Chris Blattman

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Updates from the ever more shrill Kenyan blogosphere

Two noteworthy developments.

The East African reports that Kenya’s Electoral Commission chairman, Samuel Kivuitu, “made a damning admission that he announced results of the fiercely contested presidential election under pressure”.

Presumably (and hopefully) the international community, African Union included, is pressuring Kibaki for a peaceful and reasonable resolution, and Raila for peaceable and legal action.

The FT reports, however, that the UK prime Minister supports the idea of a unity government:

Amid a flurry of phone calls from international capitals to State House in
Nairobi, Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister, proposed the formation of a
unity government to bring together President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, the
country’s opposition leader.

This proposition sounds unlikely and, if it is true, it is naive at best. Could Brown accomplish as much with the Conservatives? Could we have expected Bush and Gore to govern together after 2000? There is a winner and a loser to this election, and the way to settle that matter is relatively straightforward: an audit of the local polling stations. If I understand correctly, the charge in Kenya is largely that the central commission altered results once they reached the center. If so, the (scrupulously observed) local results should be straightforward to recount. I see little reason that the international community or (more importantly) Kenyans should settle for any less.

Finally, a plea for moderation. Passions are running high in Kenya, quite understandably. But this is most certainly not a genocide, as some have claimed. There is some terrible and tragic ethnic violence afoot, but it is far from that crime of all crimes.

That is perhaps the most extreme example. Yet today we have also heard that Ugandan forces are being used to bring order to the West, that mobs of non-Luos are forcibly circumcising Luos, and that large groups of armed men are roving about Eldoret.

Incidents such as the tragic church burning today, resulting in the death of dozens of innocents, mean we should be vigilant and not ignore such possibilities. But let us not rumor and fear monger, if only to avoid further fostering the insecurity.

We should recall, moreover, that a number of “inside source” rumours of the past 48 hours (Raila’s arrest, the resignation of the Army chief, and so forth) appear to have been mistaken.

Suspicions and vigilance may be warranted, but so is caution and reason. To quote Macharia Gaitho, this should be the time for statesmanship, not brinkmanship.

2 Responses

  1. PS Just watching BBC’s Newsnight which focussed on Democracy in 2008, the Kenyan situation was looked at in some detail. An EU observer reports that in some areas of Kenya polling stations were attacked and ballot papers destroyed, so it wouldn’t be possible to do a physical recount now. The observer said that it might be possible to get a more accurate result by looking at the voting tallies at the constituency level, which is bizarre as the EU Election Observers preliminary report mentions the irregularities I cited earlier.

  2. Chris, you suggest that a straight-forward recount of the votes at the polling stations would be one way of resolving the election crisis. I am not sure how this would work when EU observers say that they witnessed many irregularities which cast much doubt on the veracity of the vote-counting even at central level. In several constituencies, for instance, Returning Officers refused to give EU observers their tallies before these results were confirmed in Nairobi.

    Further “Whilst the result of the elections were announced, the official figures for all the constituencies are still not available and adequate measures have not been taken at all levels to ensure the results can be correlated in the public domain.”

    In certain cases it was not possible to tell whether the signature of the party agents was included before or after changes were made to the voting tallies.

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