The crisis in Kenya and the hypocrisy of the WSF

The crisis in Kenya and the hypocrisy of the WSF
Rafael Uzcátegui
El Libertario
Feb 4 2008

We can start by illustrating the point with an example. You live in a disorderly home, in which despite hardship, you try to make things better. A group of people turn up and say that they’d like to sleep in your house because they believe that their support will facilitate and encourage better
relationships between the members of your family and that the coexistence of everyone will result in new forms of relationships in which everyone will benefit. You receive them as guests, and for a week they reiterate, incessantly, the pleasure they feel to be with this family, and they speak until they’re blue in the face about the importance of solidarity, ethical values, communication, etc.etc. In your home everyone is happy, and for a week there is a respite and an atmosphere that leaves everyone feeling satisfied. Your guests repeat, for the nth time, that you can count on them for anything, and that the links needed so that your situation might improve have already been forged and are in the process of advancing. However a short time later the situation in your house flares up again and its inhabitants start to set upon each other, like they haven’t done in a long time. You wait for your new friends to help your family out, and that they honour the recently established relationship between you. It turn out, however, that your new ‘friends’ have forgotten about you and that they are busy visiting other families just like they did with your family a few months earlier. Faced with this situation, you feel that the intentions of our ‘friends’ were never sincere, that they tricked you, and that they were really using you for ends that you still don’t understand.

This comparison can be applied to the case of the ‘Day of Global Action’ called by the WSF for the 26th January, given that they were not able, for various reasons, to hold the event as they have done since its inception in Porto Alegre. At the end of January 2007 the 7th WSF was held in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, where the organisers tirelessly repeated how happy they were to hold it for the first time in the African continent. According to the official discourse of those days, realising the event there would provide support for the struggles of local organisations, connect with the problematics of the continent and help build bridges with its progressive elements. The actual event was, however, quite different, as I related at the time, as an observer on the ground, in a text that can be read (in Spanish) at: www.rafaeluzcategui.wordpress.com.

In Nairobi, due to the internal crisis that the event was experiencing, it was decided that a ‘Day of Global Action’ would be held on the 26th January 2008, this call out inspired a variety of support and campaigns that would either start or be realized on this day. But, if you make the effort to review the hundreds of actions that were realized you would very quickly notice one thing: hardly any called attention to the crisis of the African country, a turmoil in which the two months of rioting and conflict has caused the deaths of more than 700 people. What happened to the good intentions that were affirmed scarcely a year ago?

The World Social Forum was created, in its moment, as a proposal for the construction of alternatives born from the coming together of movements that in 1999 was baptized as the antiglobalization movement. A large sector of the international left were taken by surprise by the mobilisations that occurred that year in the US around the WTO convention. Many of the participants of the actions in Seattle were doing so against globalisation, multinationals and capitalism, but also against the political forms of the traditional left which many people pointed to as being partly responsible for the current situation. One of the reasons for their surprise was that here was a protest movement from which they were, quite literally excluded.

The antiglobalization movement was perceived by the ‘widows of the Berlin wall’ as an opportunity to breathe life into their discourse and recover legitimacy. In the following years they dedicated themselves, meticulously, to channelling these rebel waters towards their own decrepit mill. At least if they couldn’t control the conventions and counter-summits, they wouldn’t have the same problems with a conclave such as the WSF. In Porto Alegre, the methods of the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, Lula’s ruling party in Brasil)to assume protagonism of the event left no doubt that the WSF would be an arena in order to see which leftwing tendency would control proceedings. And sooner rather than later, this ‘other world is possible’ was colonized by the world of the dogmatic and authoritarian parliamentary left. No-one was surprised that the expensive stalls at Porto Alegre were selling Stalin t-shirts, or that the ‘leftist’ governments had the largest exhibits or that the NGO’s with greater economic capacity were the ones that monopolized the discussion forums. On a micro level, the WSF reproduced all the perversions that it, in theory, questioned.

During those days in Nairobi, the locals remembered the tribal struggles as something distant, and tried to take the first steps towards a western style democracy, that being their point of reference. However, it as if, after the events at the WSF in Caracas, in which the WSF accentuated the polarization that fragmented the grassroots movements in Venezuela (see
www.fsa.contrapoder.org.ve/english.htm), the event has been put under a curse. Thus after the WSF visited Kenya, the African country’s sleeping demons awoke, while the politburo of the new international of progressive bureaucracy looks the other way.

There are those who participate in the WSF who genuinely want change, but the crisis that the conclave is experiencing is related to this throng of functionaries and minor bureaucrats of the left who perceive the event as a platform to, in their words, “accumulate forces and change their
correlation”. They are the same people who demand in loud voices that the WSF should have a program for assuming power, and that they crave it because amongst the invited are strongmen and authoritarian prophets of every variety.

But I can save myself the effort of making all the explications. The silence of the WSF in the face of the unfolding crisis in Kenya, the most recent country to have served it as an Amphitryon, says it all.

[Rafael Uzcátegui is a member of the collective editorship of the Venezuelan publication, El Libertario (www.nodo50.org/ellibertario, in Spanish & English).

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Kenya’s Crisis: A Drama Scripted For The Last Five Years

Wandia Njoya

I will pre-empt historians who will write about Kenya’s current crisis ten years from today by saying this: I think the questionable election process and the resulting violence were choreographed by leaders from both political sides.

My instinct, informed by familiarity with the local and international political maneuverings behind the genocide in Rwanda and the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire, tells me that both the Odinga and Kibaki camps foresaw the drama of the past week. Both knew what the other was planning to do, and have since been calculating how to manipulate local and international actors to their advantage. After all, before and during elections both sides traded accusations about each other that sounded like speculation but actually turned to be accurate predictions. If such is the case, Kenyans are losing their lives in a drama whose script was written by the leaders they trusted.

As an academic, I know better than to write on the basis of mere suspicion, but I am desperate. I am a member of what the Kenya press currently calls “a certain ethnic group” that is being targeted by organized gangs. The killing of Kenyans at the church in Rift Valley province recently is ample evidence that these gangs are at war and will take no prisoners. I therefore feel compelled to speak out for my own survival, that of my people who are my brothers and sisters related to me by blood, friendship or experience.

I speak even on behalf of the cynical politicians behind this mess, and of those who are accepting pangas to kill their neighbors and burn their neighbors’ property. This is because even though the killers may survive, they will spend the rest of their lives with hearts distorted by hatred and their conscience haunted by the ancestors, and the sins of the fathers will follow their sons down to the fourth generation.

Five years ago, Kenyans elected Kibaki with an overwhelming majority, thinking that the politicians had finally united under NARC because they were genuinely committed to the welfare of the citizens. Only a few months into the 2003 parliament, they were to learn that politicians had engineered the unity through a secretive deal now known as the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which stipulated how cabinet seats and power would be distributed among the politicians. But in any private deal, one party may fail to honor its promise and cannot be held responsible by social institutions that were not involved in the signing of the contract in the first place. And so it is not surprising that Kibaki, out of legitimate political realities or lack of personal integrity, failed to deliver the goods that Raila and his allies expected.

That Kibaki did not honor the commitment or the reason why is irrelevant for voters, since the deal was not revealed to the voters before they made the decision to vote for him. But being the disingenuous people they are, politicians called upon Kenyan citizens to prevail upon Kibaki to honor the memorandum even though they had not informed the voters of its existence in the first place. From then on, politicians polarized Kenyans by urging them to take sides in what was inherently a wrestling match among members of Kenya’s political elite. The politicians duped Kenyans into believing that the side they took was politically determined and was for the good of the country. In reality, however, Kenyans were choosing to cheer either of the two wrestlers based on whether or not they preferred a suave elderly gentleman with an eccentric wife to a charismatic young-looking leader with the trappings of modernity such as a luxurious car and a private gym. With such subjectivity, ethnicity inevitably became an important consideration in the voters’ choice, since ethnicity is inherently subjective.

Meanwhile, what Kibaki and Odinga offered to Kenyan voters was not significantly different. Both sides offered material goodies with no moral, cultural or international vision about what Kenya should be locally and globally. None of the candidates addressed fundamental structures, national identity and culture, so that Kibaki was predictably content with the status quo, while the main change that Odinga offered was in new faces with supposedly clean histories occupying the highest offices of the land. Ultimately, the 2007 presidential elections were less a political and more a popularity contest similar to TV series such as American Idol and The X factor.

The referendum for the Constitution held in 2005 was yet another farce performed for unsuspecting Kenyans. The government barely campaigned for a “yes” vote, for the simple reason that it did not want its own powers to be curtailed. Meanwhile, the opposition successfully campaigned for a “no” vote, not because of the merits or demerits of the proposed constitution, but simply to make political capital in anticipation of the upcoming elections.

The tragedy of the rejection of the proposed constitution becomes clear in the wake of the current crisis. The current constitution allows a president to win on a simple majority as long as he or she garners 25% of the vote in at least 5 provinces. In a field of three or four candidates of equal popularity, a president does not need to be popularly elected to win. He or she can win with less than 25% of the total votes cast nationwide as long as he or she acquires the provincial quotas required. By contrast, under the proposed constitution, the president had to garner over 50% of the vote, failure of which there would be a run-off election. Under that constitution, the current crisis may not have emerged, because even with the current results that lack credibility, the law would have required a run-off between Odinga and Kibaki only, which may have been easily won by Odinga.

Soon after the 2002 elections, Kenyan citizens thus endured finding out that they had been bamboozled and had become the reluctant spectators of petty squabbles and scramble for power that characterized the whole five years of the last Kenyan Parliament. In the meantime, politicians pretended that the soap opera of Kenyan politics was an issue of great national significance. By the beginning of 2007, some citizens began to long for elections in order to finally get rid of the fatigue instigated by the saturation of daily Kenyan life with childish games by political soap stars who went home with a huge pay check at the end of each month.

By December 2007, many Kenyans went to the polls having forgotten that there are only two “tribes” in Kenya: the powerful and the powerless. They minimized the reality brilliantly described by a friend of mine from Kenyatta University who said that in Kenya, there is only one tribe: “kujuana” (having acquaintances). He argued that deals are almost always cut between people who know each other from the same school, clubs or other social places, more than on the basis of one’s ethnic group. Thus we find that in public, politicians spew hatred against members of another ethnic group, but in private, they and their children are married across ethnic lines. Worse, in the evenings, they drink at posh bars with the politicians of the ethnic groups whom they attacked earlier that afternoon. And while the purported political enemies cynically enjoy their evening drinks and weekend golf games, the average Kenyan who takes them seriously or who is on their payroll fights and kills his neighbor with whom he or she has interacted for years.

Nevertheless, on December 27 2007, Kenyans turned up at polling stations in record numbers. They lined up for hours in good faith to vote the leader of their choice. In most cases, they defied the attempts to ethnically polarize them and to impose the three-piece-suit voting. Kenyans chose their leaders based on the leaders’ capabilities and commitment, often rejecting arrogant and corrupt leaders who had not served them well.

Little did the voters know that politicians saw them as mere numbers that could be would used as trump cards in case of a political stalemate that the politicians had probably predicted. To these leaders, the voters do not matter as much as their numbers. Thus Kibaki and Odinga are both using numbers with a margin of about 200,000 votes, give or take, to maintain the standoff. In the meantime, the number of bodies that pile on both sides of the political divide continues to increase, a situation which both sides seem intent on exploiting in order to force their opponent into submission. Kenyans must therefore impress upon the leader they support to please, please, please get to the negotiation table before more lives are meaninglessly lost. It is unfair for peasant farmers and slum dwellers to lose their loved ones and their extremely limited property while our two leaders are glaring at each other, each waiting to see who will blink first.

Some may counter that the tensions and loss of life and property result from the fact that the elections were improperly handled rather than the simple fact that Kibaki had won, implying that had the elections been properly carried out and Kibaki still won, there would be no conflict and loss of life. However, I suspect that the discontent with the inefficiency and corruption in the Electoral Commission of Kenya are simply a convenient excuse for the current massacres and destruction of property. Former president Moi won two elections in 1992 and 1997 which many people believed and publicly claimed were rigged, but Kenya was not subjected to the bloodshed that we are now witnessing.

Instead, the opposition comfortably took their seats in parliament where they began business by increasing their salaries, and this tradition continued into the 2003 parliament. Through defections and other such charades, opposition MP’s cut deals with the government so that Moi’s KANU party remained solidly in power even though most Kenyan voters had voted for the opposition. If members of Moi’s ethnic group were not attacked after the 1992 and 1997 elections, it is doubtful that anger at electoral injustice is the sole reason for which Kenyans, particularly of Kikuyu origin, are being specifically targeted and indiscriminately raped and killed in their own country.

The other insinuation that a vote recount and a predicted win for Odinga as president would resolve the current conflicts is largely wishful thinking. Even if Odinga were to swap places with Kibaki, the ethnic tensions may not necessarily dissipate. Kenya would still have a president who will not have been elected by almost two thirds of the voters, and that two thirds may be as bitter as the current two thirds is right now. Moreover, the suffering that members of the Kikuyu, Kisii, Luhya and other ethnic groups are now enduring because of suspicion of their political sympathies did not start on December 29 when election results were announced. Scores had already been killed by the time Kenyans went to the polls. In addition, an exchange of power without addressing the injustices already going on would send the message the ethnic massacres are a legitimate ticket to the presidency.

In other words, the blame for the current conflict falls on the personality and political decisions of Kibaki and Odinga who appear to be on different sides of the political divide, when in reality they represent two sides of the same coin. Their respective political parties – which they have both changed since 2002 – were amicable as they signed their MOU and awarded themselves hefty salaries once they got to Parliament. Both their parties colluded in different ways in defeating a constitution that may have successfully averted the mishandling of the election results or the political ambiguity of a winner-take-all presidential election.

It is therefore too late for ODM to be righteous about not meeting with Kibaki unless Kibaki resigns. Suspicion sown by ODM members during campaigns and the current organized violence has left many of Kibaki’s supporters feeling that they are caught between suffering under an unpopular Kibaki regime and facing extermination under an Odinga presidency. The reason that Odinga must come to the table with Kibaki is not because Kibaki is a righteous god who won a squeaky clean election; it is in order to allay those justified fears among Kibaki’s supporters who are already suffering. That ODM is reluctant to consider this line of action raises suspicions that it is simply disputing who exercises the excessive presidential powers that Kibaki has abused, rather than the very existence of those excessive powers in the first place. Similarly, Kibaki must come to the table with Odinga because Kibaki’s perceived and actual supporters are being indiscriminately killed, and the least he must do is to show that he is willing to put aside his pride for their sake. Moreover, hundreds of lives have already been lost in the Luo strongholds of Kibera and Kisumu, and the fact that they were lost at the hands of the police in the name of keeping order, may appear to the communities concerned as evidence of the camouflaged Kikuyu hegemony that Odinga promised to eliminate if elected president.

It is evident that the dispute between Odinga and Kibaki is not about justice but about who should benefit from the current injustice of Kenya’s political system, a system that should be replaced by a constitution that diminishes the powers of the president. It is unfair that average Kenyan citizens are losing their lives and property because of a private deal gone sour. I urge Kenyans, Africans and the international community to pressure Odinga and Kibaki to lay aside their injured pride and talk with each other, instead of letting Kenyans die while they organize pristine press conferences to woo the international community to their side.

And the international community should not be duped. The rhetoric from both sides about maintaining law and order or about prayers and million man marches are aimed at moralizing the stubbornness of both leaders. These slogans are simply convenient excuses concocted for the United States and the European Union that like to consider themselves the final judge of democracy in the world.

And the appeal to the international community – particularly Europe and America – is another worrying element in the current mess. Euro-America is hardly an objective observer as far as Kenya is concerned. The British have a grudge with the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau war, a grudge which was strengthened when the Kibaki government cancelled the decades’ long contract to supply the Kenya government with the fuel guzzling and expensive Land Rover vehicles. Kibaki’s schmoozing with China may also have caused concern in both Europe and America, hence America’s hasty congratulatory message to Kibaki to endear him to their side.

The US message was hastily withdrawn, probably thanks to the EU representative in Kenya who gets more air time on Kenyan television than the commendable offer by respected diplomat Bethuel Kiplagat and peace negotiator Gen. Lazarus Sumbeiywo to broker talks between Kenya’s two main political parties. That the EU is harping on about the flawed election process but paying significantly less attention to the loss of life about which Kenyans are more concerned is predictable. In every African conflict, Euro-America has always articulated petty concerns about minute details of the democratic process which are usually irrelevant in the face of the bigger issue about loss of life, with the French government’s decisions in Rwanda in 1994 providing a relevant illustration.

Euro-America is motivated by its ideological interest in confirming that African conflicts are motivated by primitive “tribalism” rather than political and historical events, and in using the crisis in an illustration of that African states are ungovernable without its intervention as the supposed democratic model of the world. Their concern is selfish and hypocritical, since the current crisis is a direct result of the draconian constitution manufactured by Britain and handed over to Kenya at Lancaster just before independence in order to protect white settler farmers who remained in the country.

Any intervention of Europe or America will set Kenya back by at least ten years. With the Kibaki government having reduced donor borrowing, the Western world is likely to peg imposing debt on Kenya to its support of either side. In the meantime, our struggle to raise a generation of Kenyans proud of their identity and convinced that Kenyans and Africans are capable of solving their own problems will be seriously compromised. However, at this stage, losing the gains of the last ten years seems preferable to the increasing loss of life and ethnic hatred.

The international neighbors closer to home are also expected to take interest in this crisis. The fact that the port of Mombasa serves countries such as Uganda and Rwanda makes the restoration of peace in Kenya more urgent. These countries are already feeling the crunch of Kenya’s crisis through limited fuel supplies. It is possible that both PNU and ODM are hoping that the political weight of such countries will compel the opposing side to cave in.

Once again, I urge, plead with and beg Kenyans of all political persuasions and ethnic origins to prevail on their favorite leader to sit at the negotiating table. And when that is done, we must continue to be vigilant in forcing politicians to reduce executive power and in putting in place structures that are make leaders more accountable to the citizens. Never again must we surrender our dignity and intelligence to leaders who reduce us to mere numbers, which they then use to bargain for power and do not suffer the negative consequences.

In the meantime, the Kenyan public needs to repent its proportion of responsibility in the current crisis. Except in bars or in other private forums, few citizens were willing to publicly articulate the real and weighty issues that politicians covered with a veneer of propaganda, slogans and promises of material goods. When the ODM proposed majimbo in public, Kenyans privately knew that the real issue was not about a system of government but about how to deal with Kenyans living in the provinces furthest from the perceived province of origin, and in particular with the Kikuyu. We minimized the fact that the politicians who supported the majimbo system contradicted themselves by calling for a “national” distribution of resources, since the strict application of the majimbo system countrywide would mean that the national coffers would have limited access to the wealth of Central Province, and that the status of Nairobi Province as a jimbo would become a source of conflict.

Similarly, Kenyans were unwilling to publicly accept that they privately understood the change of guard promised by Raila to mean a reduction, if not removal of Kikuyus from visibility in public life. Kenyans seem reluctant to honestly address the polarization of Kenya into the dichotomy of the Kikuyu vs. the rest of Kenya. We must delve into our history in order to identify the source and consequences of this illusion that leads us to ignore concrete realities that defy ethnic identities such as the Kenya elite, stifling capitalism, poverty and the dominance of politicians in the public sphere to the exclusion of achievers in other fields such as academia, science, arts, sports and peace reconciliation.

It is this antagonistic obsession with the Kikuyu that ironically led to Kibaki to become president in 2002 in the first place. Moi made a radical shift from his alienation of the Kikuyu to his appointment of Uhuru Kenyatta as his successor while Odinga threw his weight behind Kibaki in order to beat Uhuru. As a result both KANU and the Odinga-led LDP shied away from leading an independent and spirited campaign as Kalonzo Musyoka of ODM-K did this year despite his limited prospect of winning the election. The principle protagonists in the entrenchment of the Kibaki’s henchmen since 2002 were not Kikuyu voters, but Kenya’s political class that in 2002 reduced the Kikuyu population from human beings into a swing-vote in the greedy scramble for the presidency.

Kenyans became vulnerable to the deadly foolishness of Kenyan politicians by allowing the latter to usurp our religious, cultural and intellectual life. Parliament has replaced Western countries as the primary source of Kenya’s brain drain. Every time we have voted for professors, activists and other leaders, we abandoned morality, discipline, pride and knowledge for triviality and materialism. We endorsed church pastors, professors, eminent thinkers, prominent artists and our only Nobel laureate when they compromised vision, creativity and great achievements for a seat in a petty hell hole called Parliament. Thank God Prof Wangari Maathai lost her seat which she should not have lowered herself to contesting for in the first place. I hope that Kenyans abandon their obsession with politics and instead make heroes of our sportsmen and women, soldiers, thinkers, artists and other important Kenyan achievers so as to deny the presidency and parliamentary posts their current messianic appeal.

To conclude, here’s an inspiring and hopeful anecdote. At a press conference two days ago, Bethuel Kiplagat intimated that he offered to mediate in the crisis because he was inspired by a young man who telephoned to ask what Kiplagat would do to help Kenya get back on its feet. Kiplagat said that the call from this young man was proof that anyone can make a contribution, however small, to restoring peace in Kenya. Wherever we are and whoever we are, we can do something for Kenya. Kiplagat’s story is the reason is why I have written this piece with such passion and urgency. In the meantime, I express my faith in the Kenyans from all walks of life who continue to insist that peace is more important than who is president and who reiterate the increasingly popular slogan that “Kenya is bigger than any one of us.”

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Let Us Not Find Revolutionaries Where There Are None

Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Mukoma Wa Ngugi, urges us to be wary of the democratic revolutionary claims made by various parties in Kenya.

One cannot fully grasp what is happening in Kenya and Africa without considering the changing nature of opposition movements and the differences between a people powered movement, or a democratic revolution, and a plethora of movements that consolidate democratic institutions for international capital while flying under the radar of democracy.

In Kenya, both the sitting Government and the opposition exchange members fluidly as they position and reposition themselves, eyes on the national cake.

Even though here below I am mainly speaking about Raila Odinga and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), I could just as easily be speaking about Mwai Kibaki and the Party of National Unity (PNU). It is only because ODM has actively courted the image of being a people powered movement engaged in a democratic revolution that I draw your attention to it. Amilcar Cabral once said ‘tell no lies, claim no small victories.’ It is in that spirit that I write.

Let me begin by pointing to the question of ethnicity and say this: In the same way you ought to be surprised to meet a white American denying the existence of racism in American politics, so should you be when you meet an African denying that ethnocentrism is deeply entrenched in African politics. Racism is a historical creation that serves a function – so is ‘tribalism’. In the same way that leaders in the West manipulate race and fear for political goals, so do African leaders. Ethnocentrism can be benign or extremely vicious depending on its conductor. Ethnocracy, like a racist power structure, exists to the extent it is able to obscure for the victim and the activist the root causes of economic, political and social exploitation. It misdirects.

Let us also consider Kwame Ture’s (Stokely Carmichael) reminder that we should not mistake individual success for collective success. The majority of Kenyans – Luos, Kikuyus, Luhyas etc – are poor. The 60 per cent of Kenyans living under two dollars a day cut across all ethnicities. The Kikuyu élite live at the expense of the Kikuyu poor; it is the same for other ethnicities. There is much more in common between the poor across ethnicities, than between the élite and the poor of each ethnicity. Racism, nationalism, and ethnocracy all ask that the poor die in the defense of economic and social structures that keep them poor. It is no surprise that those who have been both dying and doing the killing in Kenya in the past week are the poor. Yet they are killing along ethnic, not class, lines.

The best thing for Kenya right now is a return to a non-violent path governed by principled democratic structures that will outlive both Raila and Kibaki.

And in the same way that over time Western political parties come to represent different and contradictory positions, so have African political parties. In the dictatorships of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the opposition parties were the good guys. Progressive international political analysts are still working with that framework, which has blinded us to glaring present-day contradictions. The assumption that opposition immediately means people-power cannot be sustained by an analysis informed by the complex shifts in African politics in the last two decades. Take Zimbabwe, for example. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change is a neoliberal party. Calling it revolutionary or anti-imperialist would be wrong. In Kenya, both the sitting Government and the opposition exchange members fluidly as they position and reposition themselves, eyes on the national cake. William Ruto, a top leader in the ODM was previously a treasurer for the KANU Youth Wing – a political thug organization created by former dictator Moi, who is now in Kibaki’s camp. And the recent church killings that claimed over 50 lives took place in Eldoret, which William Ruto has represented in parliament for many years.

People power

Therefore not all opposition parties are anti-imperialist or opposed to the move by global capital to consolidate the world. At a time when the rich nations and their élite are getting richer, and the poorer nations and the poor within them are getting poorer, some opposition parties will choose the side of global capital. ODM is composed of some of the wealthiest people in the country. For example, the Odinga family owns Spectre International, a molasses company in conjunction with a multinational petroleum and diamond mining company. The international press, which refers to Raila as a ‘flamboyant millionaire’, is not entirely wrong.

With the above said, analysis of what it means to be a people powered movement is crucial. For people-power politics to be effective, solidarity has to be across ethnicity not along it. In other words, a people power movement has to, at its basis, be informed by the consciousness of a collective oppressed. Because it has no real grassroots developed over years of working with and for the people, ODM can only rile up discontentment by pointing to one ethnicity rather than organizing the whole country against élite exploitation. Like any populist movement it takes the worst fears of a people (fear of Kikuyu domination for example) and plays them out in the national stage. A people power movement on the other hand peels away these fears to reveal how power and wealth are being distributed. Because ODM has not done this, its supporters have identified the fellow poor Kikuyu as the enemy. A people power movement would have directed its energies and anger at the state not at another ethnicity.

A people power movement declares its solidarity with other marginalized peoples across the world. It is Third-Worldist in vision. A people power movement, because its vision grows organically from its struggle and engagement with the people, exhibits a stand against exploitative international economic arrangements because its constituents are impoverished through them. ODM cannot be termed as radical pan-Africanist or Third-Worldist, rather it has a populist consciousness.

Also, the shell – the façade – of a people power movement can be used by a national élite to seize power for international capital. Rather than use the term populist/people power to refer to ODM, it is appropriate to borrow a term from the International Republican Institute. The term the IRI uses is ‘consolidating democracy’, referring to a technique it used in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution and in Haiti against Aristide. Consolidating democracy translates into bringing together civil organizations (religious, universities, local NGO’s, women’s organizations, etc.), and uniting various opposition factions into one large electoral force. If missionaries paved the way for colonialism, evangelists of Western democracy like IRI pave the way for US foreign policy.

International solidarity should be with the Kenyan people and not with individual leaders.

The sole purpose of consolidating democracy is to remove the sitting government. There is no coherent underlying people-centered ideology in this goal – no interest in empowering the people, or returning economic and political institutions to them. Rather than develop real roots with the people so that when in power the ODM becomes an extension of them, the ODM has taken the easy route of consolidating democracy following the IRI model.

We urgently need to distinguish between people power movements (such as those we have seen in Latin America), populist movements, and neoliberal opposition movements that consolidate democratic institutions for global capitalism. People power movements are a fifth force usually in opposition to the legislature, executive, judiciary and military. When they seize power through democratic means, they immediately attempt to transform the other four forces into revolutionary instruments. Laws nationalizing resources or redistributing land and resources are passed. The army is transformed from an instrument of intimidation into one that helps in times of disasters – in short a people power government places the people at the center of the state. When a movement that has been consolidating democracy gets into power it does the opposite, and the democratic structures become instruments of global capital and US foreign policy. Liberia, for example, after working with IRI is one of the few countries to open its national door to the US African Command Center.

We should at least consider that the ODM has in the last few weeks not been engaged in the last phase of a people power revolution but rather in the last stage of consolidating neoliberal democracy – using the people as the battling ram against the state. This is where the neoliberal party calls for millions to take to the streets with the hope of immobilizing the state. Because consolidating democracy requires the ebb and flow of violence from the state and protest from the people, Raila could cynically tell a BBC reporter when asked whether he will appeal for calm that ‘I refuse to be asked to give the Kenyan people an anesthetic so that they can be raped.’

Wounds need healing

In case you are wondering, let me say this: for progressives, Kibaki is not the answer. Before the elections, the Kenyan Human Rights Commission released a report implicating the Kenya police in extra-judicial killings of close to 500 young men, all from poverty stricken areas such as Kibera and Mathare, slums currently up in flames. This is a stark reminder that the 6 per cent economic growth was not trickling down to the people. Also that vote-rigging took place (on both sides as it turns out) is almost certain. Enough doubt has been cast by the electoral commissioners to make a recount of the votes, a re-election, a united government or another suitable solution a matter of democratic principle.

If the country is to heal, reconcile and find justice, progressive voices should call for a UN probe into the December – January post-election ethnic cleansing in Eldoret and other areas. There should be calls and support for a United Nations probe into the 1994 Rift Valley killings in which a reported hundreds of Kikuyus were killed and thousands displaced during Moi’s regime, and The Wagalla Massacre of 1984 (again during Moi’s regime) in which hundreds of Somali Kenyans were shot to death. Finally the non-electoral extra judicial killings of the 500 young men last year should also be investigated.

Progressives should also call for the crisis to be resolved within democratic structures. When Bush won an election that the rest of the world understood as rigged, we did not ask Al Gore to try and overthrow the government through an Orange revolution, we did not ask him to divide the country across racial lines, blacks pitted against whites, whites pitted against Latinos; we asked him to find redress through peaceful and democratic processes. And for that, the United States remains standing, in spite of Bush. Al Gore did not ask for a recount of all the votes, or for a re-election. But both Raila and Kibaki can form a united government; ask for a recount, and even a re-election. Whatever process or option is used to adjudicate this must be one that leaves Kenya standing for generations to come.

My plea to you is this: Let us not find revolutionaries where there are none. International solidarity should be with the Kenyan people and not with individual leaders. A whole nation is at stake. The best thing for Kenya right now is a return to a non-violent path governed by principled democratic structures that will outlive both Raila and Kibaki. It is this that will make possible a people-powered government through a democratic revolution.