Dissent, Protest and Dispute in Africa by Toyin Falola & Emmanuel Mbah

Author:Toyin Falola & Emmanuel Mbah [Falola, Toyin & Mbah, Emmanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Violence in Society, Africa, Civics & Citizenship, Social Science, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9781138220034
Google: PRfBjwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 30269353
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

4 Politics of ethnic consociation: 2007 elections

In order to understand the aftermath of the Kenyan 2007 election, one has to acknowledge that strongmen and ethnic entrepreneurs fuelled the conflict from both sides of the ethno-political divide. The aftermath of the 2005 referendum witnessed the criss-crossing of the country by politicians rallying their supporters against ethnic “others.” Virulent language was particularly common in the Rift Valley where local Kikuyu were depicted as undue beneficiaries of state patronage. They were referred to as guests that had acquired Kalenjin land under Kenyatta’s regime and failed to respect their hosts. They were seen as having insisted on “voting against local wishes and on naming local farms and trading centres after places in Central Province” (Lynch, 2008: 564). The effects of the re-Africanization of the white highlands and President Kenyatta’s discarding arguments on the “sanctity of Tribal lands” after independence had set the stage for the deep animosities between the Kalenjin and the Kikuyu in the Rift Valley. As suggested by Kagwanja and Southall (2009: 263), to understand the political economy of Kenya, it is important to put it into the context of historical injustices that relate to the question of land in both the colonial and post-colonial state. Additionally, it is important to realize that Kenya’s post-election violence was not spontaneous but had been foreshadowed by the African Peer Review Mechanism team in 2006. The report had called for a much-needed political compromise in the aftermath of the 2005 referendum in which the whole country, with the exception of the Kikuyus, had voted against the draft constitution. The report explicitly stated that there was a need for healing in the nation otherwise the society would remain polarized (NEPAD 2006).

In the run up to the 2007 elections, there was a call for the return to Majimboism by the opposition leaders. The focus on regionalism played directly into the political grievances that had been so carefully managed during the one-party era. Understood variously to mean a form of respectable federalism, a reconsideration of land rights, regionalism became the key divisive issue of the campaign (Branch and Cheeseman, 2008). This call for Majimboism, thrived, as explained by Kagwanja and Southall (2009: 269), on “divisive binaries of ‘natives’ and ‘settlers’,” with those in the latter group capable of being violently banished from land they occupied. Thus, this language created a situation where Kikuyus were “significantly more likely to report a fear of election-related violence than any other ethnic group”(Branch and Cheeseman, 2008: 18). To counter these calls for Majimboism, the ruling party sought to compare Odinga to Idi Amin, Stalin and Hitler.

Thus by 2007 elite fragmentation coupled with the privatization of violence set the foundation for distrust in the political system, putting into context Kibaki’s decision to retain power at any cost (Branch and Cheeseman, 2008). It is also worth noting that, although Raila Odinga did not advocate expulsions, his persistent vagueness in explaining what the Majimboism policy (of which he was the main proponent) entailed was seen as a tacit nod in its radical interpretation.

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