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Peer review, African governance and Kenya polls crisis
2008-01-19 08:53:19
By Ani Jozen
A few lessons were available as the crisis in Kenya unfolded, virtually as a giant experiment in plenty of things known about democracy in Africa up to this moment, as well as in crisis resolution.
The only problem, however, as it is too often the case in political issues, or even in political science, the list of what can be called lessons more or less depends on who draws up that list.
In other words, in ways that are more pernicious than in various disciplines, it is quite easy in political science to arrive at virtually no lessons, affirmatively.
It is hard to say if something generally true can be said about the Kenyan polls or about African governance, the peer review mechanism or the way in which foreign intervention works, by looking at the Kenyan polls crisis.
Yet there are plenty of apparent truisms that can be formulated, whether they are accepted by a breadth of experts of rejected.
And in most issues that surface, the balance sheet is awful, ruining plenty of recent ideology on polls or for that the belief that `capacity building` when undertaken, is positive.
What was demonstrated in the Kenya polls, unlike plenty of what theories of political development might wish to suggest, is a crude lesson of politics anchored in the hallowed tradition of Nicholas Machiavelli, an Italian noble and secretary of state to the princely ruler of the city of Florence in the second decade of the 16th century.
What he taught in `The Prince,` chiefly that men are selfish, thinking scarcely beyond their noses or bellies, and for a pitiful gain they will sell even their mothers, was exactly the case in this case, and in many others. Crude lust was at issue, outside any `principles.`
The Kenyan polls crisis was a lesson at how much rulers in Africa can be brought to accept multiparty democracy, when those in power ensured that they get an additional one million votes by a few strokes of the pen, spread out in the 40 or so constituencies of central province, stronghold of Mzee.
It was a new idea of politics being written down, though in actual fact it belongs to the past, in that for purposes of the 2007 Kenya presidential poll, one vote in the central province will be worth two elsewhere, so that there is an effective veto as to who becomes the president.
Alternatively, it was an embellishment of the more typically African idea of multiparty politics at this moment, that a president is elected for two terms, the polls after the first term merely meant to confirm the same. How could people thus rebel?
Refusing to accept the results of the poll, a situation that had already been smelt earlier, with opposition leader Raila Odinga saying about a week before the polls that the polls commission was being put under pressure to rig the poll results, the `master stroke` was effected.
As a result, the particular ethnic group for whom this alteration of poll results was conducted had then to carry the cross of this treachery of the public trust, and many of them lost properties or limb, if not life itself.
A Rwanda scenario then set in; cars halted and anyone with central province ancestry is thrown into the river.
Perhaps the big loser in the run of things was the polls commission, followed by other institutions which put up no questions that the polls had actually been won by the incumbent.
It was proper that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the one to come over and break the ice, as finally it should have been incumbent upon top prelates in the country to warn against any betrayal of the public trust, that `the voice of the people is the voice of God,` as the Romans used to say.
Instead habitual alliances prevailed, where priests and judges usually side with the king, thus permitting the king to swear falsely.
The crisis has demonstrated what one could still have learnt in political science or in Marxism, but years of World Bank `capacity building` has more or less ensured that nothing of the sort is heard from the University of Dar es Salaam.
It constitutes in the fact that politics relies on the economic and social structures existing, and only violently can it be brought to behave differently.
Conducting opinion polls the way REDET was conducting recently about the government, parliament and the president shows trees while hiding forests, of the intensity of the cultural setting largely hostile to democracy.
What the forms of arbitration pursued may have realized doesn`t answer the more profound questions, as to whether Africa will ever learn to be a proper democracy, or any real change can only violently come about.
And when such change is effected, it tends to harden by the same warrior values that in the first place brought it to office, and in turn, it will have to be removed in like manner.
That means cycles of purported change by the ballot box, but having to be effected by riots, and in this case, hundreds of innocent people dying.
But it must be admitted that while in its vote rigging crudity the situation in Nairobi was similar to any other scenario, it was in a way more disposed to arbitration, as even senior regime people could break ranks and create a new climate positive for intervention of Archbishop Tutu, etc.
In part sensitivity arose from the fact that the president`s own people were being savaged all over the country, and they led in hysterical calls to Mr Kibaki to step down (in BBC call in programmes and reporting on the spot) so that the mayhem ends.
This more than all pleading from Archbishop Tutu, was the magic wand.
That was the tragic reality that brings about some sort of truism to the old adage of revolutionaries that every revolution finds the tools, weapons, within its own situation.
Whether indeed the Kalenjin throat slitters setting out to target central province people were engaged in a revolutionary action is beside the point, but it has a resonance with Frantz Fanon, where the place of the settler is taken by the Kikuyu, that is, altering poll results is a settler sort of arrogance.
In actual fact it isn’t the revolutionary dimension that is critical, that is, a pursuit of democracy against vote rigging, but this warrior identity that President Kibaki failed to grasp; his people paid dearly.
At the peer review level, it was evident that not much progress could be said to have been realized, as in the first place close aides of Mr Kibaki refused an arbitration visit by AU chairman President John Kuffour.
Then, while the devastation was spreading, President Yoweri Museveni cabled Mr Kibaki to congratulate him for winning the polls, and one wonders whom that was in actual fact supposed to please.
President Kikwete stopped short of any such endorsement, but couldn`t venture to suggest that poll results were flawed, in which case sovereignty ties link EAC states, not principles, human rights.
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