Hold Uhuru, Raila and Ruto to account if politics breeds violence

The 2017 General Election left a bad taste in the mouth with attack advertisements targeting rival campaigns.

 The Jubilee Party presidential campaign of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto earned particular notoriety for a series of nasty videos and pamphlets making false and scurrilous allegations against opposition chief and then-archrival Raila Odinga.

The effort, put together by disgraced British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, flouted all the campaign advertising rules but the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission preferred to play deaf and blind to the travesties.

Part of the problem was, the ads were not part of Jubilee’s official media campaign but a stealthy underground effort run anonymously on the internet.

 Without any serious effort to investigate the origin of the videos and identify the client, Jubilee was able to distance itself from the videos even as its social media warriors gleefully helped spread them around.

DIRTY TRICKS

In any case, Jubilee was not the only party to employ a dirty tricks team. Mr Odinga’s presidential campaign also had its productions targeting Mr Kenyatta but was simply outgunned and outspent.

The two also engaged in similar attacks on each other in their first duel in 2013. At the 2002 elections, Mr Kenyatta was the victim of a vicious smear campaign run by eventual winner Mwai Kibaki’s strategists.

This kind of dirty campaigns is now an integral part of electioneering in Kenya and probably plays a big role in fuelling hatred and animosity between support bases of rival candidates.

It goes without saying that the support bases are usually pegged on atavistic ethnic loyalties rather than commitment to any ideological or policy platform. What this means is that, when the anger boils over into violence, the spectre of ethnic bloodshed is unleashed.

We are not technically in campaign season but are already witnessing a sharp and alarming rise in destructive political propaganda.

One can hardly go on social media today without being hit by a deluge of phony newspaper front pages, documents and letters on forged government and political party letterheads, and the usual fake news disseminated by the keyboard mercenaries always at the service of political leaders.

ADVANCE JOSTLING

At the heart of it all is the advance jostling ahead of the 2022 General Election, featuring increasingly hostile camps around President Kenyatta and ‘former’ opposition chief Odinga on one side and Dr Ruto on the other.

While the Kenyatta team is overtly moving to cut DP Ruto down to size with the purge of his acolytes in Jubilee, what is really alarming is the related underground war being waged on social media.

It is the kind of campaign that all too often crosses over from cyberspace into the actual physical battlefield.

The 2022 elections may not be round the horizon yet but the Uhuru-Raila Building Bridges Initiative is supposed to lead to a referendum on far-reaching changes to the governing structure.

A referendum that could be as hard-fought as any presidential election carries the same risk of the ethnic violence that so often mars our electoral process.

It is as if we never learnt a lesson from the 2007 descent into ethnic electoral violence hell. We cannot afford to go into a referendum while the genie of violence is already being sown.

President Kenyatta, Mr Odinga and Dr Ruto should all be held criminally liable should the referendum and the 2022 elections lead to loss of even a single life. It behoves the trio to rein in their respective bands of attention-seeking sabre-rattling politicians and social media terrorists.

SOCIAL MEDIA

We should demand that the National Police Service throw the book at all dangerous, inflammatory incitement, whether it be on the political platform or social media. That might be too much to ask, however, of a service with no record of exercising its mandate without deference to the political forces of the day.

Lack of trusted, competent, professional and politically neutral police and prosecution services means we must turn to instruments of the international justice system for salvation.

The International Criminal Court charges against Mr Kenyatta, Dr Ruto and four others out of the 2007 post-election violence collapsed for lack of evidence but let us never forget that the cases were not closed.

The ICC should still be keeping a beady eye on Kenya and the shenanigans of leaders who may be laying the groundwork for political violence.

This is the right time to be gathering information and evidence on those responsible for the fake news, propaganda, disinformation and other campaigns that act as the spark for violence.

[email protected] www.gaitho.co.ke @MachariaGaitho