Kenya: International pressure, business impact, root causes
Annan continues to push ahead on his mediation effort.
Fresh from a retreat, lead mediator Dr Kofi Annan pushed to unlock a gridlock on negotiations by laying a roadmap for what he called a ‘new government’ expected to emerge from the initiative.
Annan announced key agreements by negotiators despite reports that drafting of fine details on power sharing had caused discord between the two teams….
Among key agreements Annan announced were that the thorny proposals of re-counting, re-tallying or a re-run of the elections would not resolve the crisis and had been ruled out.
He said these were ruled out after teams agreed they would likely divide Kenyans more than achieve a lasting solution.
This puts to rest what had been thought to be a major hurdle to the talks that both sides had tussled over.
He said: “In discussions it was apparent there was no viable way to get at the truth immediately, either by recount, re-tally or any other measure to determine outcome of elections.”
But Annan said it had been agreed an Independent Review Committee would be created to investigate all aspects of the presidential election and make the full truth known to Kenyans….
Annan has invited a German politician to explain the workings of Berlin’s left-right coalition.
Closeted in a safari lodge in the Tsavo National Park in Kenya to focus on ways to search for peace, Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga had a surprise visitor this week — a high-ranking politician from German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition.
Gernot Erler, Germany’s deputy foreign minister, was secretly flown in to Kenya at the request of Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General who is mediating between Kenya’s warring factions to resolve a crisis sparked by Kibaki’s disputed re-election last December….
Erler’s task was to explain the workings of Merkel’s grand coalition between her center-right Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, of which the minister is a member.
“My visit was a surprise to all,” Erler told German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung on the last day of his mission. “But then everyone was really interested and had a lot of questions.”
Erler said his job was to explain the complicated arithmetic underlying the power-sharing model in Germany and how such a consensus-based system worked. Germany’s grand coalition came into being after federal elections in 2005, ending two months of political uncertainty after Merkel’s conservatives won a wafer-thin majority….
Meanwhile, international pressure continues both from governments and NGOs. Amnesty International called on Kenya’s leaders to respect and protect human rights. The European Union has threatened to sever trade links with Kenya if leaders don’t act fast to resolve the crisis. The US, Canada, Switzerland, and the UK have all been exerting pressure on the government and opposition to come to a settlement; China, however, has stated its intention not to interfere. The East African Community is also pushing the Annan mediation process.
The Secretary General of the East African Community, Ambassador Juma Mwapachu has said the EAC is set to play a central role in the resolution of the Kenyan political impasse.
The Secretary General said this would be in line with the UN and AU conventions which assign frontline role to regional mechanisms in the prevention, management and resolution of conflicts.
He said the Kenya situation had affected the regional integration process, and was having an impact on the capacity of the EAC to move forward. “It is critical that the Kenyan political situation returns to normalcy without further delay”, the Secretary General said….
The Secretary General said EAC would get more deeply involved in the resolution of the Kenyan political impasse alongside the ongoing mediation process that is chaired by the former UN Secretary General Dr Kofi Annan.
The Secretary General commended the mediation process noting that the two sides in the mediation were pursuing the solution in a restrained and responsible manner. He said a more positive posture had emerged and the violence experienced in the initial stages of the conflict had abated….
He said the Kenyan political impasse had ramifications on the entire EAC region. The disruption of services at the port of Mombasa and along the rail and road transits had caused serious economic hardships to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, DRC and other parts of the Great Lakes Region. The Secretary General said the EAC is intensifying both short and long term measures to ensure reliable and dependable infrastructure in the region.
He said that the situation in Kenya has brought to the fore the need to consolidate the political and economic integration of EAC….
We continue to see articles on the economic impact of the crisis. Examples:
Kenya: Banks Hit As Staff Are Displaced
Kenya: Ethnic Animosity Enters the Work Place
Some articles on the background and impact of the crisis:
Ethnicity: ‘Referendum on Majimboism’ – Fri 2/15/2008 talks about the different ways African countries have handled ethnicity.
[The election] pitted today’s majimboists, represented by Odinga, who campaigned for regionalism, against Kibaki, who stood for the status quo of a highly centralized government that has delivered considerable economic growth but has repeatedly displayed the problems of too much power concentrated in too few hands — corruption, aloofness, favoritism and its flip side, marginalization.
Because Kibaki is a Kikuyu, the largest and most powerful ethnic group in Kenya, and Odinga is a Luo, a group that feels it has never gotten its fair share, the political and ethnic tensions aggravated by this election have often blurred — with disastrous results.
Other African countries have struggled with ways of defusing ethnic rivalries. Ethiopia set up a system in the mid-1990s called ethnic federalism, which carved the country into ethnic-based regions, each with broad power — at least on paper — including the right to secede. But Ethiopia’s leaders soon concluded that too much regional autonomy would tear the country apart, and Ethiopia is now more or less centrally controlled by members of a small ethnic group.
Tanzania took the opposite approach. It de-emphasized ethnicity. It encouraged people to speak Kiswahili, and not their mother tongues, as a way to build Tanzanian-ness. The government sent children to high schools in different areas to expose them to different communities. Tanzanian election law even makes it illegal to campaign for office based on ethnic group.
The Post-election Violence in Kenya:An overview of the underlying factors
While national level political competition in Kenya is often misunderstood and shallowly interpreted in terms of a competition between the Kikuyu and the Luo, most commentators on Kenya’s politics do ignore the position and role of the Kalenjin, Luhya, Kamba, Kisii, Coastal peoples (Mijikenda), Swahili, Arabs, Indians and Europeans who live in large farms/ranches and important urban areas in Kenya. Each of these groups subsumes a number of smaller ethnic units that become relevant bases of social identity in more localized settings. The groups hardly mentioned are the Ogieks, and the Jemps who are the original occupants of some parts of present Rift valley but have since been displaced or evicted to create room for current occupants. What is however neglected in the debate about Kenyan politics is the reality that all groups have a stake in the running of the Kenyan polity, but due to systematic exclusion of some groups from the national leadership, competitive politics in Kenya is bound to have an ethnic dimension….
Electoral politics in Kenya can also be understood best by looking at the role of the process and institutions charged with overseeing such a process. The electoral system in Kenya is based on constituencies whose boundaries are congruent with the boundaries of tribal areas. These boundaries have been used to manipulate democratic outcomes. The constituencies are represented by a member of parliament and a number of local authority representatives at ward, town and urban council levels. Their election takes place at the same time as that of presidential and parliamentary ones. The boundaries are determined by the electoral commission if there is evidence that populations have outgrown the current demarcations. This decision is however made by the electoral commission without consulting the local communities and in most cases at the directive of the president. The president without parliamentary approval appoints the Commission. However the problem with numbers in Kenyan politics is that they are never correct or close to truth. This originates from history of manipulation of constituency population numbers during the single party era, but also lack of regular census and update of births and deaths records. It is therefore not surprising to see “ghost names” in voter registers (not deleted even after a whole five year preparation and multibillion investment in the process) or to see number of registered voters increase during presidential vote tallying contrary to the actual number at constituency level or previous attempt to create extra constituencies in the incumbent friendly regions in order to meet the 25% constitutional requirement for presidential eligibility….
And lots more about the colonial and post-colonial history that led to the current conflict.
Kenyan bloggers:
In Coming soon – CSI Kenya, Midnight Mugithi talks about a Kenyan police probe of the violence.
A guest blogger at Siasi Duni asks Dear Hon. Kibaki, how would you like to be remembered?