85 - How Today's Kenyan Election Speaks to American Tribalism
Kenya’s 22 million voters (in a population of 53 million people) are queuing today to cast presidential ballots for William Rutu, 55, the incumbent deputy-president, or for Raila Odinga, a 77 year old former prime minister who has sought the presidency four previous times.
The election is important for Kenya, of course, one of Africa’s more vibrant and internet savvy economies, and for Africa as a whole. But, as identity politics (read tribalism) increasingly becomes a decisive factor in American politics, so what Kenya does with its tribalism, with its loyalty to kin rather than to policy difference -- what a polarized country does with its ethnic antagonisms -- may help us to appreciate that identity loyalties often triumph over policy pragmatism in our own polarized arena.
Just as Rutu and Odinga have been promising prospective voters that they would root out the corruption that permeates Kenya, fix the economy (with its scarcity of jobs, food shortages, a crippling drought, an 8 percent annual inflation rate, and massive debts owed to China), and produce better schooling opportunities for all -- including under-served girls – so western Kenyans like the Luo and Luhyia peoples who live next to Lake Victoria know that Odinga is one of their own; on the other hand, Kikuyu and other Central Province groups and personalities have persuaded themselves that Odinga represents something culturally alien and dangerous.
Likewise, Ruto’s followers include those of his own Kalenjin affiliation from the Rift Valley. President Daniel arap Moi, who followed the first Kenyatta and became an odious tyrant, was another Kalenjin, the Kenyan presidency having otherwise always been occupied by Kikuyu. The fact that Odinga believes a Luo, the country’s fourth largest ethnic group, should at last produce a president, may seem presumptuous to Kikuyu, and also to the Kalenjin (a composite of sub-ethnicities based along the Rift Valley), the third most numerous tribal designation.
The Luo and Kikuyu languages have distinctly different origins and etymologies. The several Kalenjin languages are unlike the others. But, after years of rivalry and enmity, Uhuru Kenyatta disdained the candidacy of his deputy president and is strongly backing Odinga. (President Jomo Kenyatta, his father, imprisoned Odinga’s father and sometime deputy president Oginga Odinga in 1970-1971, regarding the latter as a dangerous rival.)
Kenyatta and Ruto were both brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity -- essentially for fanning deadly mass violence in the aftermath of Mwai Kibaki’s contested victory in the 2007 national elections. Nearly 1,400 Kenyans lost their lives in the months of mayhem that were sparked by the contested count; Raila Odinga, the losing candidate, claimed that President Kibaki won by cheating and by attacks on fellow Luo.
The ICC eventually gave up its attempt to try Kenyatta and Ruto. The intimidation of witnesses in Kenya made it impossible, the ICC said, to bring Kenyatta and Ruto to justice. In 2016, it implied that Ruto was the main obstacle to a successful trial. There had been, the ICC declared, a “troubling incidence of witness interference and intolerable political meddling.”
Indeed, Kenyans who comment on politics regard Ruto as the greater thug. Furthermore, both Kenyatta and Ruto, the latter especially, have grown immensely wealthy while in office. Ruto now owns swaths of land, several hotels, and a major chicken-processing factory. He is being required to return a 100-acre farm that a local court says that he stole. His vice-presidential running mate is accused by Kenya’s government of having misappropriated or purloined nearly $2 million.
Raaila Odinga is a man of charm and stealth. A folksy campaigner, he is determined this time to take the nation’s highest political post for the Luo, and to reduce the prominence of tribalism – identity politics – in Kenya. But he is unlikely to succeed in reducing ethnicized voting, no more than President Biden or even well-meaning Republican politicians will be able in the short term to focus American voters on policy differences rather than identity loyalties masked by supposed differences over health care, taxes, or the like..
What a Kenyan executive consultant told Farah Stockman of the New York Times (August 3) is as apposite for our own political scene as it is accurate for Kenya: “All politics are tribal and zero-sum. You have created tribes and the tribes aren’t talking to each other anymore.”
Whoever wins today (or in a subsequent run-off between the contenders if neither achieves 50 percent of the vote; there are two other candidates) will have to cope with repaying massive borrowings from China, how to manage the affairs of the mistakenly constructed and bankrupt new Chinese railway from Mombasa through Nairobi to a wilderness dead-end, how to manage an Islamist insurgency on its border with Somalia, and how to respond to the state’s total inability to foster economic growth and foreign investment. More than half of Kenya’s proliferating population is under 25 years of age; providing for them and keeping the country safe and secure are intractable problems.
Identity politics hardly help. Nor does roiling corruption. No one wants to be pessimistic about Africa, but Kenya in so many key ways is a bellwether for the continent, just as its tribal upsurges are for us.