The Postnational Monitor

Kenyan Election Concludes In Riots | Dec 30th 2007

This is what I was afraid would happen due to the situation on the ground being so ethnically charged ahead of the elections. This latest report is claiming “vote rigging”, but originally the elections were determined “free and fair”. What happened? So now it is Kikuya vs. Luo in the streets of Nairobi. I wonder how widespread this rioting is? Often times in the media they will show 20 people protesting and make it seem like it is a very large meaningful demonstration. I’m sure this is often done for ratings/sales. I have seen this happen with Muslim radicals protesting in the UK. I’m sure things are bad in some areas of Nairobi, but I wonder to what extent.

It also seems that Kibaki won the election even if his side cheated some, but I guess that does not make anyone feel any better, even if that were the rumor circulating in the “mob”. So we have corruption+income inequality+tribalism. Sigh. I hope that things stabilize and the economic growth continues at least. Kenya distabalizing does not only hurt Kenya but every nation that depends on its infrastructure to get products out to the coast through Kenya.

—————-

Update II: More than 100 dead in Kenya. NY Times has a nice multimedia presentation, here.

—————-

Update:

—————-

http://www.pscottcummins.com/blog/uploaded_images/BesigyeArrestRiots-775490.jpg

Tribal violence breaks out in Kenya over disputed election result

By Jeffrey Gettleman
Sunday, December 30, 2007
NAIROBI: It took all of about 15 minutes for the slums to explode Sunday after the Kenyan president was declared the winner of a deeply flawed election.Thousands of young men came streaming out of Kibera, a shantytown of one million people, waving sticks, smashing shacks, burning tires and hurling stones. Soldiers poured into the streets to meet them. In other areas throughout the country, gangs went house to house, dragging people of certain tribes out of their homes and clubbing them to death. “It’s war,” said Hudson Chate, a mechanic in Nairobi. “Tribal war.”The dubious conclusion to the most fiercely fought elections in Kenyan history has pitched the country into chaos. Western observers said that the Kenyan electoral commission had ignored clear evidence of vote rigging to keep the government in power. Now, one of the most developed, stable countries in Africa, which has a powerhouse economy and some of the most spectacular game parks in the world, is the scene of tribal bloodletting.With the president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, and the leading opposition figure Raila Odinga, a Luo, the election seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface but up until now had not provoked widespread mayhem.In Mathare, a Nairobi shantytown, Luo gangs burned more than 100 Kikuyu homes. In Kibera, Kikuyu families loaded up their possessions in taxis and fled. Almost all the businesses in the country are shut. The only figures in central Nairobi, normally choked with traffic, are helmeted soldiers hunched behind plastic shields. Clouds of smoke rose from the shantytowns Sunday evening and smudged out the sun.As the riots spread, the government issued an order outlawing live media broadcasts.”It’s a sad day for Kenya,” Michael Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya, said. “My biggest worry now is violence, which, let’s be honest, will be along tribal lines.”Odinga’s supporters are unleashing their frustrations about the election, which was held Thursday and initially praised as fair, against people they suspect supported the president, namely Kikuyus.The Odinga camp urged election officials to re-tally votes after exposing serious discrepancies between the votes initially announced on the day after the election versus the numbers that were later entered into a national tally. Everyone predicted that this election would be close and the final results had Kibaki winning by a sliver, 46 percent to 44 percent.But that gap may have included thousands of invalid votes. The European Union said its observers in one constituency last week had witnessed election officials announcing that Kibaki had won 50,145 votes, but on Sunday the election commission increased those same results to 75,261 votes.”The election commission has not succeeded in establishing the credibility of the tallying process,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.One western ambassador said that western diplomats had tried for hours Sunday to persuade the election commission to do a re-tally of the figures using the original vote results but that the commission had refused. “This was rigged,” the ambassador said.The election commission acknowledged that there were irregularities but said that it was not the commission’s job to address them. The opposition, said the commission chairman, Samuel Kivuitu, “can go to the courts.”

The opposition has not indicated whether it would contest the results in the courts, which are notoriously slow and corrupt in Kenya. But it said it would have a swearing-in ceremony for Odinga on Monday and declare him the “people’s president.”

Irregularities acknowledgedKivuitu, the electoral commission chairman, acknowledged problems, including a constituency where voter turnout added up to 115 percent and another where a candidate had run away with ballot papers, the Associated Press reported

Supporters of Kibaki, 76, say he has transformed Kenya’s economy, which now has an average growth rate of 5 percent.

He won by a landslide in 2002, ending 24 years in power by the notoriously corrupt Daniel arap Moi, who was constitutionally barred from extending his term.

But Kibaki’s anti-graft campaign has largely been seen as a failure, and the country still struggles with tribalism and poverty. After the opposition took most of the parliamentary seats, he might find it difficult during his second term.

Odinga, a fiery 62-year-old former political prisoner, promised change and help for the poor. His main constituency was Kibera, home to at least 700,000 people who live in extreme poverty and the scene of many of the riots.

In recent months he had made it a priority to reach out to the country’s middle class and businessmen, many of whom belong to Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

Posted in African Politics

Tags: , , , ,

3 Comments »

  1. Upcountry and without news via tv or radio, can you suggest online sources for current reports?

    Comment by Barnyoka — December 31, 2007 @ 3:23 AM

    Reply

  3. Something Interesting:

    Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (p. 348):

    Anyway, the divisions in Kenya didn’t stop there [between Africans and Indian merchants]; there were always finer lines to draw. Between the country’s forty black tribes, for example. They, too, were a fact of life. You didn’t notice the tribalism so much among [half-sister] Auma’s friends, younger university-educated Kenyans who had been schooled in the idea of nation and race; tribe was an issue with them only when they were considering a mate, or when they got older and saw it help or hinder careers. But they were the exceptions. Most Kenyans still worked with older maps of identity, more ancient loyalties. Even Jane or Zeituni could say things that surprised me. “The Luo are intelligent but lazy,” they would say. Or “The Kikuyu are money-grubbing but industrious.” Or “The Kalenjins — well, you can see what’s happened to the country since they took over.”

    Hearing my aunts traffic in such stereotypes, I would try to explain to them the error of their ways. [At this point, Obama has spent a little less than two weeks in his life in Africa.] “It’s thinking like that that holds us back,” I would say. “We’re all part of one tribe. The black tribe. The human tribe. Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia.”

    And Jane would say, “Ah, those West Africans are all crazy anyway. You know they used to be cannibals, don’t you?”

    And Zeituni would say, “You sound just like your father, Barry, he also had such ideas about people.”

    Comment by Dragon Horse — January 3, 2008 @ 11:28 PM

    Reply

Say something?Comments RSS TrackBack URI

    a

    Archives

    Blog Stats

    • 261,770 hits