Valuable lessons Kenya learnt in 10 years

In 1999, there were 15,000 cell phone subscribers. Today, there are 16 million. This is not unique, it has happened in other African societies, perhaps to a lesser extent, but it does show a willingness to create the right policy environment for the fast adoption of technology and for Kenyans to adopt it and make it work in their lives.

A professor at the University of Paris, writing about the election violence, described the 2002 election as a “lucky near miss”.

The political transition of that time, many Kenyans would like to believe, was not an accident, but the product of deliberate decisions: Mr Moi had made no significant efforts to rig the election and they were therefore reasonably free and fair. Mr Moi was also willing to give up power and President Kibaki’s opponent, Mr Uhuru Kenyatta, was willing to concede defeat.

The election of 2007 was a lesson that it is not particularly safe to rig elections and, left to itself, the political elite and its factotums will bring down Kenya. It also exposed the moral cowardice and dishonesty of the Kenyan nation.

President Kibaki won re-election with 230,000 votes but lost the parliamentary majority to his rival, Mr Raila Odinga, in an election that was mismanaged and in all likelihood rigged. An investigation by a foreign judge, no less, and two years of back-and-forth debate, have not confirmed the truth about that fiasco. Kenyans have a dogged determination not to allow objective facts to dilute their prejudices.

It is left to history, more honest and dispassionate, to pick over the rubble of fact, half-fact, propaganda and jingoism: Did Mr Kibaki inflate his vote, thereby robbing Mr Odinga of the presidency? Did some voters elect ODM MPs and vote for Mr Kibaki? Did ODM stuff ballot boxes in some of its strongholds? Who lied? Was the violence spontaneous or was it planned?

Tribal elders

The survival of the Kenyan nation in the coming years will depend on the cleanliness of its elections. And the Kenyattan concept of government as a council of wise, tribal elders lording it over the nation and plundering its economy, so ably replicated by Mr Moi and, to a lesser extent, by Mr Kibaki is, in future, a recipe for disaster.

The other primitive polarity where Kenyan politics becomes a competition between the Kikuyu and the Luo, with the Mungiki and Kalenjin youth providing the strong arm and the rest of the tribes playing sycophant, is another route to the chasm.

In the second multiparty decade, the Kenyan voter lost all individuality. Choice as the culmination of a rational evaluation of options was replaced by the ossified, prehistoric beast of tribal euphoria, where the masses are whipped by their tribal chieftains into their tribal paddocks, then driven like buffalos in the plains of 17th century North America, in waves of political hysteria.

The political party was replaced by political SPVs (special purpose vehicles), mongrels made up of tribal parties and cobbled together just for the election. Because they have no ideology, enduring policies or systems to keep members in check, political SPVs are the authors of the indiscipline of Kenyan politics. The political party, rather than alliances and coalitions, is the road to a stable polity.

And a political system that delivers more of the plates of beans and less of the violence has to be stable.