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Kenya

What we know so far about the Kenyan election results

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It’s been over 24 hours since polls closed in Kenya’s general election, and vote counting has progressed very slowly — at this point, with midnight approaching in Nairobi, the chief elections commission has announced that because of counting delays, a preliminary announcement will not be made until tomorrow. kenya

What do we know so far?

We don’t know who will be the next president of Kenya, unfortunately, because we don’t have enough results yet — just 13,559 districts out of 31,982 have been counted, and that’s just under 42% of all districts, according to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.

Uhuru Kenyatta, former finance minister and the candidate of the Kikuyu-strong Jubilee alliance, currently leads the provisional result with 53%, with prime minister Raila Odinga, the runner-up of the controversial 2007 presidential election and the candidate of the Luo-strong Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) alliance winning 42%.  The margin for Kenyatta has gone done significantly over the past few hours, though, and there’s a general understanding that the results do not include as many of Odinga’s strongholds in the west and along the coast.

Musalia Mudavadi, deputy prime minister and the candidate of the candidate of the Amani coalition, which includes many supporters from the Luhya people and the once-dominant Kenya African National Union (KANU), was far behind in third place with just 3%.

One troubling issue is the high number of rejected votes — running at 330,000, that’s more than half the votes that Mudavadi is currently winning and about 7% of the vote.  That could mean up to half a million voters or more when the final results are in — perhaps even the margin of victory — will be rejected.  As a winning presidential candidate must take a 50% absolute majority, that means that Kenyatta or Odinga will need to win closer to 53% of the non-rejected ballots in order to avoid a runoff.

CORD leaders, such as vice presidential candidate Kalonzo Musyoka, cautioned that the results are incomplete and that Kenyatta’s lead is not a reliable gauge of where the race stands:

“It is important that we await the outcome of the remaining two thirds of the polling stations in order to make any conclusion about the results of this election,” Kalonzo said.

While urging for calm, the VP said in any case, results from Cord strongholds were yet to trickle in adding that results from their stronghold stood at about 10 percent while those of Jubilee were average of 40 percent.

Kalonzo taunted the Jubilee rivals for what he termed as premature celebrations while exuding confidence that their coalition will pull a comeback and stage their rivals lead once results from their strongholds are recorded.

Peter Kenneth, who was leading the Eagle coalition, has conceded defeat having received just 1% of the vote, but cautioned that the independent numbers being reports do not currently match what the IEBC is reporting:

Kenneth urged the electoral body to clear presidential results saying results they were getting from their field agents were different from what IEBC has.

“The country cannot get out of anxiety mood we are heading to.  We are getting real time results that differ with IEBC”, said Kenneth.

Due to the fact that there are high regional differences, however, it seems likely that the IEBC’s numbers will ultimately tighten, which would be consistent with pre-election polls and any divergent alternative tallies.

Currently, Odinga leads in 26 counties and Kenyatta leads in 21 counties. (I don’t know what that means for parliamentary results, necessarily, even though results for both the National Assembly and the newly formed Senate are coming in as well).

What else do the results tell us?

Continue reading What we know so far about the Kenyan election results →

Kenya

In Depth: Kenya

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nairobi concert

Kenya — a country of 41 million people in east Africa  — widely seen as a relatively stable hub for international actors in the east African region will go to the polls on March 4, 2013, to select a new president and the members of Kenya’s newly redesigned parliament.

The most high-profile race is the one to replace Kenya’s third president since independence, Mwai Kibaki, who is stepping down after his election in 2002 and his controversial reelection in 2007, widely seen as a fraudulent victory and a catalyst for political violence that lasted for two months following the 2007 election.

The two leading candidates are Uhuru Kenyatta, a former finance minister and the son of Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s first president, and Raila Odinga, the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first prime minister. Odinga (the son) narrowly lost — officially, at least — the 2007 election to Kibaki, and since a 2008 power-sharing deal with Kibaki, has served as prime minister.

Kenyatta leads an alliance of parties known as the Jubilee alliance, which is dominated by members of Kenyatta’s own Kikuyu ethnic group, the largest in Kenya (17%) and the Kalenjin people.  Odinga leads the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) alliance, comprised in turn of Odinga’s own Luo people, as well as the Kamba people.

The key issues in the race have involved corruption, Kenya’s somewhat lackluster economic growth and unemployment, the indictment of Kenyatta (and his running mate, William Ruto) for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court springing from the 2007-08 political violence, the ongoing devolution of power from the central government to Kenya’s eight provinces and 47 counties, and the progress of land reform resulting from the Independent Land Commission established by the 2010 constitution.

Six other candidates are contesting the race, although none of them receive more than single digits in polls.  They include:

  • Musalia Mudavadi, deputy prime minister, a former vice president, former running mate of Kenyatta in 2002 and a former running mate of Odinga in 2007, who is running as the candidate of the Amani coalition, which includes many supporters from the Luhya people and the once-dominant Kenya African National Union (KANU), and Mudavadi has the support of former president Daniel arap Moi, who served from 1978 to 2002.
  • Peter Kenneth, an MP who is running as the candidate of the Eagle Alliance, and is running on an explicitly national basis (i.e., not on the basis of a particular ethnic group).
  • Martha Karua, an anti-corruption MP and a former minister of justice.
  • Mohammed Abdula Dida, a high school teacher known mostly for his folksy one-liners in Kenya’s two presidential debates.
  • James ole Kiyiapi,  a former permanent secretary in the ministries of education and local government.
  • Paul Muite, a former MP.

Under new election rules resulting from a new constitution promulgated in 2010, a presidential candidate must win in excess of 50% of the vote and win 25% of the vote in at least 24 of Kenya’s 47 counties.  If neither condition is met, the two candidates will face off in a runoff to be held on April 11.

Kenya’s parliament is also gaining a house after the 2010 constitutional reforms — the formerly unicameral National Assembly will remain as the lower house, while the new Senate will become the parliament’s upper house.

The National Assembly, formerly consisting of 224 members, will now have 350 members, 290 of which are directly elected in single-member districts and 47 of which must be women (one in each Kenyan county).

Kenyans will elect members of the Senate for the first time ever on March 4 as well — it’s expected that there will be 68 senators, one elected in each of the 47 counties, with 16 additional special representatives for women, two representatives for youth and two representatives for persons with disabilities.

Currently, the largest bloc in the National Assembly is the Odinga-led Orange Democratic Movement (100 seats), followed by Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (43 seats), though because of the transient nature of many Kenyan political parties and movements, it’s uncertain whether pro-Kenyatta or pro-Odinga forces will actually win the new elections for the National Assembly and the Senate.

See below Suffragio‘s coverage of the Kenyan races:

Kenyan Supreme Court upholds Kenyatta victory
March 30, 2013

Uhuru Kenyatta is the next president of Kenya
March 8, 2013

Tense Thursday finds both Uhuru, Raila under 50% in Kenya election results
March 7, 2013

The latest on Kenya’s election results: IEBC targets Friday finale
March 6, 2013

What we know so far about the Kenyan election results
March 5, 2013

Could Kenya enter another period of power-sharing after its general election?
March 4, 2013

Mudavadi likely to become kingmaker in Kenya’s presidential runoff
March 3, 2013

Five reasons why Kenya is unlikely to repeat 2007’s post-election violence
March 1, 2013

Live-blogging the final Kenyan presidential debate
February 25, 2013

Making sense of Kenya’s ethnopolitical alliances
February 19, 2013

Kenyatta, Ruto cleared to run in Kenyan election despite ICC woes
February 18, 2013

Kenya

Five reasons why Kenya is unlikely to repeat 2007’s post-election violence

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peaceconcert

Everywhere you look, especially in the U.S. and European media, coverage of Monday’s Kenyan election is superseded by one central question.kenya

Will Kenya resort to the kind of ethnic-based political violence that occurred after the last election in 2007?

Of course, the presidential race is tight — the candidate of the ‘Jubilee’ alliance, Uhuru Kenyatta (the son of Kenya’s first president), is essentially tied with the candidate of the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) alliance, Raila Odinga (Kenya’s prime minister and the son of Kenya’s first vice president, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga).

Furthermore, the two major coalitions — Jubilee and CORD — are loose patchwork alliances of Kenyan ethnic groups, some of whom were allied in 2007 and some of whom were not, and they pit Kenyatta’s Kikuyu ethnic group against Odinga’s Luo ethnic group.

But it’s still unlikely that Kenya will repeat anything like the 2007-08 violence, which led to the deaths of over 1,000 Kenyans and displaced nearly 200,000 more after incumbent Mwai Kibaki was widely seen to have used vote-buying, vote-tampering and, ultimately, fraudulent vote counting, to retain the presidency against the challenge from Odinga.  Two months of harrowing fighting followed before Kibaki agreed to share power with Odinga, who subsequently became prime minister.

Kenya remains on alert, of course, but scenes like those pictured above — a peace concert last week in Nairobi designed to promote Kenyan unity throughout the campaign and its aftermath — tell us more about the narrative of this year’s Kenyan election.

There’s really no reason to believe that there’s a likelier chance of violence today than there was after the August 2010 constitutional referendum, which came and went without significant tumult.

So while the world (especially Western policymakers and media) holds its collective breath waiting for more turmoil, here are five reasons why it’s a smarter bet that Kenya won’t repeat its 2007-08 experience.  Continue reading Five reasons why Kenya is unlikely to repeat 2007’s post-election violence →

Kenya

Making sense of Kenya’s ethnopolitical alliances

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uhuru rally

To understand what’s going on in Kenya’s politics and to understand the nature of its upcoming March 4 presidential election, you have to understand that Kenyan politics are based on ethnic identity, not ideology.kenya

Due to the nature of Kenyan election rules, a presidential candidate has to build an electoral coalition larger than any single ethnic group in the country — a candidate must win not only a 50% majority of the votes, but 25% of the vote in at least 24 of Kenya’s 47 counties.

So it’s not enough for deputy prime minister and former finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta to win a plurality of the vote based largely on the support of his Kikuyu ethnic group, Kenya’s largest.  Nor would it be enough for Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga to win a plurality on the strength of his own Luo ethnic group.

That means the winning candidate will have to craft a coalition based on many different ethnic groups, and Kenyatta and Odinga have both named running mates of differing ethnic groups.  In light of the aftermath of the 2007 election, when incumbent Mwai Kibaki won narrow reelection against Odinga amid charges of rigging the vote count, political riots quickly descended into ethnic violence.  But the 2013 elections will also largely be determined on the basis of ethnicity-based coalitions, which only underscores the fear that Kenya could undergo another round of destabilizing political violence.

Identifying Kenya’s ethnic groups

In the broadest terms, Kenya’s ethnic groups can be divided into the Bantu and the Nilotic peoples.

The Bantu comprise by far the largest group of Kenyans, roughly two-thirds of Kenya’s 43 million people.  The Bantu ethnic groups derive from people who originally came to Kenya from western and central Africa 2,000 years ago during the so-called Bantu expansion.  The Bantu languages are derived from the Niger-Congo language family — you are likely to be most familiar with Swahili, a Bantu language that, along with English, is one of Kenya’s two official languages.

The Nilotic peoples are the second-largest group, comprising about one-third of Kenyans.  Unlike the Bantu, they originally came to Kenya from what is today South Sudan, and they are somewhat more rural than their Bantu counterparts.  They speak languages derived from the Nilo-Saharan language family, which includes the Dholuo language of Kenya, but also Nubian and other languages throughout Sudan and north-central Africa.

But that only explains so much about Kenya’s incredibly complex range of ethnic groups, which are divided even further on the basis of regional, linguistic and other cultural and historical criteria.  Notably, as the useful map below shows, much of Kenya’s population resides in the highlands that stretch from the Rift Valley and along the western border through the central heartland of Kenya.

kenyamap

Accordingly, there are five major ethnic groups and countless others that form a mosaic of politically mobilized chess pieces, any of which can come together to form a political and governing alliance.  Alliances are not based on Bantu / Nilotic lines, and from one election to the next, one ethnic group may support a candidate that it virulently opposed in the prior election, making Kenyan politics incredibly unique — and also difficult to understand.

As recently as 2005, Odinga and Kenyatta found themselves on the same side, politically, in opposition to a constitutional referendum

The five largest groups are as follows:

  • The Kikuyu, a Bantu group, comprise 17% of the population (according to the 2009 census) that, as the map shows, reside largely in the central highlands of Kenya around Mount Kenya north of Nairobi.
  • The Luhya, also a Bantu group, comprise 14% of the population and reside in the highlands of Western Province, along the Ugandan border just north of Lake Victoria.
  • The Kalenjin, a Nilotic group, comprise 13% of the population and reside in the Rift Valley highlands and are perhaps best known for producing some of the Kenya’s best runners, who routinely rank among the fastest in the world.
  • The Luo, a Nilotic group, comprise 10% of the population and reside in the highlands of Nyanza province, adjacent to Lake Victoria, bordering both Uganda and Tanzania — Barack Obama, Sr., the father of the current U.S. president, was from the Luo ethnic group.
  • The Kamba, another Bantu group, comprise 10% of the population and reside in the area east of Nairobi, where the highlands begin to level off into Kenya’s lowlands.

Continue reading Making sense of Kenya’s ethnopolitical alliances →