Conjecture from the Mzungu Chick

There is of course much speculation all over with regards to the violence we are experiencing here in Kenya, and seeing as we’re all going in for a bit of conjecture, I thought I’d add my own in too as I’ve been thinking about exactly this for ages.

I had a comment on a recent post that said that if the elections had been completely transparent then this violence would not have happened at all, and another train of thought is that this violence is tribal and has been simmering for years and has now erupted into what we are experiencing now.

Personally I think both views hold some truth in them.

I do believe that this current outbreak of tribal violence that we are seeing right now would not have started if the elections had been seen to be free, fair and totally transparent. This certainly did not happen and although it was all geared to go that way, with all of the big media houses having agents all around the country who were ringing in the results as they were provisionally released at a constitutional level, they seemed to be keeping a running tally that showed Raila with a large lead on the first day of counting with a slimmer lead on the second day when the Central province results were coming in (which is as expected), but they still had Raila in the lead until people started getting excited about the process taking so long and not all of the official results being released at the ECK tallying with the ones being provisionally released at provincial level.

That was then the media seemed to stop releasing results. In some provinces came allegations of rigging and some trouble which caused them to stop counting altogether. Then there was the closed door overnight retallying that took place with representatives of both Raila and Kibaki’s party, and although there were still questions there, it seems Samuel Kivuitu, the Chairman of the ECK, (or so he said and then later retracted), was pressurised into releasing a result, and was told what he would release, and it didn’t correspond to anything that the media had been collating along the way.

Just before Kivuitu announced the ‘final’ tally of the Presidential results, all of the media was thrown out of the KICC, which was at the time, the Electoral Commissions headquarters. John Muchuki, who was the former Internal Security Minister, had issued a written order to shut down all TV and radio stations in the country which was not acted against, although the live broadcast ban came into affect and is still in situ today, although it has been blatantly flouted a few times in the past couple of days by some of the TV stations and to no consequence to them.

Now the violence that is currently gripping this country is, whether we like it or not, tribal conflict. It is tribe against tribe, and I think the reason we are in shock here is that we have never before seen this tribal violence spread from the villages where in some areas it has been a constant threat long before these elections. What I think we are amazed by is that it has spread into major towns where various different ethnic tribes have lived in peace for many years, but ultimately, it has become a question of perceived inequality between the tribes, that has simmered under the surface for many years.

Nick Wadhams, a journalist based here in Nairobi, has written this post today

http://nwadhams.typepad.com/nwadhams/2008/01/age-old-rivalri.html

outlining most of this and, like he says, tribal conflict and electoral violence has been going on for years and is not new to us. What is new to us though is this targeting of the large towns in all this, starting with Kisumu, spreading to Eldoret – which then the government thought be removing all the Kikuyu’s from that town it would ease the tension. But surely it has done the opposite, who should decide that one tribe should move and why the Kikuyu’s? Now the Kikuyu’s want revenge and they are taking it out on the other tribes in Nakuru which is where they were taken and where now they must hold a majority. Today this has spread down as far as Naivasha, and here in Nairobi it has been going on within the slums sporadically throughout the past four weeks.

As references in Nick Wadhams post says, Kikuyu’s are perceived as to have taken the lions share over the past few years with a Kikuyu in charge in the form of Kibaki, and the Luo’s now feel it is their turn to garner some of this wealth and have their people in power and reap some of these rewards. Because of the way the final results in the Presidential election were released in such a clandestine manner, and the fact that up until that point, the media had Raila leading the race. Of course the people who voted for Raila feel cheated, and that means it has turned into a war of Luo vs. Kikuyu with all the other tribes taking their sides as per how the majority of their tribesmen were perceived to have voted.

One thing is, that a lot of people are tending to ignore at this stage, is that some of this violence had already broken out before the results were announced in Western Kenya which tells me that the Luo’s thought they had won and the looting and chaos that erupted in Kisumu started with those people trying to get a head start on the wealth that they felt was coming to them with a Raila win. People were then killed when the police opened fire as they could not control the situation any more. Perhaps if Raila had then been declared the winner and would have been then in charge of the police, it may be that people would have let those police killings go, as it has happened many times before. As Kibaki won, it was then seen that those police were acting directly on Kibaki’s orders and then it became a case of Kikuyu’s (as the police, no matter what tribe they actually were from, were in Kibaki’s hands in their opinion, so therefore acting on behalf of a Kikuyu,) vs. the other tribes.

What this shows is that having a President of whatever tribe giving out various government posts and therefore (how it generally ends up), unequal distribution of funds to his cronies, certain tribes feel missed out in this distribution of wealth and this has to change before we will ever get anywhere surely.

It most definitely ends up being all about money and who benefits. Whatever they decide to do and however it is done, the most important thing in all this is that a long term plan of sorting out this incredible inequality between Kenyans needs to be most definitely be on top of the agenda. And whatever is done, it must be done so in a totally transparent way, so that Kenyans can feel that those big wigs are actually thinking of them and not just themselves, as per usual.