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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.

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Kenya

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

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rutokenyatta

Friday’s ruling from the Kenyan High Court has — for now, at least, and through the duration of the presidential campaign, barring any last-minute intervention from Kenya’s supreme court — cleared the legal obstacles for Uhuru Kenyatta to run for president in the March 4 election.kenya

Kenyatta’s legal issues stem from Kenyatta’s indictment for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, on the basis of orchestrating ethnic violence following the previous presidential election in 2007 when over 1,000 Kenyans were killed during tumult that upturned hundreds of thousands more from their homes, pummeled the reputation Kenya’s political system and damaged its economy.

Kenyatta’s running mate, William Ruto (pictured above right, with Kenyatta at left), is one of five other Kenyan officials also charged for crimes against humanity, and the High Court’s ruling also clears him.  Kenyatta and Ruto were actually on opposite political sides in 2007, though they’ve now found common cause through, among other things, the pariah status that’s come from ICC indictment.

It’s more accurate, however, to say that the court refused to intervene — the basis of the case was whether Kenyatta and Ruto had demonstrated sufficient ‘personal integrity, competence and suitability’ for the presidency, as stated under Kenya’s constitution.  The court claimed it lacked the jurisdiction to disqualify the candidates, though it noted that the Supreme Court holds jurisdiction to make such a determination.

Kenyatta and Ruto head the Jubilee alliance, a merger of various parties, but really an alliance that binds together members from Kenyatta’s Kikuyu ethnic group (Kenya’s largest, comprising around 22% of the population) and Ruto’s Kalenjin ethnic group.

Kenyatta’s main opponent, Raila Odinga, heads the CORD (Coalition for Reforms and Democracy) alliance, which binds together Odinga’s Luo ethnic group and the Kamba ethnic group of Odinga’s running mate, Kalonzo Musyoka.

Kenyatta, currently a deputy prime minister since 2008 and minister of finance from 2008 to 2012 under Kenya’s outgoing, term-limited president Mwai Kibaki, is the son of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta.

Odinga, currently Kenya’s prime minister following the power-sharing agreement that resulted in the wake of the 2007 presidential election, is the son of Kenya’s first vice president, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, whose falling out with Jomo Kenyatta in the 1960s serves as prologue to much of this year’s presidential election.  In 2007, Odinga only narrowly lost the presidency to Kibaki, and he’s held a narrow lead throughout much of the 2013 campaign, though Kenyatta has waged a spirited campaign and was generally seen as the winner of Kenya’s first presidential debate on February 11.

Within Kenya, the ICC charges themselves matter little to voters — though Odinga is more to the left and Kenyatta is more to the right, Kenya’s election has been polarized into tribal ethnic lines, not on standard ideological lines.  So Kenyatta’s supporters could care less about international charges they believe are unfair, though Odinga has used the ICC charges to taunt Kenyatta, most recently during their presidential debate when Odinga scoffed that it would be impractical to run a government from the Hague using Skype.

Even Odinga, nonetheless, has called for the Kenyan courts to validate Kenyatta’s presidential candidacy, and he’s even called for any trials over the 2007-08 violence to be settled in Nairobi, not through the ICC.

In a sense, while the ICC charges themselves are a fringe issue, they are also at the heart of the campaign, given the ethnic tensions involved in the current campaign and the desire among all of Kenya’s leaders to avoid a devastating replay of the 2007 and 2008 political violence that followed the last election.

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