Published March 13, 2013
The peoples of Kenya voted in an electoral process on 4 March 2013.
There were six differing elections held on that day with the contests
for president, 47 governors, 47 senators, 47 county women’s
representatives, 290 members of the National Assembly and 1,450 members
of the county assembly. When the election results were officially
announced by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC)
on 9 March, Uhuru Kenyatta, leader of The National Alliance (TNA),
which together with three other parties formed the Jubilee Coalition,
was declared winner of the presidential vote with 6,173,433 votes out of
12, 330, 028 votes cast – translating into 50.07 per cent of the vote.
Mr. Raila Odinga leader of the Coalition for Reform and Democracy (CORD)
was supposed to have polled 5,340, 546 or 43.31 per cent of the votes.
Under the Constitution of Kenya, the winner had to receive 50 percent
plus one to avoid a runoff election. In this announcement Kenyatta, son
of former President Jomo Kenyatta, was declared president – elect.
Within one hour of the declaration of the official results by the IEBC,
Raila Odinga disputed the declaration of Uhuru Kenyatta as president
citing ‘massive irregularities’ and evidence of ‘poll anomalies.’ Even
before this press conference, the entire process of the 2013 elections
had been called into question in the face of ‘technical' difficulties,
where the system that had been established for the conduct of the
elections failed. Were these ‘technical’ failures in the birthplace of
M-pesa, the famous electronic money transfer service, orchestrated to
manipulate the system? This was the claim by the CORD alliance as they
promised to file an election petition to challenge the election results
of the presidential vote. Other sources claimed that there had been a
cyber attack on the IEBC to discredit this independent body.
The CORD challenge to what was called election rigging was to be
presented to the Supreme Court of Kenya by a team of lawyers. The
election petition that was being assembled was arguing that the
equipment deployed by the IEBC for the election - ranging from the poll
books, computer servers, electronic transmission of results and
electronic voter identification - had failed and that the tallying of
votes had been compromised.
FRONTS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION
This legal challenge to the 2013 elections brought to the fore one of
five major fronts in the struggles for democratic participation in
Kenya. The five fronts had been (1) the protracted political struggles –
manifest in the election campaigns of Kenya (especially between 1992
and 2013, (2) the information warfare and attempts to control the flow
of information about the political process, 3) the cyber warfare which
involved the compromising of the computer systems of the IEBC) (4) the
legal struggles to be fought before the Supreme Court and (5) the
struggles over the devolution of political power weakening the
centralization and concentration of wealth and power in Kenya since
1963.
Both Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta represent wings of the nationalist
thrust of the decolonization process. The father of Raila Odinga,
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, had been a stalwart of the independence
struggles and had written the book about the derailment of independence,
Not yet Uhuru (Not yet Independence). Western media placed the stamp of
ethnic enclaves and simplified the principled opposition of Oginga
Odinga to the derailment of the political process as‘tribal’ differences
between the Luo and Kikuyu peoples. During the first forty years of
decolonization, Kenya was the principal base for western military,
economic and political mischief in Africa.
Uhuru Kenyatta is heir to one of the largest fortunes in Eastern Africa
and his family is associated with the forces that dominate the Nairobi
Securities Exchange. The faction of the political divide represented by
Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto was that section of
the Kenyan society that had monopolized political and economic power
since 1963. In 2007, national elections were held and the outcome of
that process contested. Headlines in newspapers far and wide had
screamed ‘Kibaki ‘stole’ Kenyan elections through vote rigging and
fraud.’ Mwai Kibaki had been sworn in quickly at dusk in order to
prevent a challenge in court and immediately violence had erupted as
spontaneous outbursts of anger spread throughout Kenya. Sections of the
political leaders entered the violent confrontation with allegations
that these leaders fomented ethnic hatred and violence. The violent
confrontations on the streets and villages of Kenya had left over a
thousand dead . Two years after these clashes both Uhuru Kenyatta and
William Ruto were indicted before the International Criminal Court
(ICC) on charges of crimes against humanity.
Within the ranks of the Kenyan society there had been a massive
mobilization to reform the political system to break the monopoly of
power by the Kenyan oligarchy. One component of the reform sentiment was
that there should be an end to the politics of impunity. In the
planning for the 2013 electoral contest, those opposed to the maturation
of a dynastic tradition in Kenya mobilized to prevent a repeat of the
vote rigging and fraud of 2007-2008. This reform process resulted in
the new 2010 constitution where a referendum was overwhelmingly
supported by 67 per cent of the voters. This referendum had expanded the
democratic rights of the Kenyan people and the 2013 process was
supposed to be one more episode in the extension of democratic
participation.
The very fact that the planned election petition opposing
'irregularities' is to be heard before the Supreme Court of Kenya is one
of the small victories of the 2010 constitutional process. What was
before the people in the election was whether the dominant tycoons could
win in the elections what they had lost in the referendum in 2010. This
was also a test of the contending forces, because elections as one
element of political struggle depended on the organizational
capabilities of the competing factions. To be able to rig elections
successfully requires a level of financial, military and political
capability that challenged Kenyans whether they were able to develop new
strategies to extend democratic participation. The majority of Kenyans
are opposed to the creation of a dynasty in the society and the
protracted battles with the entrenched oligarchs will have consequences
far beyond the created borders of present day Kenya.
ELECTORAL FRAUD IN KENYA
Throughout Africa numerous leaders have mastered the art of manipulating
elections and the electoral game. After the African Union outlawed
coups in 2002 many of the former generals found ways to perpetuate
themselves in power through election rigging, unconstitutional
manipulations of political process and subversion of their country’s
constitutions. Elsewhere, the idea of democratic elections had been
turned into contests between ethnic blocs. Kenya had not suffered from a
successful coup’d etat by the military but since the 1969 split among
the nationalist leaders, the electoral system has been bedeviled by
fraud and the disenfranchisement of the electorate. Daniel Arap Moi ,
the second President of Kenya between 1978-2002, had gained
international notoriety to the point where the struggles to extend
democratic participation extended to every social group in Kenya. When
it became clear to the external supporters of the Moi dictatorship that
the mass mobilization against arbitrary rule held the seeds of massive
revolt, international forces from the western world financed a massive
human rights campaign to depoliticize the struggles for basic freedoms
in Kenya.
Under Arap Moi, the concentration and centralization of wealth had
rocketed Kenya to the top tier of the African economies. The banking
sector of Kenya became the hub for regional accumulation and leaders
from as far afield as West Africa found the Kenyan financial services
industry a friendly offshore center to store illicit holdings. The real
estate sector in Nairobi grew by leaps and bounds and regional
accumulators from Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan,
Uganda, Tanzania, Somalia and parts of Ethiopia found an alliance with
the Kenyan magnates. The growth of the banking sector (boosted by funds
from far and wide), the telecommunications sector, and insurance
industry outpaced the traditional areas of manufacturing, agriculture,
tourism and transportation sectors. Money laundering from the
international trade in illegal substances could easily be disguised in
this booming economy as the economic barons hid behind ethnic masks to
demobilize the population. The politicization of ethnicity had been
orchestrated very effectively by the British colonial overlords in the
last years of colonial exploitation in order to divide the forces of
national independence and reconstruction.
Frank Kitson, the theoretician and practitioner of British
counterinsurgency warfare had mobilized the British intellectual
institutions and had stimulated a growth industry in British
anthropological circles to reinforce the stamp of ethnic allegiances on
the people of Kenya. Kenyan freedom fighters from the Land and Freedom
Army (called Mau Mau) had exposed the crimes against humanity by the
British and 50 years after independence, some of the survivors of
‘Britain's Gulag’ have been waging a protracted campaign to claim
reparations from Britain. Last October the British courts ruled in
favor of some of the veterans of the war who had been brutally tortured
during the period of savage beatings and killings that had
characterized the effort of Britain to defeat the independence struggle.
What Britain had lost during the anti-colonial struggles it made up for
with the massive cultural war to impose western values and cultures on a
small educated elite. Although Britain had ceded power to a small
group, the dominance of the English language and culture among the
rulers had created Nairobi as a hub for international financiers. Kenyan
schools and cultural institutions boasted of their links to Britain
while towards the end of the Cold War the US military cooperated with
the British to maintain Kenya as one of the cockpits of western imperial
interests in Africa.
Exploitation and domination in Kenya took many forms and the more
intense the exploitation, the greater was the western presence in the
form of differing business enterprises, media outlets, private military
contractors, conservative evangelists and international non-governmental
organizations. The latter claimed a space within the ‘human rights‘
networks across Eastern Africa and sought to monopolize the intellectual
currents. In so far as extreme inequalities arose from the consequences
of liberalization and privatization, there was a clear relationship
between gross inequalities and regional alliances. These alliances were
founded on the political barons whose experiences at primitive
accumulation were refined with the years of holding on to political
power. Scandals such as Anglo leasing, Goldenberg, Maize procurement
followed each other with such regularity that the poor of Kenya were
becoming immune to stories of theft of state property and
misappropriation of funds. In the period between the referendum of 2010
and the elections of 2013 one former ally of Raila Odinga, Miguna Miguna
issued a book, ‘Peeling Back The Mask’, about the economic activities
of Raila Odinga as Prime Minister. A second book launched before the
2013 elections , ‘Kidneys for the King’ castigated Kenyan politicians in
general but was supportive of Uhuru Kenyatta. What the books really
exposed was the extent to which Raila Odinga was a novice in this
hothouse of primitive accumulation that was called the business
community of Kenya.
This aspect of Kenyan society is of central importance to the history of
electoral fraud and the changing political alliances. Fraud reinforced
the conditions of mass poverty and regional divisions. Regional
differentiation and ethnic mobilization were meant to conceal the
massive wealth in the hands of a few. This high concentration of wealth
dictated that the creativity of the mass of the population was
compromised and the necessary conditions for genuine wealth creation
remain stymied. Electoral fraud strengthened the power of those with the
inside levers of the networks of capital.
Numerous commentators have pointed to the undemocratic governance and
manipulation of elections in countries such as Cameroons, Egypt,
Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Swaziland and Zimbabwe to point to
the reality that most African states are undemocratic. After the end of
the Cold War western agencies such as the National Endowment for
Democracy in the Unites States traversed the length and breadth of
Africa promoting a brand of democratic politics that divorced policies
from the economic realities of exploitation. In the teaching of
political science, democracy has been associated with competition in
elections just as economics is associated with competition in the market
place. This representation of democracy has come from the
conditionalities that have been associated with ‘development
organizations’ in the past twenty years. The World Bank and the varying
international organs promoted democratic governance that was in essence
one where, democracy is a competitive political system in which
competing leaders and organizations define the alternatives of public
policy in such a way that the public can participate in the decision
making process.
Kenya was one of the bases for European and North American democratic
initiatives .Robert Dahl has been one of the most prolific writers on
the conception of democracy which excluded issues of economic
management, access to economic resources and life itself. Engaged groups
within Africa and outside critiqued this simplistic view of democracy
to note that issues of health, education, shelter, food, environmental
repair and basic requirements of life were very important components of
democracy. In particular, African feminists drew attention to the issues
of citizenship, bodily integrity, sexual and reproductive rights as
central aspects of democracy that had been erased in the liberal
conception of democracy. [1] Feminists broadened democracy even
further than the horizons of the social democrats who had struggled to
defend the rights of workers in Western Europe after the capitalist
depression of the 1930s.
It is precisely because of this tradition of undemocratic leaders
covering up brutalities in the name of democracy why the mainstream
focus on elections and voting has been manipulated and subverted.
Leaders in most African countries understand the ideological biases of
the mainstream scholarship on democracy and are aware that democracy can
be undermined as long as the basic forms of capital accumulation are
not seriously affected. It is for this reason that the writers on low
intensity democracy argue for the link between political change and
social reform. In Kenya a vibrant grassroots tradition maintained the
pressures for social reforms and these pressures brought about shifting
alliances. It was within this tradition of social reforms and the
elaboration of democratic participation where the elections of 2013
needs to be located.
ELECTORAL STRUGGLES IN KENYA
After the struggles for independence in Kenya, the society produced
thinkers and activists who stood at the front of the African struggles
for democratic participation. Writers such as Ngugi Wa Thiongo
achieved international notoriety in his campaign for justice in Kenya.
Other leaders such as Wangari Mathaai had taken the ideas about
democracy and basic rights to link to environmental sustenance. As one
generation of Kenyans was exiled, imprisoned, broken or passed on,
another came up and these battles for change emerged in the electoral
contests. The twenty first century had started with intensified
struggles to end the Moi dictatorship and this took the form of a
coalition that brought Mwai Kibaki to the Presidency in 2002. No sooner
had Kibaki occupied the seat of power when it became clear that the
economic oligarchs would dominate the political spaces in Kenya. Five
years after Kibaki took over from Moi to become the third President of
Kenya, elections were held in December 2007. It was this election where
the people came out and voted massively to end the dominance of the one
per cent that dominated the Kenyan Stock Market.
When the election results were announced, awarding victory to Kibaki for
a second term in the first days of January 2008, there was a
spontaneous eruption of outrage. Elements from the ruling factions
entered into the fray to direct the spontaneous rebellions of the
peoples into ethnic rivalries in order to stem the possibility of a
wider rebellion. It was in the midst of this violent confrontation when
the international forces converged on Kenya to work out a compromise
where Mwai Kibaki would remain as President and Raila Odinga would
enter a coalition government as the Prime Minister. For one large
section of the population, this compromise was a bitter pill but was
accepted in order to avert a complete breakdown of social peace. While
the mainstream political forces jockeyed for positions, the grass roots
democratic forces worked hard to bring to the table the reform of the
political system through a constitutional process. This process
culminated in a referendum of 2010 where the new constitution of Kenya
was ratified.
PRESENTATION OF THE CANDIDATES
The forces of democratic change in Kenya had been campaigning against
impunity and international human rights forces joined in this call for
impunity in order to be at the center of the political debate. This
intervention took the form of the indictment of six leaders in Kenya who
were indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes
against humanity. After this indictment of the six, the charges were
dropped against two and of the four that faced indictment; two were from
the most prominent leaders in Kenya. These were the Deputy Prime
Minister of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto.
Both Kenyatta and Ruto presented themselves as ethnic leaders preserving
the interests of the ‘Kikuyu’ and ‘Kalenjin.’ Uhuru Kenyatta
represented a section of the Kenyan oligarchy that felt that it was
their right to hold on to power. William Ruto had emerged in the last
years of the Moi dictatorship and at the time of the 2007 elections had
been an ally of Raila Odinga in the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM).
Both Kenyatta and Ruto represented entrenched interests of capital. Ruto
had received even greater national prominence during the struggles over
the new constitution in 2010 when he emerged as the leading
spokesperson for that faction of the Kenyan political leadership that
was aligned to the most conservative section of religious fundamentalism
in the United States. As a conservative populist leader, Ruto did not
disguise his deep misogynistic and homophobic politics while presenting
himself as the leader of the disenfranchised from the Rift Valley, in
short, a leader of the Kalenjins.
Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto created an alliance called The National
Alliance (TNA) with the nomenclature of the Jubilee which was a play on
both biblical code s as well as the fact that 2013 was the fiftieth
anniversary of Kenyan independence. After some twists and turns during
the period after the referendum when it was unclear where the balance of
political forces stood, Uhuru Kenyatta took the nomination forms to be
the presidential candidate for the TNA while William Ruto was his
running mate.
Both Kenyatta and Ruto hid behind regional allegiances and petty ethnic
claims to mount their campaign. As the campaign matured and the lines of
the electoral battles became sharper, Kenyatta and Ruto developed a
sharp anti-imperialist posture with claims that their campaign was to
protect the sovereignty of Kenya. Both leaders had presented themselves
to the ICC in The Hague to proclaim their innocence. Here was a case of
one of the most blatant manipulation of the anti-imperialist claims of
the progressive forces in Africa.
Progressive African intellectuals had critiqued the ICC in so far as up
to the present all of those indicted under the statutes of the Rome
Convention were from Africa. These African nationalists had queried
whether it was only in Africa where crimes against humanity were being
carried out. When the ICC indicted the leader of Libya as part of the
NATO war against Libya in June 2011, the clear manipulation of the ICC
by the West was opposed in Africa. More significant was the fact that
the very same Western Europeans who had indicted President Bashir of
Sudan aligned with Bashir to execute the war against the peoples of
Libya. The United States was not a signatory to the Rome Statutes but
the media in the United States were willing and able to hide behind the
Rome Statutes to push the foreign policy agenda of the United States.
William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta used the discourse of African radicals
about defending the sovereignty of Africa, especially after some western
European diplomats issued statements to the effect there would be
sanctions on Kenya if Uhuru Kenyatta were to be elected President. The
assistant Secretary of State for Africa in the State Department , Johnny
Carson, inflamed the ‘anti-imperialist’ posture of the TNA leaders when
he issued a statement to the effect that there would be ‘consequences’
if the leaders of the Jubilee alliance were elected in the elections.
The planning for the elections of 2013 had attracted international
attention because of the confluence of national, regional and
international issues that hinged on the outcome of the elections.
4 MARCH 2013: FRAUD OR TECHNICAL FAILURES?
For the peoples of Kenya the 2013 electoral contests were the first to
be held under the new Constitution. The Constitution had provided for a
devolved system of government which replaced the 8 provinces of Kenya
with 47 counties. On March 4 there were six elections held on one day.
An elaborate system of the sharing of National revenues had been worked
out in order to break the concentration and centralization of wealth and
power in Nairobi.
The election campaign had been unrelenting from the end of the period of
the Referendum in 2010 and picked up momentum in the last months of
2012. As the campaign intensified, there were signs that the technical
capabilities of the IEBC were flawed. In February, the chairperson of
the telecommunications company Safari com, Mr. Collymore had warned the
public over possible electoral hitches. In a letter dated 21 February
2013, Mr Collymore pointed out the shortcomings of the technical
capabilities that could ‘seriously compromise the IEBC’s ability to
execute a credible election.’ This warning from the top service provider
of cell phone service in Kenya brought this company into the center of
the fray after the court challenge subsequent to the announcement of the
election results on Saturday March 9. The CEO of Safaricom Had urged
Hassan to pursue technical testing of stress loads, mobile handsets and
website security. One other prelude to the election was the
announcement by the Chief Justice, Dr. Willy Mutunga, that he had been
threatened and intimidated by sections of the intelligence services when
he was about to leave the country. Mutunga issued a statement
reaffirming the independence of the Judiciary under the new
Constitution.
THE PEOPLE VOTED
On the morning of 4 March, people woke early to go to the polls and
found that by 5 am there were long lines of anxious citizens who wanted
to exercise the franchise. People waiting for eight to ten hours and as
the international media queried why there had been so much patience to
vote, those who responded overwhelmingly declared that they had waited
five years for this new chance to vote. Numerous stories were carried in
the press of the sacrifices of the people as they waited to vote.
Billions of Kenya shillings (over one hundred million dollars) had been
invested in new technologies to ensure a smooth flow of the election but
as soon as the polling started there were reports of the breakdown of
the voter identification system. Electronic voter identification kits
failed forcing the IEBC to manually register and identify voters. Prior
to the elections, Kenyans had been feted in the international media as a
new base to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Africa
where young Kenyans were at the forefront of innovative rollouts to
increase cell phone and computer usage in Kenya. Yet, on the very day
that this expertise was needed, the entire system broke down. As
reported in the newspapers, ‘Kenyans witnessed the failure of virtually
every instrument the IEBC had deployed for the elections: the poll
books, the servers, the telephone transmission, the BVR – biometric
voter registration- - they all failed despite the billions spent on
acquiring them.’
The people of Kenya were shaken as the systems broke and differing
reports were trickling in as to the cause of the breakdown of the
system. Here was a replay of 2007 elections when it was not possible to
believe the figures that were being reported.
According to the East African newspaper, the credibility of the process was undermined.
‘During voting on Monday the electronic voter identification kip
procured late last year to identify voters failed, forcing the IEBC to
switch to manual identification- a system that was castigated in 2007
election which was marred by rigging claims. The challenges did not end
there. The electoral body was supposed to transmit election results from
the polling centers electronically to the tallying center in Nairobi,
from where they would be broadcast throughout the country. Afterwards,
polling heads from the country’s 290 constituencies would physically
take the hard copies of the results to the national tallying centre. The
IEBC had to verify the results sent electronically before announcing
the final results to the public. All of this was expected to be done in
48 hours after the polls closed, even though the law grants the poll
body seven days after the voting to announce the results. But the
electronic system failed, forcing the electoral body to adopt the manual
tallying system.
According to the IEBC chairman, the fault was due to a programing error
which he said resulted from a conflict between the IEBC server and the
database resulting in the system multiplying the number of rejected
votes by eight. At some point the total votes counted at 5.6 m, the
number of rejected votes were at 338, 592.’
As reported in the East African, ‘Polling clerks, frustrated by
passwords that did not work and batteries that had not been charged,
among other glaring mistakes, were forced to resort to manual
identification of voters. The use of kits was meant to stop multiple
voting an end such practices as people voted using the names of long
dead voters.’
ELECTORAL FRAUD AGAIN?
Instead of the results being announced after 48 hours, Kenyans were
gripped by the conflicting reports coming out of the HQ of the IEBC
about the causes of the technical problems. From the reporting, despite
minor problems with the other five electoral contests, the major problem
was with the tallying of the results of the Presidential election. It
soon became obvious from the press reports that there had been massive
interference with the system at numerous levels, at the polling station,
with the tampering with the registration kits, with the breakdown of
the computing system and with the inconsistent reportage of the election
results. The IEBC was embarrassed when it was coming out that in some
centers the number of votes counted exceeded the number of registered
voters.
Two days after the elections electronic tallying was discarded and
counting began afresh manually. Under these conditions, the IEBC
withdrew the verification of the results with the polling agents from
the 8 Presidential candidates. After the removal of the polling agents ,
the vote counting process was not transparent. By 7 March, one
nongovernmental organization went to Court to try to stop the counting.
The African centre for open Governance (Africog) presented a case to the
High Court saying that they had uncontroverted evidence’ of
inconsistencies and votes that were more than the registered voters.
Africog questioned why the IEBC had resorted to manual tallying of the
votes and the fact that the technical failures were not explained to the
electorate.
This complaint had been followed but by another from the Vice
presidential candidate of CORD, Mr Musyoka. The press conference of the
VP of CORD was hardly covered by the local media and gave an indication
of the layered organizational capabilities of the TNA. Not only did the
campaign and publicity of the TNA exude the amount of financial
resources available to the Uhuru Kenyatta camp, but the information
operations of the TNA were superior to all the other parties combined.
By Friday evening, the ways in which the reportage of the results were
being managed by the print and TV forces demonstrated the fact that the
population was being prepared for a victory by Uhuru Kenyatta. After
midnight on 8 March, the citizens were told that election results would
be announced at 11am on 9 March. By 2 am the IBEC released more results
and by morning the dominant news outlets were carrying stories of the
massive victory of Uhuru Kenyatta.
When citizens went to sleep, it was not clear that Uhuru Kenyatta had
reached the threshold of avoiding a runoff election. By mid-afternoon
the IEBC announced the results with Uhuru Kenyatta designated as
president elect. Apart from the declaration of the Presidential
results, it was announced that CORD won 23 of the 47 senate seats, with
19 for Jubilee, the Amani Coalition of Musalia Mudavadi won – 4 Senate
seats, while the Alliance Party won two senate seats. In the Parliament –
of 291 MP’s Jubilee won 159, to CORD 139. Jubilee controlled most of
the counties – won 21 governor seats, CORD 20 governor seats and seven
shared among other independent parties
International election observers stated that the polls were credible but
immediately Raila Odinga on behalf of the CORD coalition called a press
conference stating that the results were flawed and did not reflect the
will of the voters.
THE COURT CHALLENGE
Within minutes after the IEBC delivered their results, Raila Odinga
called a press conference and stated that the IEBC had delivered another
‘tainted elections.’ Odinga stated that,” we thought that this would
never happen again. It most regrettably did. But this time we have a new
independent judiciary in which we in CORD and most Kenyans have faith.
It will uphold the rule of law and we will abide by its decision.” Even
while international praise was being showered on the victor, the CORD
alliance was assembling a team of lawyers to present a petition to the
Supreme Court that the results were not credible. Under the law, the
IEBC was supposed to turn over the information of the voting tallies to
any Court challenge, but had been refusing to cooperate with the Court
challenge.
Kenyan citizens had voted and waited patiently to hear from the Chief
Justice. Willy Mutunga had emerged from over thirty years of the
anti-dictatorial struggles in Kenya to become the Chief Justice. On
Monday March 11, he made a clear press statement that the Supreme Court
would hear the petition without fear or favor. The fourth leg of the
2013 democratic struggles had been joined as Kenyans braced to the full
information of the case to be presented to the High Court by CORD.
CONCLUSION
In 2007, Mwai Kibaki had been hurriedly sworn in even before the people
had digested the results. Under the new reform constitution of Kenya
there had to be 14 days between the election and the swearing in of the
new President. In this 14 day period, any citizen had the right to
present an election petition within seven days. This article of the
constitution had been one small reform that guaranteed that Uhuru
Kenyatta would not be sworn in while there were court challenges. Even
in the face of the challenge, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto began to
play out the part as new leaders while for proper theater, they both
went to church services with the press publishing pictures of Ruto
shedding tears of joy.
The local and international media were replete with stories that Kenyans
had voted on the basis of ‘tribal’ affiliations’ ignoring the real
information about the Kenyatta’s commercial interests – banking,
insurance , agriculture, tourism, manufacturing and many other
enterprises tied to western interest. The issues of the possibility of a
Kenyan dynasty began to emerge as Kenyatta traveled to Gatundu, the
seat of power under Jomo Kenyatta 1963-1978. It was the visual images of
this new Kenyatta at Gatundu that brought out clearly the issues of
theft and primitive accumulation over the past fifty years.
During the presidential debates, Uhuru Kenyatta had admitted that in one
part of Kenya he only had 30,000 hectares. In a society with mass
poverty and landlessness this casual remark reminded the people that the
millions of Kikuyus were not landlords like Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenyatta
declared that the 2013 elections were the fairest and freest in Kenya’s
history while numerous heads of states showered accolades on the
peaceful electoral process. As the new battles of the democratic
struggles went to the courts, Kenyans were being patient in so far as
they understood that the entire process of reform that brought about
this stage of democratic contest had emerged from fifty years of
anti-dictatorial struggles. The devolved constitution had provided a
template that could be a model for local self-determination as the
pressures of African unification pushed the process of the full unity of
the peoples of Africa.
Kenyans had turned out in large numbers to exercise their franchise
because they had placed their faith in the new devolved Constitution
that they had struggled to bring into force.
The Jubilee coalition has argued through their spokespersons that the
elections represented the will of the Kenyan people. CORD argues that
the tally was manipulated to avoid a runoff and second round of
elections. If Jubilee was so confident then they ought to cooperate with
the legal process and fight the fight if and when a ruling is made by
the Supreme Court.
In November 2010, Hosni Mubarak and his party announced that they had
won 80 per cent of the votes in the elections. Four months later, the
people organized themselves in a massive rebellion that drove Mubarak
from power. The emergence of new social forces such as Asma Mafhouz was
one indication that a new wind was blowing over Africa as the poverty
and exploitation intensified in this period of crisis. Kenya is now
awaiting its own Asma Mafhouz moment as the more far sighted members of
the oligarchy understand that political power cannot be monopolized by
one section of the capitalist class. This is the new stage of the
struggle for democracy as the people.

Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.
- Order Horace Campbell's recent book, Global Nato and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya
- Welcome to horacecampbell.net. Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University, New York. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is the author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.