Ethnic Violence and the Prospects for Democracy in the Aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan Elections

Adam Ashforth

On the night of December 29, 2007, Kenya seemed poised for that rarest of achievements in Africa, a peaceful handover of power to an opposition party in a democratic election. The opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) had defeated the Party of National Unity (PNU) of incumbent president Mwai Kibaki in the parliamentary election, winning ninety-nine seats to forty-three. Raila Odinga, the ODM presidential candidate, was leading in the presidential vote count by more than a million votes. The next day, however, the Electoral Commission of Kenya announced that the sitting president had been reelected by a margin of fewer than a quarter million votes.1 In a hastily arranged ceremony closed to the public, Kibaki was sworn in for a second term. The country exploded.

Through the months of January and February 2008, some fifteen hundred people were killed and five hundred thousand displaced from their homes in violence fueled by outrage over the stolen election.2 As the killing and burning spread across the country in early January, Kofi Annan, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, was called in to mediate between the two rival leaders and their parties. After exhausting negotiations, Annan brokered a deal at the end of February in which the two parties would form a “grand coalition” government of national unity. This cabinet was sworn in on April 17, with President Kibaki remaining as head of state and a new post of executive prime minister being created for Odinga.3 On May 14 the new cabinet met for the first time, and Kenya once again had a government. Once again, incidentally, Kenya has no formal parliamentary opposition. At the top of the new government’s agenda is the difficult task of repairing the social damage caused by the postelection violence.

Kenyans as well as outside observers were shocked by the rapidity of the country’s collapse into chaos in early January 2008. For decades Kenya had seemed the stable exception in a region racked with civil war and ethnic conflict, a haven for refugees from other parts of Africa — Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda — not a source of strife in its own right. Despite a long history of “ethnic clashes,” most Kenyans seemed reasonably comfortable in recognizing one another as both Kenyans and members of different “tribes.” Kenyans carry a national identity card listing their affiliation to one of “forty-two tribes,” though few can name them all, and occasionally another group voices a demand for tribal recognition.4 In the chaos that followed the announcement of the poll results, warnings of “another Rwanda” in the making were commonplace. For while outrage over the stolen election sparked the violence, there were undeniably ethnic aspects to the killing. Yet while there was no Rwanda-style genocide, most of the violent clashes occurred along ethnic lines. The ethnic dimensions, however, were not the same in all instances.5

Broadly speaking, five types of ethnic conflict marked the aftermath of the elections: ethnically targeted state repression; targeting of local ethnic proxies for national political figures; ethnic vigilantism; opportunistic criminal violence (some of which, it should be pointed out, was not ethnically motivated); and ethnic cleansing by Kalenjin ethnonationalists. In this essay I anatomize the postelection violence in Kenya to identify the different forms of ethnic conflict so as to analyze the implications for the future stability of a democratic regime in the country. None of these forms of violence is unique to Kenya. Numerous examples of similar conflicts can be found in many parts of the world, particularly in contexts of emerging democracies following authoritarian rule. Since the Kenyan case of Kalenjin nationalism is relatively unfamiliar in the literature on ethnic nationalism, however, I focus here on the historical specifics of this case.

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Notes

1. The Electoral Commission’s Web site lists a page for the 2007 results (www.eck.or.ke/index .php/Election-Results-Database).
2. For a good overview of the events of January and February, see Human Rights Watch, Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya’s Crisis of Governance, Human Rights Watch series, vol. 20, no. 1 (A), www.hrw.org/reports/2008/kenya0308.
3. The cabinet was finally sworn in with forty ministers (twenty from each side) and fifty-two assistant ministers, almost half the total number of members of Parliament (MPs). The cost of running such an enormous executive will consume much of the discretionary funds in the Kenyan budget. The Daily Telegraph estimated that “of Kenya’s annual budget of £5.4 billion, more than £4.3 billion will go on 93 ministers and their government’s general running costs. Only £1.3 billion will be left for roads, schools and hospitals for Kenya’s 38 million people” (Mike Pflanz, “Kenya’s Cabinet Soaks Up 80% of Budget,” Daily Telegraph, April 18, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world news/1895899/Kenya%27s-cabinet-%27soaks-up-80pc-of-the-budget%27.html).
4. For a discussion of the Sengwer and their efforts to gain official recognition, see Gabrielle Lynch, “Negotiating Ethnicity: Identity Politics in Contemporary Kenya,” Review of African Political Economy 107 (2006): 49 – 65.
5. John Lonsdale has famously argued for a distinction between “moral ethnicity” — “a process of ‘ourselves-ing’ ” — and the “othering” force of “political tribalism” (“Moral and Political Argument in Kenya,” in Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, ed. Bruce Berman, Dickson Eyoh, and Will Kymlicka [Oxford: Currey; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004], 76). In Lonsdale’s view, the former provides communities with resources for resisting the totalizing inclinations of the state. The latter is a weapon most serviceable to the holders of power within the state and to those contending for it. The ethnic conflicts I describe herein could all be considered forms of political tribalism. Little morality can be found in them.