Global Courant
In late January 2018, Kenya’s veteran opposition leader Raila Odinga took the oath of office as the self-proclaimed “people’s president”, barely three months after boycotting a new election called after the courts’ annulment of the first poll in August.
His rival, Uhuru Kenyatta, the incumbent president, had been duly declared re-elected, and Odinga had threatened to hold a parallel inauguration ceremony for himself, then attempted to withdraw, before being forced to do so by the younger and more militant fringe of his coalition. But even then he could not bring himself to take the oath as prescribed in the constitution. He seemed to know the boundaries and didn’t want to go any further.
That event neatly illustrates one of the challenges facing Kenya today and why the current confrontation between Odinga and Kenyatta’s successor, his former deputy and BFF enemy William Ruto, is so deeply disturbing and frightening to many Kenyans.
Elite scrambles for power and extraction opportunities in Kenya have had a fairly predictable logic and pattern – you could say, as The Elephant’s Joe Kobuthi has writtenthat there have always been “unwritten rules of engagement that govern their game of thrones”.
Both politicians and ordinary Kenyans enduring their violent predation have an idea of where the red lines are that limit how far they can go. The elite who run Kenya through a series of crises, each sparked to gain a seat at the dinner table, needed such rules to keep the whole thing from imploding. It is these rules that have created what Charles Obbo describes in The EastAfrican as “the amorality – and even immorality – of (Kenyan) politicians (that) … has helped them avoid civil wars and the do-or-die politics that have ruined many an African country”.
Street protests, for example, have been an effective way for the opposition to demand reforms and their share of the spoils of recalcitrant regimes. It is a tactic designed not only to demonstrate public support for the opposition’s cause, but also to provoke the state into an exaggerated reaction that would inevitably position it as the enemy of constitutionalism and democracy. And it almost always works, with the state happy to continually assume its role as a purveyor of colonial terror in an effort to remind the natives of their place.
After periods of intense combat in which death, mutilation and destruction occur on a scale acceptable to the elite, the politicians strike a deal before it all spirals out of control. As Kobuthi points out, “internal squabbles (between elites), which have regularly led to occasional violence in the country, have been mediated by elite ‘handshakes’ – essentially boardroom deals”.
But in recent years, as the independence generation of politicians left the stage, their successors seemed increasingly unwilling to respect the rules of the game. And this is what is causing much of the fear surrounding the current protests and the state’s response. While it resembles the usual squabble between elites over power, it is in many ways a subversion of the game.
When the demonstrations were held in the aftermath of Ruto’s election last year, they were a reversal of the script. Rather than a means of reining in a rogue state, they were rightly viewed by many as an attempt by Odinga, yet again the losing presidential candidate, to ransom the country despite the fact that he had provided no credible evidence that the election had actually been stolen from him. The initially muted public response to his calls for demonstrations spoke to this, as did the fact that barely a year later, Odinga seems to have completely given up claims of manipulation and settled for more forceful complaints about Ruto’s stewardship of the economy and inability to tame rising prices. Still, his weaponization of street demos for purely selfish purposes is disturbing.
On the other hand, the state’s response to the protests also indicates a rule change. In the past, elites have preferred the bodies and property of ordinary Kenyans as a battlefield for settling their differences, and have largely avoided attacking each other personally. In July 2008, for example, a minister was caught during a heated debate camera he invited a rival MP to “bring his people” for an all-out battle to settle the issue, suggesting that his group had already massacred between 600 and 1,000.
In fact, protecting each other while killing and expelling each other’s followers has been a running theme in Kenya’s post-independence politics. Just as Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, protected the white settlers from the appropriation of their stolen farms, so his successor Daniel Moi protected the Kenyatta family’s corrupt assets. Then Mwai Kibaki, the third president, and Odinga protected Moi’s corrupt fortunes and Uhuru Kenyatta (Jomo’s son) protected Kibakis.
However, Ruto, who accuses his predecessor of financing the ongoing protests, seems less inclined to continue that tradition for now. In March, with the complicity of his government, gangs of youths raided and destroyed a Kenyatta family farm. On the same day, another group attacked the premises of an Odinga company. Last week, the former president had to come to the aid of his son after the police raided his home. Such personalization of political violence is not customary within the petty incestuous mafia for whom politics is not personal, it is just business.
In that context, Ruto’s violence against demonstrators takes on a new and more sinister hue. Elected on a populist platform to make Kenya work for the poorest, his government has initially shown remarkable restraint compared to previous regimes. Perhaps that was simply because the initial protests had little traction. But as they turned into a forum for expressing much broader feelings about the cost of living, it was predictable that there would be a crackdown. However, when it arrived, its brutality and brutality surprised many.
Spurred on by his own insane fringe, including his deputy, Rigathi Gachagua, and the likes of Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria, which even Americans seem to find too extreme, Ruto flooded the streets of the capital and other major cities with police, seemingly detached from all restraint. Opposition politicians have been kidnapped and held incommunicado, many have gone into hiding, demonstrators and bystanders have been shot and beaten, homes and children have been tear-gassed and hundreds, including opposition bloggers, have been arrested.
No one knows how far Ruto is willing to go, least of all perhaps himself and his band of thugs. There doesn’t seem to be much room or interest in a deal, either within the shaken opposition or within the chest-thumping regime. There are growing fears of a rebirth of Daniel Moi’s dictatorship, a possibility that many believed was fading as a real option despite the best efforts of his successors.
Odinga’s Azimio la Umoja coalition has called off this week’s protests, but Kenyans are still waiting to find out what the new red lines will be and what the new rules of the game are.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.
