Daily Archives: March 8, 2013

Kenya

Uhuru Kenyatta is the next president of Kenya

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With all constituencies now in, Uhuru Kenyatta has been elected the fourth president of Kenya with 50.03% of the vote, triumphing over prime minister Raila Odinga, who won 43.28%, avoiding an April runoff by just 4,099 votes.

Kenyatta is the son of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, and is the candidate of the Jubilee coalition, an alliance of parties featuring mostly Kenyans of Kenyatta’s own Kikuyu ethnic group and the Kalenjin ethnic group of his running mate, William Ruto, who will now become vice president.  Kenyatta ran for president — and lost by a wide margin — in 2002 to the outgoing president, Mwai Kibaki.  He served briefly in the current government as finance minister from 2009 to 2012.

Odinga, the son of Kenya’s first vice president, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, was the runner-up in the 2007 presidential election that was widely believed to have been fraudulent.  Following the post-election tumult, Odinga was appointed prime minister in 2008 in a power-sharing agreement with Kibaki.  He was the candidate of the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) alliance, comprise of Odinga’s Luo ethnic group and other ethnic groups.

What comes next?

The International Elections and Boundaries Commission is set to meet early Saturday morning, Nairobi time, to audit the results and announce an official winner.

First off, provided that this count stands (and it’s the final count, not the provisional count, so it should, pending a court challenge from Odinga), Kenyatta needs to strike a tone of unity to avoid any chance of a repeat of the violence that followed the previous election.  There’s not much of a hint that violence will erupt, but 50.03% is an incredibly narrow margin, Odinga’s Luo ethnic group will be unhappy to have been shut out once again from power, and it’s clear that Kenya remains very much split on ethnic lines in terms of governance.  Nonetheless, there are a lot of reasons why, this time around, Kenya is unlikely to repeat anything like what happened in 2007-08.

Secondly, it appears that Kenya will avoid anything similar to the power-sharing of the last five years, with the Jubilee coalition set to take control of both houses of Kenya’s parliament.  Under a new constitution adopted in 2010, Kenya will have for the first time a bicameral parliament, with both a National Assembly and a Senate, each of which has allotted a set number of seats particularly for women.

Thirdly, there’s the matter of an indictment of each of Kenyatta and Ruto for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court and the awkward position of Kenya’s head of state accused of atrocities pending trial in The Hague.  Governments in Europe and the United States will need to find a way to work with Kenyetta, though, because Kenya, with 40 million people, and a relatively stable nation, is a key regional partner for all sorts of strategic, humanitarian and economic purposes.  The next hearing for Kenyatta, however, was postponed until June, and given the relative weakness of the case, there’s a chance prosecutors may simply drop the case altogether.

Finally, of course, there’s the matter of governing Kenya — Kenya faces sluggish growth and high unemployment, especially among its explosively robust young population, and that will (or should) certainly be at the top of Kenyatta’s governing agenda.  Corruption should come a close second, and the joke is that Kenyatta, thought to be the richest man in Kenya, is so wealthy that he’s particularly immune to corruption.

Kenyatta will also oversee the continuation of reforms that began under Kenya’s new 2010 constitution, including the coordination of the Independent Land Commission and its recommendations for sorting out the mess of land ownership in Kenya and determining the best economic use for land with no titles — or too many titles.  He will also sort out the minor issues that arise from devolution — under the 2010 constitution, Monday’s elections also saw each of Kenya’s newly drawn 47 counties elect their own governors and county-wide assemblies.

Denmark, Greenland

Greenland’s election a case study in climate change, sovereignty, China, the EU and the Arctic’s future

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It’s home to just 57,000 people, but when Greenland’s voters go to the polls on March 12, they will be choosing a path that could have global implications — for the European Union, the United States and China, and the future of the Arctic as an economically viable region, with climate change opening the far north to further development.greenland flagdenmark flag

The world’s largest island, Greenland is an ‘autonomous country’ within the Kingdom of Denmark, and the Danish have essentially ruled Greenland for centuries.

But that, like many things these days in Greenland, may be changing.

A strategic Arctic holding in a longtime Cold War ally

Denmark’s northern holdings — Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands — were key strategic locations during both World War I and World War II, giving them an outsized importance to the Allied powers in those wars.  During World War II, U.S. and Allied forces used Keflavik airfield outside Reykjavík, in particular, as an important stop between North America and Europe.  Germans attempted to occupy Greenland during World War II after occupying Denmark, but U.S. and Canadian forces protected the island from a full occupation, largely to protect its strategic power to the United States and Greenland’s valuable deposits of cryolite, an aluminum ore that was crucial to the Allied war effort — a hint of the battle shaping up today over Greenland’s mineral wealth.

Although Iceland gained its independence from Denmark in 1944, Greenland’s status as a Danish possession endured.

As the Cold War began, the U.S. continued to look to Greenland as an incredibly strategic holding — it allegedly offered Denmark $100 million to buy it in 1946 for its strategic use as an early warning station for any potential Soviet missile attacks on the U.S. mainland.

Denmark demurred, and as the Cold War wound down, relented in giving Greenland home rule in 1979 — Greenland’s capital, Godthåb, was renamed Nuuk, and it would now have its own parliament.  Following a widely successful 2008 referendum, Greenland obtained further self-rule capabilities in 2009 — its parliament is now responsible for all but the most high-level foreign policy and defense decisions, and Danish is no longer an official language.  Greenland controls its own security, judiciary, and it’s essentially up to Greenlanders to determine the future of its potential mineral wealth.

As a Danish province, Greenland became a member of what was then the European Economic Community in 1973, but following home rule, Greenland became the first — and so far, only — member to leave the EEC or its predecessor, the European Union in 1985.

Membership was never popular in Greenland, where fishing has traditionally been an incredibly important industry, so Greenlanders have never been enthusiastic about opening up its waters to European-wide competition and, potentially worse, overfishing Greenlandic waters.  Iceland remains a EU holdout for many of the same reasons — despite talks for Icelandic accession to the EU, concessions for fishing rights would likely be a key precondition to any eventual Icelandic membership.

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A geopolitical tussle over the promise of Greenlandic mineral wealth

The longtime suspicion of EU exploitation of Greenland’s economy is at the heart of the most recent war of words between Nuuk and Brussels — in advance of elections, Greenland’s prime minister Kuupik Kleist (pictured above) this week sent a warning to the European Commission that Greenland is looking not just to Europe, but to China as well, in the bid to open up the Arctic north’s mineral riches.

Kleist, one of Greenland’s most renowned musician, leads the Inuit Ataqatigiit (‘Community of the People’), a socialist and stridently pro-independence party that won election in 2009 after 30 years in opposition — just in time, perhaps ironically, to oversee the most rapid market-based transformation of Greenland in its history.

With the advent of global warming (here’s a clip of Kleist explaining climate change’s effect on his country), Greenland’s transforming into a more hospitable place — more moderate climates and melting ice means that it’s never been easier for mining companies to explore and extract the minerals buried deep under Greenland — government permits for exploration have skyrocketed from about 10 a decade ago to 150 today. Continue reading Greenland’s election a case study in climate change, sovereignty, China, the EU and the Arctic’s future →

Venezuela

World leaders descend upon Chávez funeral: one photo, but mil palabras

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What’s always been so interesting about chavismo is the way that the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez managed to build alliances both with just about every leader in Latin America, no matter how radical or moderate, while also building close alliances with a ‘who’s who’ of world rogue leaders on poor terms with the United States of America.Venezuela Flag Icon

It makes for an interesting set of photos from Chávez’s funeral — the photo above comes from the Facebook feed of Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of México, a country that’s had relatively little use for Venezuela over the past 14 years — former president Felipe Calderón used Chávez as a boogeyman in the 2006 Mexican presidential election to warn voters against the one-time leftist frontrunner, former Mexican City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and that may have made the difference in that election.

Chávez died Tuesday in Caracas after a long fight with cancer, suddenly bringing to life Venezuelan politics that had largely been frozen in waiting on Chávez’s health since his 11-point reelection in October 2012.

Peña Nieto was expected to move Mexican relations closer to Venezuela than under the more right-wing Calderón, but Peña Nieto and Chávez were hardly best friends.  That relationship was part and parcel of the diverse set of relationships that Chávez had with the rest of Latin America — sometimes ally, sometimes foil, sometimes donor and often, all three simultaneously.  Those relationships, all of which are on display this week in Caracas, give us a rough sense of whether chavismo — and the broader form of the populist, socialist left that has been on the rise in Latin America (though not necessarily in its largest, most economically successful, countries like México and Brazil) — will live beyond Chávez.

Peña Nieto is in the fourth row, standing between businessman Ricardo Martinelli, Panama’s conservative president to his left and Peruvian president Ollanta Humala to his right.  Humala, who won a very close election in 2011 in Perú, was feared as a potential chavista radical leftist, anathema to Peru’s business elite, despite renouncing a chavista-style government in Perú.  In fact, Humala has turned out to govern as a business-friendly moderate, garnering relatively more criticism from environmentalists and social activists on the left since his election.

There in the front row, you can see Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Cuba’s president Raúl Castro (who has the distinction of belonging to both the ‘rogue state’ and ‘Latin American’ groups), the new ‘acting’ first lady of Venezuela Cilia Flores, and her husband, acting president Nicolás Maduro. Continue reading World leaders descend upon Chávez funeral: one photo, but mil palabras →