Lessons from the Kenya Election Crisis

The Kenyan voters went to polls on December 27 2007 with optimism given the previous qualitatively lauded elections mores so the 2002 general elections and a subsequent national referendum on a new constitution for Kenya. At the turn of the year, political temperatures had gone high but even then, it was not anticipated that the country would degenerate into unprecedented chaos. What went wrong? How come this promising country, though located in a volatile region but had maintained a commendable degree of political stability and democratic progress, instead relapsed into mayhem and bloodletting? How did the situation explode with unimaginable deaths and variously described as ethnic cleansing, state genocide, etc? What are the lessons for democratic transitions in Africa, more so for Uganda with elections come up in 2011?

The crisis in Kenyan resulted from a bigger problem relating to access to and distribution of national resources. The politics of economic well being stood at the heart of the crisis in Kenya, an issue that pervades the African continent and beyond. And even though a power sharing deal was brokered, as long as the underlying grievances remain unattended to, reoccurrence of the crisis cannot be ruled out. Kenya is a quintessence of an inequitable society where the vast wealth is controlled by a small political elite and business community but more sentimentally for the national politics is the dominance of the Kikuyu ethnic group. If the fighting, deaths and destruction of property were simply knee jack reactions due to alleged flawed electoral results, how come either belligerent side accused the other of having systematically planned the violent encounter?