand-picked successor roundly defeated.

A nation rejoiced. Already one of Africa’s most stable countries, Kenya could also now claim to be among its most democratic.

Last night, Mr Kibaki was hurriedly sworn in before a few hundred loyalists at a tawdry ceremony held in the gardens of the official presidential residence.

The contrast could not have been more stark.

As he lumbered towards the podium, Kenya’s cities and towns were erupting in chaos and ethnically motivated bloodshed, a predictable response after the most dubious election since the one-party era ended in 1992.

It is no exaggeration to say that Kenya is potentially facing its most serious crisis since gaining independence from Britain in 1963.

The prospect for serious violence between the country’s two most traditionally antagonistic tribes, Mr Kibaki’s Kikuyu and the Luo, led by his challenger Raila Odinga, is worryingly high.

Luos, marginalised since independence, have reason to feel aggrieved. Thanks to an alliance that Mr Odinga built with other tribes, they felt that this was their best and possibly last chance of taking power.

The farcical nature of the vote will only heighten their disappointment. The electoral commission initially claimed that roughly a quarter of returning officers disappeared for 36 hours without announcing results and had switched off their mobile phones.

When results did finally emerge, Mr Odinga saw a one million vote lead overturned.

Opinion polls showed that the contest was always going to be close, but if the official results are correct, Kenyans voted in an inexplicably bizarre manner.

After turfing out 20 of Mr Kibaki’s cabinet ministers and reducing his party to a rump in the simultaneous parliamentary poll, they apparently voted in an entirely different manner in the presidential race.

Apart from an unusually high turn-out in some of Mr Kibaki’s strongholds (sometimes more than 100 per cent ), the president then appeared to have won many more votes in some constituencies than first reported.

If it all seems depressingly familiar, it need not have been.

Mr Kibaki had lost a lot of the enormous goodwill that he enjoyed following the 2002 election after a cabal of Kikuyu cronies was accused of corruption. He also reneged on a promise to introduce a new constitution that would have returned many of his overarching powers to parliament.

On the other hand, he allowed a free press to thrive and respected the results of a 2005 referendum that went against him. Many expected he would do the same if he lost last Thursday’s election.

Instead of setting an example to the rest of the continent, Mr Kibaki’s opponents say that he has joined the unholy pantheon of African presidents who have refused to surrender power.

If he has chosen instead to squander his country’s stability and its fragile ethnic harmony it is a tragedy not just for Kenya but for all of Africa.

Ambassador Godec, as Acting Assistant Secretary of State, should articulate U.S. policy for Kenya’s election

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Kenya 2013 election IRI Electoral Commission voter education posterAmbassador Robert Godec has served as the Biden Administration’s Acting Assistant Secretary of State since the inauguration.

Ambassador Godec served in Kenya from August 2012, as Chargé d’Affaires following Amb. Scott Gration’s ouster, becoming the Ambassador in January 2013 after November 2012 confirmation hearings ahead of Kenya’s March 2013 election.

Godec thus led U.S. engagement with both the later stages of the 2013 election and the ensuing litigation (both the presidential election petition at the Supreme Court and the on-going attempt to prosecute IEBC technology procurement fraud), the formation of the Jubilee Party in 2016, the eventual replacement of the Issack Hassan-led IEBC following protests in which opposition supporters were killed, the attacks on the USAID-funded International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) by the Jubilee Party and President Kenyatta and Cabinet members, the change of U.S. Administrations from Obama to Trump, the acquisition of the Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS) from Safran Morpho (n/k/a Idemia), the abduction and murder of IEBC acting ICT Director Chris Msando on the eve of the 2017 vote, the general election and the successful Supreme Court petition annulling the presidential portion of the vote, the boycotted re-run, the announcement of the “Big 4 Agenda” and the post-election diplomatic negotiations, the “People’s President” swearing in, the “Handshake” and most of first year of the Building Bridges Initiative.

For the status of things in December 2018 as Ambassador Godec’s replacement, Ambassador McCarter was being confirmed see: “Something afoot in Kenya: Nation newspaper is running investigative reporting on IEBC procurement corruption in 2017“.

So at this point, Ambassador Godec is a seasoned veteran of Kenya’s post-2007 politics who knows the ground intimately from the last two election cycles.  (His prospective “permanent” replacement, Mary Catherine Phee, was nominated in April and got a favorable vote by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this summer, but a confirmation vote by the full Senate is blocked along with dozens of other nominees.)

I was asked a few months ago to write an article about U.S. support for the BBI process, but I have been unable to do so because it is not clear to me what our policy has been or is now, and I have not found people involved willing to talk to me.  Given my role in telling the story of what went wrong in 2007 when I was involved myself it is no surprise that I might not be the one that people in Washington want to open up to now, but even people that I am used to talking to privately have not been as forthcoming as usual.  Nonetheless, Kenyans inevitably have questions, and those Americans who care may in the future.

Members of the Kenyan Diaspora Alliance-USA have announced that they have sent Freedom of Information Requests to USAID and some Kenyans on social media and in a few cases in print have asserted suspicions or accusations that the U.S. Government was intending to back “unconstitutional constitutional amendments” in the form of the BBI referendum for some negative purpose.  Looking at the degree to which the Obama Administration backed the passage of the new 2010 Constitution as the terminal event of the post-2007 “Reform Agenda”–to the point of having millions of dollars bleed over from neutral democracy assistance programing into supporting the “Yes” campaign in the 2010 referendum during Ambassador Ranneberger’s tenure–I am having a bit of difficulty understanding why my representatives in Washington would be working in general terms to undermine the new Constitution we helped midwife in the first place.  At the same time it has openly been our policy under Ambassador Godec originally and then his predecessor Ambassador McCarter to support the Building Bridges Initiative and we did provide some USAID funding for the conducting the consultative process itself.  I think it would be in the interests of the United States and of Kenyans for the State Department to get out front of the questions now, with the BBI referendum effort rejected both at trial court level and on appeal, and with the Kenyan presidential race that has been going on since the Handshake entering into its later stages.

We remain Kenya’s largest donor, we have many relationships and support many assistance programs of all sorts in Kenya.  Most Kenyans remain in need, and we continue to have the same issues regarding terrorism as during the past 25 years (most especially since the 1998 embassy bombing). In general the geographic neighborhood is experiencing more specific crises and some overall erosion of peace, prosperity and governance.  While we may not be as influential in Kenya as we were prior to 2007, and anyone with money can play in Kenyan politics, we will be engaged and we will have influence in 2022.  So there is no time like the present to articulate what our policy is for the coming year.

Here is my take from December 2019: “Important Kenya BBI reads, and my comments“.

And from January 2020: “How will the Trump Administration’s support for the Uhuru-Raila handshake play out in 2020?”

Kenya’s revised “Building Bridges Initiative” report published—clock ticking on Referendum preparation

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Read the Report of the Steering Committee on the Implementation of the Building Bridges to a United Kenya Taskforce Report. (Forewarning: it is over 200 pages).

Kenya Pre-Election Violence: with only 22 months until vote, were deadly clashes temporarily delayed by BBI process? What is next?

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Sunday saw two deaths associated with clashes allegedly between factions within the ruling Jubilee Party.

The Presidential campaign of Deputy President William Ruto did a Sunday morning church and politics foray in Murang’a in what would be seen as President Kenyatta’s backyard. See the story from The Daily Nation on arrest orders from the IG of Police and a very strong warning from the National Cohesion and Integration Commission.

Uraia- Because Kenyans Have Rights

Circumstances are disputed between the supporters of the two politicians (Incumbent President Kenyatta and Incumbent Deputy President Ruto). It appears that government security forces were active and may have helped prevent worse violence—which could be encouraging—but that is just a superficial impression on my part from early reporting.

We are only 22 months away from a constitutionally mandated August 2022 General Election and violence in the campaign has been below what one would expect as the norm in the MultiParty Era. But the air seems pregnant with possibilities for both violence instigated by campaigns and for violent state repression. A constitutional crisis is afoot from the failure of the ruling party to effectuate the constitutional mandated gender balance in Parliament.

We are almost a year past the original release of a Building Bridges Initiative report. There is no clarity on exactly how long is to be allowed on what is now “overtime” on negotiating and agreeing on concrete steps to effectuate the changes to the basic bargain of governance in Kenya. The idea is to avoid the kind of competition we are seeing in the 2022 race as it stands now.

Germany is on social media as a lead on some of the civil society and domestic observation group preparation of the type that has been a staple but the U.S. and U.K. are unusually quiet in public about election specific issues now. There has been no public break at all in the partnership between Jubilee and the increasingly repressive Chinese Communist Party. Kenyatta has just signed a big debt and infrastructure deal with France as it becomes more apparent that the Jubilee Government grossly overpaid and thus over-borrowed on the Chinese Standard Gauge Railroad deal—which remains substantially secret.

France was a conspicuous diplomatic critic of the 2007 election theft among the European democracies but seems to have adapted to the role of election hardware and software supplier to the Election Commission since 2012 and become a major investor over the years since the partially State-owned Danone food conglomerate purchased forty percent of the Kenyatta family’s Brookside Dairies business in 2014.

The U.S. sent diplomats to facilitate post-election negotiations in late 2017 that culminated in the March 2018 “handshake” and we gave diplomatic support and National Democratic Institute facilitation to the BBI process.

As recently as April 2019 Ambassador McCarter tweeted with a picture of a visit from IEBC Chairman Chebukati that he hoped to see a 2022 election that did not involve a dispute or litigation. Without a investment in reform, which we have not seen, that would require either (1) a landslide of the sort that we saw with NARC in 2002 that gave rise to the 2003-05 democratic interregnum or (2) a recognition and consolidation of Jubilee as KANU successor.

In Washington the overwhelming public messaging is complacency. Kenya is very important to us because we are there in some real magnitude compared to the rest of the region and we are there because Kenya is important to us. But it is too early to talk about governance and elections and political violence, if for no other reason than the war against al-Shabaab is still going on as it was in the run up to the 2007, 2013 and 2017 elections.

Extended: Let me note that NDI will be releasing public opinion polling about attitudes towards elections with the Uraia Trust by Zoom on Wednesday, October 7. (Register through the link.). Regular readers will remember that what to release from the USAID public opinion survey programs conducted by IRI in 2002-07 and NDI since has been a matter of “discussion” in some situations in the past. Public release is in general what is required by the stated purposes of these USAID democracy assistance programs vis what the State Department might do for itself. So let me recognize this positive step.

Addendum:

One of the most striking symbols of French financial penetration was the acquisition last year by one of France’s richest families of a major stake in Twiga Foods which aspires to be Africa’s biggest grocery supplier after being co-founded in Nairobi by a young American entrepreneur as a “social enterprise” with support from USAID and subsequent “philanthrocapital” and IFC investment. The dollars are inconsequential relative to the infrastructure deals but if this business does ultimately succeed in its ambitions the French will be indebted to American aid and we may have missed an opportunity to help finance and support African small business.