Clinton: How US ‘got tough’ with Kibaki and Raila

The Obama administration’s claims that it exerted great pressure on the Grand Coalition government to undertake reforms, have elicited a swift rejoinder from both State House and the Prime Minister’s office.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said the American efforts were now bearing fruit, even as State House denied that the government was carrying out reforms because of American pressure.

On the contrary, Kenyans passed the new Constitution because they realised the need to bequeath future generations with a constitution that reflected their needs, said the President’s spokesman, Mr Isaiah Kabira.

“This constitution was passed overwhelmingly by the Kenyan people. The Kenyan people were not under any pressure from any quarters to pass it,” he said.

“It was the realisation of the Kenyan leadership and the people that they needed to do away with the old constitution and usher in a new one that captures their needs and future aspirations,” he added.

And Mr Odinga’s spokesman, Mr Dennis Onyango said: “He (the PM) did not see it as pressure then and does not think it was. He took it as support from a government with shared interests and values with Kenya.”

He added: “The delivery of the new Constitution has been a life-long pursuit (of Mr Odinga). He was only too happy to help deliver it when this constitutional moment occurred. The Prime Minister appreciates US involvement in the process, particularly the moral encouragement and even the financing of civic education.”

According to Mr Onyango, the PM saw America’s push as a continuation of the US support for democratic reforms in Kenya, dating back to the 1980s.    

Speaking at a gathering of US envoys to African states in Washington, Mrs Clinton said her government “kept hammering” at President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga in a series of “straight talking meetings” which she said had started yielding fruits.

Choosing blunt words that diplomats usually eschew, Mrs Clinton added: “We kept hammering on them, we kept calling them. We didn’t give them much rest.”

“And we had some of the most straight-talking meetings with the President, the Prime Minister, and Cabinet members that you could imagine,” the secretary of state continued. “And we, of course, carried a message from President Obama because of his personal connection with Kenya.”

In her speech on Tuesday, the top US diplomat singled out her August 2009 visit to Kenya as an example of how US diplomatic engagement can help bring about political progress in Africa.

Mrs Clinton recalled that she and her chief assistant on Africa, Johnnie Carson, had “a very tough visit with the leaders of Kenya, because they had not yet resolved the aftermath of the violence following the election.”

In Washington, Mrs Clinton said part of the pressure was the personal message from President Obama, her visit to Kenya and frequent reminders by Washington’s envoy to the country, Mr Michael Ranneberger.

During her visit in August last year, the US Secretary of State urged President Kibaki and Mr Odinga to ensure that lingering tensions related to the 2007 election chaos were tackled.

Mrs Clinton urged them to sack Attorney General Amos Wako and the Police Commissioner Hussein Ali and warned that Washington would slap travel bans on some key leaders if the government failed to prosecute the schemers of the post-election chaos.

“We are going to use whatever tools we need to use to ensure that there is justice. We raised the possibility of visa bans and implied there could be more,” she said.

Mr Ranneberger, who has been all over the country issuing strong statements on reforms, was described by Mrs Clinton as “very able,” was “constantly in their face.”

She argued that following the US pressure, Kenyan leaders had started implementing reforms and cited the peaceful referendum on the new Constitution that was held on August 4 as an example.

“We’re beginning to see Kenyans themselves taking responsibility for their own future,” she declared, citing the smooth conduct and outcome of the August 4 referendum.

The US Agency for International Development and its British counterpart helped Kenya “put together an election system that was truly technologically advanced,” Mrs Clinton said. As a result of a computerised process, “results could be put up immediately and there could be no question about the outcome.”

Referred approvingly to Clinton

Nearly a year later, she continued, a Kenyan deputy foreign minister whom she did not name referred approvingly to Mrs Clinton’s diplomatic offensive in his remarks at a conference of democratic nations held in Poland.

“I see Secretary Clinton in the audience,” she recalled the Kenyan official as saying on that occasion. “She and America just kept telling us to quit killing each other, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Mrs Clinton also told the US envoys that she and Ambassador Carson have been working to “rebuild” the State Department’s Africa Bureau.

Without mentioning the Bush administration explicitly, Secretary Clinton said that when she took over early in 2009 “the view was that the Africa Bureau had been starved of resources and attention; that it was not given the support it needed within the highest levels of our foreign policy establishment.”

Additional reporting by Peter Leftie and Walter Menya