'Who's to blame? It depends where you begin the story'

Chris McGreal

The Guardian

February 7, 2008.

The tribal violence that has swept through parts of Kenya during the past month has been blamed on a disputed election. But in fact it has been simmering for decades, ever since British colonialists unjustly carved the country up - and Kenya's own leaders followed suit.

Charles Mugo never thought much about the history of his family. He knew that his ancestors were driven off some of the most fertile land in Kenya to make way for white settlers, and that for years after they lived in grinding poverty as little better than indentured labour for the colonists. His father told him that some fought with the Mau Mau to liberate the country and, more importantly, the land. But the Mau Mau later became a national embarrassment so not much was said about it.

He can't even say exactly where it is they all came from, just somewhere in what the British called the White Highlands beyond Nairobi, where many Kikuyu once lived. In any case, by the time Mugo was born 34 years ago, all that was regarded by the family as ancient history. His father had a one-and-a-half acre plot in the Rift Valley given to him in the late 60s by the first post-independence government of Kenyatta. Admittedly, it was far from where the Kikuyu had traditionally farmed but it was land, the key to economic and social advancement, and it fed the family. Charles Mugo inherited the plot and made his living growing watermelon, tomatoes and other vegetables, and selling what the family did not eat at a stall alongside the main road north from Nakuru. As far as he was concerned, a historic wrong had been more or less put right.

That was until last week, when his home was razed by the neighbours and his crops plundered in the violence that swept through the Rift Valley over the disputed December 27 election. All that is left is his father's grave.

Mugo doubts he will ever farm his land again. The people who burned him out were his Kalenjin neighbours who said he never belonged there in the first place, and that he was little better than a squatter planted on their land by Kenyatta, a Kikuyu favouring other Kikuyu. So far as they were concerned, righting the wrong against Mugo's family was at their expense.

Mugo suspected trouble was coming so he had already sent his wife and children out of the Rift Valley. Now living in a corner of a large Red Cross tent in a stadium in the town of Nakuru, he says the best hope of rebuilding his life is to return to what he calls his "ancestral lands", a place he has never seen. He doesn't know what he will find there, or who, but there is no turning back after the events of the past week.

"If they want the Rift Valley to be peaceful it is best for the Kikuyu to leave. They [the Kalenjin] do not want us here and as long as we are here they will try and get rid of us, there will not be peace," he says. "The British started this but we have not had good leaders. I used to think that we were all Kenyans and we could all live together. Now I think we all have to go back to where we were before the British arrived and begin again. That is the only way we can live together in Kenya."

Ask a Kalenjin who is to blame for the mess of Kenya's land crisis and they say the Kikuyu. Ask a Kikuyu and they say the British. It just depends where you choose to begin the history of land policies based on greed and tribalism - whether by the white tribe of settlers or Kenya's post-independence rulers - that continue to drive large numbers of Kenyans deeper into grinding poverty and to be the most divisive social issue in the country.

Mugo thought he had escaped all that but a century after his ancestors were turned off their land he too finds himself landless and destitute. He is not alone.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the colonial administration justified seizing land for European settlers on the grounds that with a population of just four million Africans there was sufficient land in Kenya for everyone, although the true nature of the confiscations is exposed by the fact that the Europeans took the best land for themselves.

More than 30 million people live in Kenya today, a high proportion of them concentrated on the lush Central Highlands, Rift Valley and western Kenya. The demand for land has grown because of the scarcity of paid jobs. The majority of Kenyans are like Mugo, scraping a living from the soil. Almost 60% of Kenyans live on less than a dollar a day. They include many of the others who have sought refuge in Nakuru's stadium, including Jeremiah Oiruria, 77, who got a one-acre plot in Moro in 1971. He was in his house when the mob set fire to it and has burns down the right side of his face and body. "I was saved by my wife who pulled me out," he says. "That land is everything we had. I don't know where we go or what we do but I don't think we can go back.

They don't want us. They told us we don't belong here."

Jackson Mugo, 56, from Burnt Forest, only survived by hiding under his recently harvested corn cobs. From there he watched his neighbours haul off his four cows and raze his house. "They told me before they were going to do it. They told me Kenyatta should never have sent me here.

They took everything, my cattle, my bicycle, my radio. I could see them searching everywhere for the Kikuyu," he says.

Nakuru's town clerk, Albert Leina, a Masai, says it was tragic to watch Kenyans killing each other but that it has happened before and will go on happening until there is a government that chooses to address the legacy of the country's history. "We voted almost in a tribal, ethnic kind of way. You're talking about human beings. That's facts. But if all this was not triggered by the elections it would have been triggered by something else. We are talking about historic injustices and the national cake," he says.

Colonisation in Kenya was one long campaign of dispossession. "The British idea of land ownership was in total contradiction with the African idea," says Odenda Lumumba, coordinator of the Kenya Land Alliance, a network of organisations campaigning for land reform. "The British deemed that Africans didn't own land, they merely used it, and so any land lying fallow was deemed to be unused and the British took it. This made Africans essentially tenants of the crown. This was never understood by Africans. Who was this crown? Whose grandfather was it?

Because all landownership was traced to grandfathers."

The Kalenjin and Masai lost more acreage but it was the Kikuyu who were hardest hit because they were robbed of almost all their land and suffered the biggest displacement, mostly from fertile areas beyond Nairobi that the colonists called the White Highlands.

A growing population of Kikuyu was crowded on to the remaining land - "native reserves", as the white people deemed them - that were little more than labour pools to provide workers for land they had once farmed themselves. On top of that Kenyans were deprived of the land they needed to move on in life with dowry payments that would help them climb up the social scale.

"The British took the land promising employment, but unemployment started soaring. Slums started developing in the urban areas. Africans were put in a helpless situation," says Lumumba. The situation was exacerbated after the first world war with an influx of former army officers in search of a better life that they found on yet more expropriated land.

The settlers weren't particularly productive - many had never farmed before - so to maintain the illusion of white superiority, the colonial administration stacked the odds against African farmers even further by banning them from growing cash crops that competed with the settlers, particularly tea and sisal.

The colonial administration introduced a "tribal chiefs" system that came to wield more power than the traditional councils of elders. The chiefs were foremost loyal to their paymasters, the British, and enforced colonial edicts with an iron fist.

Mwalimu Mati, head of Mars, an anti-corruption group campaigning to call Kenyan leaders to account for past abuses, says that at independence in 1963, Kenya inherited what has been described as one of the most skewed patterns of land distribution in the world, comparable with countries such as South Africa, Zimbabwe and Brazil. "The struggle for independence and the Mau Mau rebellion were primarily a land grievance. The white settler population had a system of apartheid. We ended up with a situation where the best land was in the hands of a very small section of the population. The rest of the population was driven on to dry, rocky, waterless areas," he says.

Kenyans looked to the first post-colonial government under Kenyatta to put the situation right. But in the hard-fought negotiations for independence he bowed to British demands for white settlers to remain on their farms if they wanted and for land only to be transferred through a "willing buyer-willing seller arrangement", also the source of the present wrangle over land in Zimbabwe.

Some white people did remain but enough left that large tracts of land came up for redistribution. The Kikuyu, Kalenjin and Masai prepared to go home. But, says Mati, that wasn't Kenyatta's plan. "The root cause of our crisis is that the land did not get bought by the people who lost it but by the Kikuyu elite of the time. That was the situation in Central province where the Kikuyu came from. Kenyatta then settled the poor landless Kikuyu in the Rift Valley on land that had belonged to the Kalenjin," says Mati.

Mugo's father was among the poor Kikuyu resettled on Kalenjin land. He was a minor beneficiary. Others did much better. What evolved in the following years was little more than a land grab by Kenya's new elite, which used British land law and Indian colonial statutes introduced to Kenya as a mechanism to distribute land as political patronage while keeping a large slice of the pie for themselves.

The largest landowners in Kenya today are the families of the only three presidents the country has had since independence - the Kenyattas, the family of his successor, Daniel arap Moi, and the present president, Mwai Kibaki, who served in the Kenyatta and Moi administrations. A little further down the scale are a residual group of white settlers, senior politicians and businessmen with political connections.

The extended Kenyatta family alone owns an estimated 500,000 acres (2,000 sq km). That represents a large chunk of the 28m acres (113,000 sq km) of arable land in Kenya. The remaining 80% of the country is mostly semi-arid and arid land. The Kenya Land Alliance says more than half the arable land in the country is in the hands of only 20% of the population. Two-thirds of the people own, on average, less than an acre per person. There are 13% who own no land at all.

Three years ago the government launched the Ndungu commission to investigate the illegal distribution of publicly owned land. The commission found that Kenyatta and Moi both grossly abused their powers to grab public land and former white-owned farms, and parcelled it out "as political reward or patronage".

"As a result a large number of the genuinely landless ... remain locked in a cycle of poverty," the commission said in its report. The commission members included Lumumba, who says, "The land belonged to the government or was in trust for the people but the trustees, particularly the presidents, behaved as if they were estate owners. They handed out individual titles to parts of national parks and gave trust land as political favours."

After Moi came to power in 1978 the land grabs evolved away from the vast tracts of farmlands that had already been parcelled out to all kinds of other publicly owned land. State corporations such as the railways, airports authority and power company have been plundered of land at a cost of "colossal amounts of money" to the public.

"Under Moi you used to get people turning up at a piece of land and they'd both have titles issued by the same government, sometimes by the president," says Mati. "If Moi wanted to give someone $1m, he didn't give them cash. He gave them the title deed to land and they'd sell that using the government land registry. Moi gave lots of people land. That was his way of governing." Other high officials, such as successive commissioners of lands and private interests such as bankers, lawyers and architects, contributed to this "unbridled plunder".

The commission said: "In every corner of the country today, there is a significant number of squatters who trace their landlessness to historical injustices and the failure of the post-independence governments to undertake a comprehensive resettlement programme. Their status as squatters has also left them in grinding poverty and vulnerable to all manner of human rights violations, including incessant evictions. This historical failure has given rise to a deep seated sense of grievance."

This is not the first organised violence over land. Moi unleashed a form of terror and ethnic cleansing against the Kikuyu in the Rift Valley 15 years ago because it was Kikuyu politicians who were pressing hardest for the introduction of multi-party democracy. No one knows how many were killed, but it ran into the thousands. Moi repeated his assault ahead of the 1997 general election, targeting Kikuyu communities on the coast as well as in the Rift Valley. That helped unleash regular localised violence over land grievances separate from the immediate politics. For instance, a low-level insurgency in the Mount Elgon district has pitted rival clans against each other over land with 22 people killed in an assault on Kimama village on December 31 alone, and another 50 in the areas around in the following week. Many of them were hacked to death as they worked in their fields.

A group calling itself the Sabaot Land Defence Force has targeted specific communities in order to drive them off their land. Human rights groups say they have documented nearly 400 deaths during the violence in the area in the past six months. About 80,000 people, a third of the district's population, has been displaced. "The violence was going to happen so long as the original grievance was not addressed. It never has been," says Mati.

The Ndungu commission agreed. "Forty years of independence is a long time during which any historical injustices regarding land should have been resolved. The fact of the matter, however, is that there are certain deep-rooted injustices that still rankle whole communities in Kenya ... The politically ignited land clashes of the 1990s are a manifestation of deep-rooted grievances that cannot be glossed over in a reform process," it said.

Kibaki came to power in 2002 promising reform. Little has happened. Mati says the only way to address the issue is to break up the vast land holdings of the Kenyattas, Mois and others. "There is a massive youth population that doesn't have land and that is unlikely to get it the way things are. And yet land is ingrained to them as the key to life. We have to address this or live with the consequences," he says.

The upheaval of the past month has created the greatest ethnic migration since the end of British rule. "To say you are taking people to their ancestral homelands is ridiculous," says Lumumba. "It's like you are going back to the native reserves because what will they find when they get there? There is no room for them there. They will end up on the periphery of the urban areas trying to survive. It will be another time bomb," he says.

Charles Mugo says there is no future for him or any other Kikuyu in Nakuru, and it is best just to go. "There were good Kalenjin. Some of our neighbours tried to protect us but they were threatened and told that next time their houses would be burned. That is when I knew that we wouldn't come back. The good people have lost out to the bad. We can never feel safe here again," he says.

'Who's to blame? It depends where you begin the story'

McGreal reports

Thursday February 7, 2008

The Guardian

The tribal violence that has swept through parts of Kenya during the past month has been blamed on a disputed election. But in fact it has been simmering for decades, ever since British colonialists unjustly carved the country up - and Kenya's own leaders followed suit. Chris McGreal reports Thursday February 7, 2008The Guardian
Charles Mugo never thought much about the history of his family. He knew that his ancestors were driven off some of the most fertile land in Kenya to make way for white settlers, and that for years after they lived in grinding poverty as little better than indentured labour for the colonists. His father told him that some fought with the Mau Mau to liberate the country and, more importantly, the land. But the Mau Mau later became a national embarrassment so not much was said about it.

He can't even say exactly where it is they all came from, just somewhere in what the British called the White Highlands beyond Nairobi, where many Kikuyu once lived. In any case, by the time Mugo was born 34 years ago, all that was regarded by the family as ancient history. His father had a one-and-a-half acre plot in the Rift Valley given to him in the late 60s by the first post-independence government of Kenyatta. Admittedly, it was far from where the Kikuyu had traditionally farmed but it was land, the key to economic and social advancement, and it fed the family. Charles Mugo inherited the plot and made his living growing watermelon, tomatoes and other vegetables, and selling what the family did not eat at a stall alongside the main road north from Nakuru. As far as he was concerned, a historic wrong had been more or less put right.
That was until last week, when his home was razed by the neighbours and his crops plundered in the violence that swept through the Rift Valley over the disputed December 27 election. All that is left is his father's grave.
Mugo doubts he will ever farm his land again. The people who burned him out were his Kalenjin neighbours who said he never belonged there in the first place, and that he was little better than a squatter planted on their land by Kenyatta, a Kikuyu favouring other Kikuyu. So far as they were concerned, righting the wrong against Mugo's family was at their expense.
Mugo suspected trouble was coming so he had already sent his wife and children out of the Rift Valley. Now living in a corner of a large Red Cross tent in a stadium in the town of Nakuru, he says the best hope of rebuilding his life is to return to what he calls his "ancestral lands", a place he has never seen. He doesn't know what he will find there, or who, but there is no turning back after the events of the past week.
"If they want the Rift Valley to be peaceful it is best for the Kikuyu to leave. They [the Kalenjin] do not want us here and as long as we are here they will try and get rid of us, there will not be peace," he says. "The British started this but we have not had good leaders. I used to think that we were all Kenyans and we could all live together. Now I think we all have to go back to where we were before the British arrived and begin again. That is the only way we can live together in Kenya."
Ask a Kalenjin who is to blame for the mess of Kenya's land crisis and they say the Kikuyu. Ask a Kikuyu and they say the British. It just depends where you choose to begin the history of land policies based on greed and tribalism - whether by the white tribe of settlers or Kenya's post-independence rulers - that continue to drive large numbers of Kenyans deeper into grinding poverty and to be the most divisive social issue in the country.
Mugo thought he had escaped all that but a century after his ancestors were turned off their land he too finds himself landless and destitute. He is not alone.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the colonial administration justified seizing land for European settlers on the grounds that with a population of just four million Africans there was sufficient land in Kenya for everyone, although the true nature of the confiscations is exposed by the fact that the Europeans took the best land for themselves.
More than 30 million people live in Kenya today, a high proportion of them concentrated on the lush Central Highlands, Rift Valley and western Kenya. The demand for land has grown because of the scarcity of paid jobs. The majority of Kenyans are like Mugo, scraping a living from the soil. Almost 60% of Kenyans live on less than a dollar a day. They include many of the others who have sought refuge in Nakuru's stadium, including Jeremiah Oiruria, 77, who got a one-acre plot in Moro in 1971. He was in his house when the mob set fire to it and has burns down the right side of his face and body. "I was saved by my wife who pulled me out," he says. "That land is everything we had. I don't know where we go or what we do but I don't think we can go back. They don't want us. They told us we don't belong here."
Jackson Mugo, 56, from Burnt Forest, only survived by hiding under his recently harvested corn cobs. From there he watched his neighbours haul off his four cows and raze his house. "They told me before they were going to do it. They told me Kenyatta should never have sent me here. They took everything, my cattle, my bicycle, my radio. I could see them searching everywhere for the Kikuyu," he says.
Nakuru's town clerk, Albert Leina, a Masai, says it was tragic to watch Kenyans killing each other but that it has happened before and will go on happening until there is a government that chooses to address the legacy of the country's history. "We voted almost in a tribal, ethnic kind of way. You're talking about human beings. That's facts. But if all this was not triggered by the elections it would have been triggered by something else. We are talking about historic injustices and the national cake," he says.
Colonisation in Kenya was one long campaign of dispossession. "The British idea of land ownership was in total contradiction with the African idea," says Odenda Lumumba, coordinator of the Kenya Land Alliance, a network of organisations campaigning for land reform. "The British deemed that Africans didn't own land, they merely used it, and so any land lying fallow was deemed to be unused and the British took it. This made Africans essentially tenants of the crown. This was never understood by Africans. Who was this crown? Whose grandfather was it? Because all landownership was traced to grandfathers."
The Kalenjin and Masai lost more acreage but it was the Kikuyu who were hardest hit because they were robbed of almost all their land and suffered the biggest displacement, mostly from fertile areas beyond Nairobi that the colonists called the White Highlands.
A growing population of Kikuyu was crowded on to the remaining land - "native reserves", as the white people deemed them - that were little more than labour pools to provide workers for land they had once farmed themselves. On top of that Kenyans were deprived of the land they needed to move on in life with dowry payments that would help them climb up the social scale.
"The British took the land promising employment, but unemployment started soaring. Slums started developing in the urban areas. Africans were put in a helpless situation," says Lumumba. The situation was exacerbated after the first world war with an influx of former army officers in search of a better life that they found on yet more expropriated land.
The settlers weren't particularly productive - many had never farmed before - so to maintain the illusion of white superiority, the colonial administration stacked the odds against African farmers even further by banning them from growing cash crops that competed with the settlers, particularly tea and sisal.
The colonial administration introduced a "tribal chiefs" system that came to wield more power than the traditional councils of elders. The chiefs were foremost loyal to their paymasters, the British, and enforced colonial edicts with an iron fist.
Mwalimu Mati, head of Mars, an anti-corruption group campaigning to call Kenyan leaders to account for past abuses, says that at independence in 1963, Kenya inherited what has been described as one of the most skewed patterns of land distribution in the world, comparable with countries such as South Africa, Zimbabwe and Brazil. "The struggle for independence and the Mau Mau rebellion were primarily a land grievance. The white settler population had a system of apartheid. We ended up with a situation where the best land was in the hands of a very small section of the population. The rest of the population was driven on to dry, rocky, waterless areas," he says.
Kenyans looked to the first post-colonial government under Kenyatta to put the situation right. But in the hard-fought negotiations for independence he bowed to British demands for white settlers to remain on their farms if they wanted and for land only to be transferred through a "willing buyer-willing seller arrangement", also the source of the present wrangle over land in Zimbabwe.
Some white people did remain but enough left that large tracts of land came up for redistribution. The Kikuyu, Kalenjin and Masai prepared to go home. But, says Mati, that wasn't Kenyatta's plan. "The root cause of our crisis is that the land did not get bought by the people who lost it but by the Kikuyu elite of the time. That was the situation in Central province where the Kikuyu came from. Kenyatta then settled the poor landless Kikuyu in the Rift Valley on land that had belonged to the Kalenjin," says Mati.
Mugo's father was among the poor Kikuyu resettled on Kalenjin land. He was a minor beneficiary. Others did much better. What evolved in the following years was little more than a land grab by Kenya's new elite, which used British land law and Indian colonial statutes introduced to Kenya as a mechanism to distribute land as political patronage while keeping a large slice of the pie for themselves.
The largest landowners in Kenya today are the families of the only three presidents the country has had since independence - the Kenyattas, the family of his successor, Daniel arap Moi, and the present president, Mwai Kibaki, who served in the Kenyatta and Moi administrations. A little further down the scale are a residual group of white settlers, senior politicians and businessmen with political connections.
The extended Kenyatta family alone owns an estimated 500,000 acres (2,000 sq km). That represents a large chunk of the 28m acres (113,000 sq km) of arable land in Kenya. The remaining 80% of the country is mostly semi-arid and arid land. The Kenya Land Alliance says more than half the arable land in the country is in the hands of only 20% of the population. Two-thirds of the people own, on average, less than an acre per person. There are 13% who own no land at all.
Three years ago the government launched the Ndungu commission to investigate the illegal distribution of publicly owned land. The commission found that Kenyatta and Moi both grossly abused their powers to grab public land and former white-owned farms, and parcelled it out "as political reward or patronage".
"As a result a large number of the genuinely landless ... remain locked in a cycle of poverty," the commission said in its report. The commission members included Lumumba, who says, "The land belonged to the government or was in trust for the people but the trustees, particularly the presidents, behaved as if they were estate owners. They handed out individual titles to parts of national parks and gave trust land as political favours."
After Moi came to power in 1978 the land grabs evolved away from the vast tracts of farmlands that had already been parcelled out to all kinds of other publicly owned land. State corporations such as the railways, airports authority and power company have been plundered of land at a cost of "colossal amounts of money" to the public.
"Under Moi you used to get people turning up at a piece of land and they'd both have titles issued by the same government, sometimes by the president," says Mati. "If Moi wanted to give someone $1m, he didn't give them cash. He gave them the title deed to land and they'd sell that using the government land registry. Moi gave lots of people land. That was his way of governing." Other high officials, such as successive commissioners of lands and private interests such as bankers, lawyers and architects, contributed to this "unbridled plunder".
The commission said: "In every corner of the country today, there is a significant number of squatters who trace their landlessness to historical injustices and the failure of the post-independence governments to undertake a comprehensive resettlement programme. Their status as squatters has also left them in grinding poverty and vulnerable to all manner of human rights violations, including incessant evictions. This historical failure has given rise to a deep seated sense of grievance."
This is not the first organised violence over land. Moi unleashed a form of terror and ethnic cleansing against the Kikuyu in the Rift Valley 15 years ago because it was Kikuyu politicians who were pressing hardest for the introduction of multi-party democracy. No one knows how many were killed, but it ran into the thousands. Moi repeated his assault ahead of the 1997 general election, targeting Kikuyu communities on the coast as well as in the Rift Valley. That helped unleash regular localised violence over land grievances separate from the immediate politics. For instance, a low-level insurgency in the Mount Elgon district has pitted rival clans against each other over land with 22 people killed in an assault on Kimama village on December 31 alone, and another 50 in the areas around in the following week. Many of them were hacked to death as they worked in their fields.
A group calling itself the Sabaot Land Defence Force has targeted specific communities in order to drive them off their land. Human rights groups say they have documented nearly 400 deaths during the violence in the area in the past six months. About 80,000 people, a third of the district's population, has been displaced. "The violence was going to happen so long as the original grievance was not addressed. It never has been," says Mati.
The Ndungu commission agreed. "Forty years of independence is a long time during which any historical injustices regarding land should have been resolved. The fact of the matter, however, is that there are certain deep-rooted injustices that still rankle whole communities in Kenya ... The politically ignited land clashes of the 1990s are a manifestation of deep-rooted grievances that cannot be glossed over in a reform process," it said.
Kibaki came to power in 2002 promising reform. Little has happened. Mati says the only way to address the issue is to break up the vast land holdings of the Kenyattas, Mois and others. "There is a massive youth population that doesn't have land and that is unlikely to get it the way things are. And yet land is ingrained to them as the key to life. We have to address this or live with the consequences," he says.
The upheaval of the past month has created the greatest ethnic migration since the end of British rule. "To say you are taking people to their ancestral homelands is ridiculous," says Lumumba. "It's like you are going back to the native reserves because what will they find when they get there? There is no room for them there. They will end up on the periphery of the urban areas trying to survive. It will be another time bomb," he says.
Charles Mugo says there is no future for him or any other Kikuyu in Nakuru, and it is best just to go. "There were good Kalenjin. Some of our neighbours tried to protect us but they were threatened and told that next time their houses would be burned. That is when I knew that we wouldn't come back. The good people have lost out to the bad. We can never feel safe here again," he says.

Kagame blasts African dictators

ROBERT MUKOMBOZI

KIGALI

President Paul Kagame has attacked what he called dictatorial leaders in Africa, saying they are to blame for much of the conflicts plaguing the continent.

"Rwanda has shared much of its problems in the past with most African states. People do not want to relinquish power peacefully until they are forced out after a spell of destructions and this has affected the development of the continent,"President Kagame said during the 14th heroes day celebrations held in the country's southern province on February 1.

Even countries that have had a relatively stable political and economic terrain for a number of years, there is little to learn from them.

"They have also ended up in flames. Today one country is in total chaos, then tomorrow another follows suit and the next day violence is reported in another African country.......and all these conflicts are fuelled by bad leadership," he said.

In this case, he says such countries that have fallen in that trap are experiencing even a more worrying situation-of not only anarchy but also a future of uncertainty.

This is the case he cited with most African countries now experiencing violent situations. Actually Mr Kagame run short of mentioning Kenya.But he said this is not the kind of trend Rwanda would want to see.

"I want to see Rwanda, where leaders act by example. Getting rich is not a sin because even God wants us rich but where the riches are obtained in a selfish manner, at the expense of the masses then there is a big problem," he said, adding that in such a situation the end result is likely to be violence as the oppressed population revolts in an effort to realise justice and equity.

African leaders must not wait for violence, they must learn to sense danger and step down, Mr Kagame said.

However, Kagame also failed to turn down a request by one of is cabinet ministers to stand for a second term.

During the well attended event Rwandan Sports and Culture minister Joseph Habineza outlined the achievements made by Kagame's leadership, and later announced that he is looking forward to 2010 when Mr. Kagame will run for another term.

But Kagame did not come out to give his position on the matter. Instead, he said: "I am grateful about the minister's (Habineza) announcements and observations".Meanwhile Fred Rwigyema was recognised among the top heroes for his contribution in stopping the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

Moderate majority must defeat ethnic hawks

The EastAfrican,

By KARIM ANJARWALLA

Kenya is being held captive by two groups of people. Those whose primary objective was to rig the presidential elections — call them the ethnic riggers — and those who inflame ethnic hatred and cause death, destruction and displacement — call them the ethnic warriors.

The ethnic riggers do not believe that the Kenyan people have a right to freely and fairly elect their own leaders. They believe that the Kenyan people are inherently too stupid to do so. Crucially, they also believe that their own interests may not be best served by the results of a free and fair election.

Ethnic riggers were to be found on both sides of the political divide. However, the ethnic riggers who favoured President Mwai Kibaki were obviously more successful and creative than the ethnic riggers who favoured Raila Odinga.

The ethnic warriors on the other hand believe that killing and maiming people and destroying Kenyans’ property because these Kenyans belong to the “other tribe” is a valid method of enhancing their negotiating position in the current political dispute.

The ethnic riggers and the ethnic warriors and their accomplices hold our futures to ransom. They use the language of war. They seek to exploit ethnic fault lines. In doing so, they seek to radicalise the moderate majority of Kenyans. Their vision of Kenya is blinded by gross ethnic prejudice. Kenya, to them, is nothing more than a conglomeration of tribes inherently opposed to each other.

The concept of being “Kenyan” is alien to them, because their sense of Kenya is linked to geographical boundaries and nothing more. So, ruling Kenya is a ticket for tribal domination. Indeed, for them a Kenya without the other “tribes” would be a much improved Kenya.

It is this malign vision of Kenya that threatens our stable and democratic existence and derails our economic advancement. Consider this lunacy. The ethnic riggers justify their action on a number of spurious grounds including that, had the party backed by the ethnic warriors won the presidential election, the ethnic riggers’ tribe would have been subjected to the death and destruction that has in fact been unleashed.

The ethnic warriors counter this by the argument that they knew the election was to be rigged so their campaign of terror was their only method of responding to premeditated electoral fraud.
So, one lunacy feeds another and before we know it, Kenya is drawn into a cycle of bloodshed. But let this much be clear — the violence visited by Kenyan upon Kenyan following the presidential election is but a mere foretaste of our propensity and capacity for unspeakable crimes against humanity.

If we do not reject the politics of the riggers and the warriors, if we do not embrace democracy — which, with all its faults, is surely the system of governance with the least faults — and if we do not deal with the long-standing and underlying ethnic tensions that divide Kenya, Kenyans will pay a high price.

BUT LET US RETURN TO THE IMMEDIATE cause of our current predicament. To suggest that the recent presidential elections were anything but deeply flawed would be akin to suggesting that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. There is now a virtual consensus amongst observers, international and local, and other disinterested parties that the elections were a travesty.

All circumstantial evidence also points to the fact that the will of the Kenyan people was not reflected in the result of the election. This is not necessarily to say that President Kibaki was in fact the loser and Raila Odinga the winner, although it may be that this was in fact the outcome. Who should have won is not, in fact, the point. The real issue is that far too many Kenyans do not consider the result credible.

We are told by those on the government benches that there is a method of dealing with electoral disputes. We are told that Raila Odinga should launch an election petition and hope that the judiciary delivers justice. Of course, this may be theoretically correct. However, this riposte is nothing more than a partisan and self-serving rejoinder to a serious national crisis that calls for much more than political jousts.

OUR COURTS DO NOT COMMAND OUR RESPECT, nor should they. Our courts are not the US Supreme Court, which, whether you agree with some of its rulings or not over the years, carries immense institutional credibility. Both before and after the first Kibaki administration’s “radical surgery,” our courts have been bedevilled by corruption, ineptitude and delay. Any result they deliver will lack legitimacy and it is legitimacy that any president must have if he is to be recognised as the duly elected president of Kenya.

It is inconceivable that a Kenyan court would unseat a sitting president. The record of the Kenyan courts in taking on the executive is notable only for its failings. So the government knows that in suggesting that the ODM resort to court, they are virtually guaranteeing a victory for President Kibaki with a threadbare cloak of judicial legitimacy. But how much further will such a judicial victory take us? Will an election petition assist the process of healing and reconciliation? Hardly. Yet if our politicians really do care about Kenya, this should be their focus.

So, while our politicians are quick to criticise interfering “foreigners” (especially the British), it is notable that they clone the “winner-take-all” Westminster type political system, entirely unsuitable for Kenya’s needs.

As our politicians posture and beat the drum, the country bleeds. As Kenyans waited expectantly for the arrival of President John Kufuor as a “mediator,” we were told that he was in fact flying all the way from Ghana for a “cup of tea.” Apart from being deeply insulting to President Kufuor who I am sure is perfectly happy with the tea he drinks in Ghana, it made Kenyans wonder whether the very real problems we face were in fact being taken seriously.

Consider also the statement that the leading African statesmen who visited Kenya — former president Joachim Chissano and Benjamin Mkapa and Kenneth Kaunda — had not been “invited,” suggesting of course that they were not really welcome at all.

This flippancy only exacerbates the problem, it sharpens ethnic fault lines, it radicalises the moderate majority on all sides of the argument. But of course, that is what the hawks, the ethnic riggers and the ethnic warriors want. They want us to give up on rational argument.

Kenyans must reject this and recapture the common ground. But what should the common ground be?

(i) That the presidential election results were deeply flawed;

(ii) That too many Kenyans feel disenfranchised as a consequence;

(iii) That Kenya is afflicted by deepseated ethnic tensions linked principally to poverty and a sense of marginalisation, which must be dealt with;

(iv) That the post-election feelings of disenfranchisement can only worsen the ethnic tensions;

(v) That the post-election violence is abhorrent and must be stopped;

(vi) That the ethnic warriors and the ethnic riggers must be brought to justice;

(vii) That every step must be taken to return those displaced to their homes, to help them rebuild their lives and compensate them for their loss of property;

(viii) That a government be constituted that is broad based and inclusive;

(ix) That steps be taken to restore legitimacy to the position of the president in the eyes of the majority of Kenyans, whether through new elections after an agreed period of time or through a new and different constitutional dispensation. In any event, if a new election is to be called, President Kibaki, if he so wishes, should be allowed to run again and the constitution be amended on a one-off basis to permit this.

SEEKING AN END TO THE CURRENT VIOlence, while laudable and necessary, is not an end in itself. An absence of war is not equivalent to the establishment of peace. For Kenya to be at peace with itself, justice and inclusiveness must be the cornerstones of our national regeneration.

But are our politicians capable of sensible dialogue on matters of such grave importance? Their performance to date, their apparent lust for power, their resort to ethnicity, would suggest that they are not.

Sadly, it appears that our political ranks are not populated by the likes of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Ahmed Kathrada and the other great South African freedom fighters, who were capable of rising above themselves, who recognised a defining moment and who discarded recrimination, ethnicity and racial prejudice. Had they not done so, how different the future of South Africa would have been.

Look at how different the Kenya of January, 2008 is from the Kenya of December, 2007. So, how then do we move the debate to the common ground and fashion a government that represents the moderate majority?

FIRSTLY, ALL KENYANS, IRRESPECTIVE of who they voted for, should embrace the common ground and reject ethnic stereotypes. In our clubs, our churches, our mosques, our temples, we must firmly but peacefully organise ourselves to demand the recognition of the common ground. We must insist that the sabre-rattling and posturing and partisan politicking stop. In short, we must ensure that the moderate majority is heard.

Second, we must embrace and invite leaders, particularly African leaders, of international standing who are ready and willing to help us, to do so and insist that our leaders also welcome them and allow them to assist in the delicate political negotiations that must take place.

We must be less arrogant, not shy to ask for help, to learn from the experience of others and to seek counsel. It does not diminish us as a people, insult our intelligence or belittle our institutions. Most importantly and this will be most difficult of all, we must begin to create the nation state called Kenya from the tribal conglomeration that currently goes by that name. This will be no easy task and will take many years, since we will need to confront many of our own demons and ditch many of our “hard-wired” prejudices, but in this will be our salvation as a nation and our development as a people.

Karim S. Anjarwalla is a lawyer practising in Nairobi

Kenya can avoid years of civil strife by sharing power

The EastAfrican,

By MARTIN MBUGUA KIMANI martinkimani@gmail.com

Special Correspondent

There is no great mystery about what the future has in store for Kenya.

Other nations, too, have trodden the path of contested electoral outcomes, the formation of winner-takes-all governments, mass protests, mass violence, civil war and their breaking and shattering before they are put back together laboriously.

Still others have shied away from the abyss after an initial period of bloodletting similar to the one that has been experienced in Kenya during the past three weeks. They have been blessed with wise statesmanship and have embraced reforms that enable power sharing, empower their citizens to emerge from poverty and embrace a politics that promotes cohesion as opposed to discord.

Kenya’s choices are simple: life or death, penury or prosperity, a cohesive, well-governed nation that counts its diversity as strength or a suspicious, hateful one governed by the cynical and awash in the blood of its young. The leaders too must now decide whether they will be remembered as the men and women who destroyed a nation or as those who rescued it and set it on a glorious path that will be remembered for generations.

Raila Odinga has a right to call for peaceful mass protests. If that right keeps being denied, we cannot continue to consider our country a democracy. But the opposition should not assume that it has enough of a national mandate to force the government out through extra-constitutional measures or to try and use violence by its alleged supporters as a stratagem to force the government’s hand.

Unfortunately, Raila Odinga, who promised the country transformative leadership, must begin leading before he occupies State House. President Kibaki can choose to govern a country that is unravelling or bring about reconciliation by pushing for genuine power-sharing measures that will allow for the gains of Vision 2030 to be his permanent legacy. Other countries have been at a similar crossroads.

In December 1980, Uganda held its first presidential elections. Milton Obote was declared the winner of a poll that international observers monitored and declared to be far from free or fair. A losing aspirant by the name Yoweri Museveni, refusing to accept the decision, led 27 men into the bush to wage a bloody six-year guerrilla war that brought him to power, where he remains more than two decades later.

The government of Milton Obote, on its way to defeat, killed over 300,000 Ugandans. Kenya looked on, refugees crossed its borders, and many Kenyan children were taught by Ugandan teachers on the run from a country that had become the bone over which men of outstanding viciousness and cynicism fought.

Lesson to Kenya: Beware those thwarted by the ballot and refused the right to organise peacefully, come to believe that the only course of action open to them is the bullet. This may not be decided by the opposition of the day but perhaps by one of the millions of now-unknown Kenyans who feel left out of the process of governing. Perhaps we should learn also that power-sharing is national survival and not merely a procedural choice.

For three decades after independence, Ivory Coast was the Kenya of West Africa. It was ruled over by the authoritarian Felix Houphouet-Boigny, but nevertheless distinguished itself for generally harmonious relations between its ethnic and religious groups, and its strong economy.

In the mid-1990s, this island of calm turned away from cohesion and openness to destructive difference, as Henri Conan Bedie, Houphouet-Boigny’s successor, turned to a policy known as Ivoirité to maintain his tenuous grip on political power.

Ivoirité initially referred to the country’s common cultural identity, but in the cut and thrust of politics came to exclude many northerners whose origins were in neighbouring countries but who had acquired citizenship. What followed was a period of coups, cancelled elections, rigged Supreme Court decisions, bloody riots in Abidjan targeting “foreigners” and a decisive turn toward the politics of difference.

This unfortunate period culminated in a mutiny in 2002 carried out by soldiers of northern origin. It escalated into a full-scale civil war whose main bone of contention was how the definition of a citizen affected who could hope to govern the country.

The fighting lasted five years and cost many lives as well as bringing that formerly vibrant economy to its knees. The northerners’ exclusion from government led them to lose hope in politics as an arena that they could usefully participate in; they concluded that the best course for them was to attempt to topple the system that had judged them ineligible.

Last year, the conflict appeared at an end when President Laurent Gbagbo signed a power-sharing agreement with Guillaume Soro, the rebel commander.

Lesson to Kenya: Power sharing will be the way of governing whether we wait to fight a civil war to realise that point or enact it immediately and render it as law in a new constitution. Neither Gbagbo nor Soro or any of the other leaders in Ivory Coast had the support of the majority — just like the situation in Kenya today — which ultimately meant that they did not have the mandate to force their version of government on the entire nation.

A further lesson is that discrimination, whether in the form of Ivoirité or in the Kenyan version of cobbling together alliances to exclude one tribe or the other from the table of government very rarely delivers a lasting political victory. It should also be noted that armies and police forces reflect the feelings and identities of their fellow citizens. To promote the politics of difference risks ultimately splitting the security forces, with disastrous consequences that are visible throughout the continent.

South Africa, even as it came out of decades of the brutal apartheid system, had the benefit of having leaders of vision and courage. Rather than push for a “winner-takes-all” system, Nelson Mandela and the ANC, which could have secured the two-thirds parliamentary majority to force any constitutional changes it wished, instead chose to form a government of national unity. This government included the Nationalist Party that had championed apartheid and the mostly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party whose supporters had fought a brutal low-intensity war against the ANC’s supporters in Kwazulu-Natal.

That Mandela and his colleagues could share power with those who had detained them and brutalised millions of their fellow countrymen is a testament to their profound understanding that the path of governing alone would lead them to further misery rather than a healing democracy.

Today, South Africa remains mired in the legacy of apartheid but there are few in that country who believe as they did in the mid-1990s that the country will come apart at the seams and degenerate into a widespread civil war between its internal nations.

Surely, if Nelson Mandela could share power with the Nationalist Party, then it is not too much to expect President Kibaki and Raila Odinga to do the same. It is not their individual ambitions that should now concern Kenyans. Rather, citizens must now push to overhaul the brutal machine inherited from the colonialists, designed as it is to maintain the power and privilege of the few by turning us against each other.

It is up to Raila Odinga to show Kenyans that he will not stand by as Kenya disintegrates, that the love of country that distinguished his years of struggling for democracy and enduring detention and torture will rise to the fore. He must allay fears, however unfounded, that many in the Mt Kenya region have of him as a leader, and he must castigate violence with feeling and conviction.

For the rest of us Kenyans, we must rally to a Citizen’s Agenda that rejects leaders who do not bring about a closure to the election either by a re-tallying or a re-election after an appropriate length of time. We must agitate for a government of national unity to deliver us a new constitution that improves mechanisms for the transfer of power, enables the equitable regional distribution of state resources and trims the powers of the executive.

We must demand the restoration of the lives of the displaced, and their rehabilitation and reconstruction. We must act on past injustices in the allocation and ownership of land while acknowledging that not to deal with these matters will forever threaten our peace.

Finally and most importantly, Kenyans must teach politicians that they are leaders to serve and not be served, and that we shall reject them should they appear to take positions that bring our country to ruin.

Kenya can avoid years of civil strife by sharing power

Imperial presidency will eventually tear Kenya apart

The EastAfrican,

By TIM MURITHI Special Correspondent

Through an unexpected confluence of events, Kenyans currently find themselves faced with a political conundrum. The spectacular abdication of responsibility by the chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK), Samuel Kiviutu, has perpetuated a general sense of confusion, anxiety, anger, hatred and ultimately violence.

The fact that Mr Kivuitu has cast doubt on the final tally of the Kenyan presidential vote, held on 27 December 2007, means that the country is no longer faced with a situation that can be resolved through adjudication and arbitration by national judicial institutions, since they tend to favour the status quo. The situation now demands a process of political dialogue that should be conducted through negotiations, including at the very minimum, the Party of National Unity, the Orange Democratic Movement , and the Orange Democratic Movement-Kenya.

These negotiations should be assisted by Pan-African and international mediation in the form of African Union and the United Nations. The recent intervention by Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a welcome step in the right direction. On January 4, 2008, Tutu indicated that the incumbent and self-declared President Mwai Kibaki of the Party of national Unity (PNU) would be prepared to explore the establishment of a coalition government.

One element that manifests the desire of the majority of Kenyans to transcend the current impasse is the widespread call for peace by Kenyan citizens in civil society, private enterprise, ecumenical groups and professional associations.

Ultimately, the responsibility for the current situation in the country falls squarely on the shoulders of Kenyans, who are after all engaged in violent confrontation with their compatriots. The responsibility for resolving the current situation also rests squarely on the shoulders of Kenyans.

The tragedy of Kenya’s situation is that the seeds of dissension that are manifesting today as the sprouting of violence were sown in the very fabric of the post-colonial nation-state, when the country inherited its current constitution, system of government and its electoral system from the former British colonial administration. Successive Kenyan leaders did not appreciate the necessity or did not see the long-term political expediency of changing and transforming the way in which political power is centralised in what is in effect an imperial and exceptionally powerful presidency. As a consequence, the stakes in terms of controlling the presidency are inappropriately high.

Since independence in 1963, three of Kenya’s post-colonial presidents have come from only two ethnic groups, the Kikuyu and Kalenjin. It therefore goes without saying that the remaining 40 ethnic groups, out of Kenya’s total of 42 ethnic groups, have a just basis upon which to feel indignant and impatient to take over the mantel of presidential power.

The fundamental problem with the system of government and elections in Kenya is that even though a minority of ethnic groups succeed in capturing state power it will not alter the essential sense of exclusion that other groups will undoubtedly feel. In his book The Wretched of the Earth published in 1961 the Pan-Africanist thinker Frantz Fanon warned that the post-colonial African states that were created held within their design all the seeds of a divisive and ultimately violent future for African people and societies.

Fanon was observing the process of decolonisation as it unfolded in the early 1960s and noted that the political parties which had taken over control from the colonial powers were in fact strongholds for ethnic group power. Fanon observed that the typical political party “which of its own will proclaim that it is a national party, and which claims to speak in the name of the totality of the people, secretly, sometimes even openly organises an authentic ethnical dictatorship.”

He argued that after such political parties captured state power, they would seek to maintain and extend their power and dominion over other groups within states, or enter into alliances with a few select ethnic groups to consolidate their position. Fanon goes on to note that “this tribalising of the central authority, it is certain, encourages regionalist ideas and separatism. All the decentralising tendencies spring up again and triumph, and the nation falls to pieces, broken in bits.”

Historically, the process of decolonisation left behind an arbitrary logic of statehood which has sown the seeds of the current instability and “ungovernability” of several African states. Most of the existing boundaries were drawn by colonial administrations without regard for, or knowledge of, pre-existing indigenous or cultural social political groupings.

This arbitrary division of community created and continues to sustain the potential for tension.

It also contributes toward the cycles of violence which plague a number of African countries.

The degree of ethnic animosity in Kenya has been fuelled by years of misrule, economic mismanagement and corruption. Effectively, the politics of polarisation in Kenya today have become manifest through the tragic confluence of this legacy, the deep seated sense of being aggrieved politically among some ethnic groups, a restless and anxious populace and the failure by the ECK to fulfil effectively its mandate.

In terms of the way forward, it is self-evident that political negotiations between Kenyan political parties is a vital first step. These parties need to commit themselves to preventing the further escalation of violent conflict and outlining a roadmap for restoring stability to the country. This process would be more effective through international mediation because domestic actors will not be seen as impartial.

Some have suggested that an independent audit of the presidential votes may resolve the situation. However, this will only partially address the core issue of how to govern the country in a way that does not perpetuate the dominance of one ethnic group or groups. In the immediate short-term, a governing framework that promotes power-sharing would begin to address this core issue.

Even if elections were held again in the next few months, the fundamental problem of how the country is governed will not be addressed. In the medium to long-term, a fundamental restructuring of the configuration and distribution of state power in Kenya is absolutely vital for its continued survival. The imperial presidency has to be gradually dismantled and replaced with a system of devolved power to eliminate the vicious cycle of competitive “winner-takes-all” politics which is threatening to tear Kenya apart.

Dr Tim Murithi, is a senior analyst with the Institute for Security Studies and author of The African Union: Pan-Africanism, Peacebuilding and Development