Next Tuesday, Uhuru Kenyatta will be sworn-in for his second term as president of the Republic of Kenya, a key U.S. ally in the fight against Islamic extremism on the African continent. But Kenyatta’s election did not go any smoother than the last several elections, and the lingering distrust of the ruling Jubilee Party threatens to destabilize an otherwise democratic country.
Hacking, murder, riots, and a supreme Court intervention
The Kenyan people went to the polls in August for the regularly-scheduled presidential election. Kenyatta was reelected with a clear majority. But candidate Raila Odinga, who leads the opposition coalition known as the National Super Alliance, or NASA, claimed the Kenyan election authority’s computer system had been hacked and that the results should be thrown out. The electoral commission admitted there had been an unsuccessful hacking attempt, but that the system remained secure.
Further muddying the waters was the fact that a week before the election, unknown assailants kidnapped, tortured, and murdered Chris Msando, an IT expert for the electoral commission who the BBC identified as “a key figure in managing the voter identification and result transmission system.” Msando’s body was found in a forest outside of the town of Kikuyu, about 12 miles from the capital of Nairobi.
Despite this, international observers including former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, proclaimed the elections to be fair. Kerry, who led the contingent from the Carter Center, said that although there were minor “aberrations” in some locations, he believed “the election’s commission in Kenya has put together a process that will allow each and every vote’s integrity to be proven.” The Carter Center later issued a statement saying that although the initial electronic transmission of results had proved “unreliable,” nonetheless “the paper balloting and polling station results forms provided a verifiable mechanism to conduct tabulation in the absence of the electronically scanned results forms.”
Marietje Schaake, Chief Observer of the European Union Election Observation Mission, said that Odinga and his supporters needed to “accept that not winning is a natural part of a democratic competition. But Odinga continued to argue the results were a “sham” and challenged them in court. On September 1, the Kenyan Supreme Court invalidated the election, saying the results were “neither transparent or verifiable.” A new election was scheduled for October 26, which Odinga soon announced he would boycott.
Predictably, he polled only one percent in the re-run, and continues to complain. His supporters have taken to the streets, leading to an also predictable government crackdown.
Democratization, but Continued power for the Kenyatta family
Kenyatta is the son of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, who led the movement that gained Kenya’s independence from Great Britain in 1963. Jomo Kenyatta ruled as a typical African post-colonial strongman until his death in 1978, using land reforms to favor his supporters, who hailed mostly from the Kikuyu tribe, who presently comprise 22 percent of the country’s population. The original Kenyan constitution at the time recognized only the Kenyan African National Union party — which Kenyatta headed — and prohibited a left-wing splinter group, the Kenya People’s Union, from competing in elections.
Subsequent constitutional reforms have opened electoral competition. Writing at Foreign Policy this week, John Tomaszewski and Daniel Twining of the International Republican Institute, a Washington-based NGO that promotes democracy around the globe, called Kenya’s constitution “one of the most progressive on the continent.” But they acknowledged that “the future of Kenyan democracy is even less clear than when the process began.”
This is distressing, because Kenya’s place in securing a stable Africa is critical. The country actively assists the U.S. in its fight against al-Shabaab terrorists in neighboring Somalia, who killed 67 people in an attack on a Nairobi shopping mall in 2013. The country currently hosts more than 580,800 refugees, including 300,000 Somalis, and others from Uganda who have fled the Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony.
Even with so much turmoil surrounding it, tourism remains a strong point for Kenya. Spurred by the attraction of safaris and expeditions to Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest mountain that lies just across the border with Tanzania, Kenya’s tourism revenue rose by 37 percent in 2016, according to the CIA’s World Fact Book. The U.S. State Department warns American tourists only to avoid the areas along the border with Somalia and one depressed neighborhood in Nairobi, and that they visit Mobmassa’s Old Town “only during daylight hours.”
