It's Our Turn to Eat (36 page)

Wandering the aisles, I suddenly thought that maybe they had been right after all, those determined optimists who insisted it was worth tempering principle for the sake of a greater, long-term good. Oh, I knew Westgate catered for Nairobi's
wabenzi
. I'd seen the nail-varnished Kenyan teenagers impatiently jiggling their Bluetooth mobiles and the keys to the car Daddy had given them at the tills. I understood this gleaming world of dishwashers and catfood bore no relation to life on the
shamba
or in the urban slums. But if this was the way the
crème de la crème
in Kibaki's Kenya shopped, surely the rest of the nation must inevitably be swept along?

I thought of John's warnings. ‘Six per cent growth is all well and good, but the trickle-down isn't trickling down.' A small, irreverent voice in my head piped up: ‘Well, he
would
say that, wouldn't he?' How could John, who had walked out on this government over a point of principle, bear now to admit that he had got it wrong? How could he accept his sacrifice had been for nothing?

The run-up to Kenya's 2007 elections would see a smattering of small, ominous incidents that should have set alarm bells ringing, if only people were in the mood to listen. One took place in the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, where police seized an assistant minister's white Pajero carrying sixty-nine
pangas
(machetes), two hundred whips and fifty
rungus
(clubs). Another occurred when the Nakumatt supermarket chain announced, after logging a strange sudden spike in machete sales, that it was limiting purchases of gardening tools and kitchen utensils such as knives to just one per person. Some sections of the community were clearly preparing for a fight.

From my perspective, the polls would serve as a litmus test of Kenyan opinion. Did Kenyans care enough about grand corruption to vote out the government, or would they agree with the donors, convinced the ‘overall trajectory' mattered more than the inconvenient detail of Anglo Leasing?

That assessment, however, was askew. Top-level sleaze
per se
would not be the issue, as was amply illustrated by Kamlesh Pattni's decision to stand as MP in Nairobi's Westlands constituency. ‘Steal
a mobile in this country and you get lynched, steal $100 million and you get to run as MP,' scoffed a journalist friend. But the issue of corruption would nonetheless lie at the election's beating heart. As the polls neared, opposition leader Raila Odinga revived a key theme of the constitutional debate, calling for a return to ‘majimboism'–a system of devolved regional government left behind by Britain's colonial administration but abandoned by Jomo Kenyatta in 1964. To Western ears, majimboism seemed difficult to fault. Who could deny that power in Kenya, as in most African countries, was damagingly over-centralised? There was learned discussion as to whether the American, German or Canadian federal system would be best suited to Kenya. But for ordinary Kenyans, majimboism meant something very different, and quite specific. To opposition and government supporters alike, the toxic concept challenged the fundamental notion that a Kenyan was free to work, live and invest anywhere in his own country. Under majimboism, those who had bought land, farmed the soil and opened shops outside their ethnic communities' traditional areas would be forced to sell up and move. Given the country's historic patterns of population growth and migration, majimboism's main target could only be the Kikuyu.

This was not so much a principled rejection of the ‘Our Turn to Eat' principle of government itself, as a challenge to the notion that one particular tribe should enjoy a monopoly position at the trough. On the stump, Raila's supporters repeatedly cited the Anglo Leasing scandal as concrete evidence of what a bothersome ‘certain community' got up to when given half a chance. Ethnic favouritism, the foundation on which Anglo Leasing was built, became the rallying issue of the election campaign. On the websites, non-Kikuyu bloggers sketched a ‘41 versus 1' scenario: the notion that Kenya's forty-one other tribes must unite, come polling day, against the Kikuyu. I was astonished to hear the same refrain on the lips of a staff member of the Kenyan High Commission in London. ‘The way we see it,' he confided in an unguarded moment, ‘it's going to be everyone against the Kikuyu.'

‘There's a snake in the nest,' Raila declared at his rallies. Using a parable from the animal kingdom, he explained how the safari ant–so tiny, so seemingly insignificant on its own–could, by sheer dint of numbers, overpower the snake that had curled itself around Kenya's hearth. ‘You are the safari ants,' he told his audience, to roars of approval.

In the Rift Valley, vernacular Kalenjin radio stations called on listeners to ‘clear the weed', to remove the ‘spots' on the landscape represented by the ‘settlers': Kikuyu whose forefathers had acquired land under Kenyatta. Kalenjin youths, bent on finishing the job started during the ethnic clashes of the 1990s, were more direct. ‘Whatever happens in the elections, win or lose, you're out of here,' they told Kikuyu neighbours. The message also won support on the Swahili coast, where local Muslims had for years resented the stranglehold ‘upcountry' Kikuyu, who owned many of the large hotels, enjoyed over the tourist industry.

While ODM leaders stoked their supporters' sense of ethnic grievance, the government side–hurriedly mustered under the banner of the Party of National Unity (PNU), yet another ideology-free political formation–systematically whipped up a matching paranoia in Kikuyu ranks. At weekends, hard-line MPs regularly made the trip from Nairobi to Central Province to warn any Kikuyu stupid enough to consider voting ODM of the community's looming marginalisation.

When the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights published a report accusing top civil servants of breaching their supposed neutrality and government ministers of misusing public funds in their eagerness to campaign for the PNU, the names cited–from Francis Muthaura, head of the civil service, to Kiraitu Murungi, John Michuki, George Muhoho and Joe Wanjui–read like a roll-call of the Mount Kenya Mafia.

Bit by bit, an ethnic siege mentality was created. ‘The notion of defending the government as an institution merged gradually into the notion of defending the president, and that then became defending “one of our own”,' recalls
Nation
columnist Kwamchetsi
Makokha. ‘It was very, very subtle. If you did a forensic examination you would hardly be able to track the shift.'

As the months passed, Raila, who in 2002 had received a rapturous welcome in Central Province from Kikuyu grateful for the campaigning he had done on Kibaki's behalf, was successfully transformed in their eyes into a terrifying bogeyman. A series of extravagant rumours, inflammatory leaflets and fake memos–Raila was planning to bring in
sharia
law; the ODM had drawn up plans for the genocide of one million Kikuyu; the Kikuyu would be chopped into pieces, Rwanda-style–played their part in creating the mood. ‘The amount of fear-mongering SMSs and emails was stupendous,' says Makokha. ‘It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you set the stage where a single community has isolated itself, what follows is resentment. People start saying, “What's so special about you?” and, “We're going to get these guys.”'

Samuel Kivuitu, head of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK), could have been under few illusions as to what was being planned on the government side. In January 2007, violating a ten-year-old agreement that political parties should be consulted on the selection of electoral commissioners, Kibaki unilaterally announced nine new appointments to the twenty-two-member organisation. Then five more. The new arrivals broke with tradition in another worrying way: they chose to supervise the polls in their home provinces, where they hand-picked returning officers. ‘I've been trying to train the new commissioners appointed by Kibaki,' Kivuitu privately told EU observers. ‘But they tell me they don't need any training, because they are here for only one thing: to take over the ECK.'

 

There were few more interesting places to be, in the closing days of the campaign, than the western town of Kisumu, in Nyanza province.

Perched on one of Africa's great expanses of fresh water, framed by emerald hills, Kisumu should be a bustling metropolis. The largest city in the Lake Victoria basin, it was once the terminus of the colonial Uganda Railway and should, for no better reason than geographical
location, be a magnet for trade from Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Instead, it feels like a city time forgot, snoozing in the torpid heat.

The local sugar, rice and cotton industries are either in decline or ticking over, awaiting better days. Kisumu's once-frantic industrial area is now a quiet stretch of shuttered godowns, padlocked compounds and empty yards. The main road to Nairobi is so potholed, only the foolhardy or desperate attempt it. If you value your spine you are advised to go by air, and your plane takes off from outside a glorified shack. A promised international airport has yet to materialise, as has a deep-water harbour.

Even the blue waters of Lake Victoria are not the blessing they once were. Kisumu's fabled mermaid seems to have cast her curse. The bay is choked with water hyacinth, a bobbing green blanket fishermen have to battle across in their flimsy pirogues, which blocks the mouth of the yacht club and hides the herds of hippo the odd tourist comes to see. The fish-processing sector is slowly dying, its workers lured away, managers complain, by Kikuyu factory owners from upcountry, promising fat pay packets and fantasy perks.

Kenya's recent economic surge has made little visible impact here. In 2005, according to the government's own statistics, Nyanza overtook North-Eastern as the country's poorest province. Unemployment is rife, and Kisumu cannot even produce enough food to feed its own population. The favourite method of transport–the
boda boda
taxi bike–says a great deal about Kisumu. In other Kenyan cities, cars and vans serve as taxis. But distances here are short, and human sweat is always cheaper than petrol.

Residents harbour few illusions as to the reason for this neglect. ‘UK'–‘United Kisumu', as it is known–is the regional capital of the Luo, Kenya's third biggest ethnic group, a community that regards itself as victim of a plot to keep it poor and irrelevant. Two of Kenya's most high-profile assassinations–those of Tom Mboya in 1969 and Robert Ouko in 1990–were of Luo government ministers. The male flag-bearers of the Odinga family, the family that has been a thorn in the side of every Kenyan president since independence, both spent
time in detention. An opposition bastion since 1966, when the then vice president Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Raila's father, broke with Jomo Kenyatta, Kisumu has paid an all-too-visible price for the family's failure to win their spot at the table. ‘These NARC guys never even had a plan for Kisumu or Nyanza province,' says Stephen Otieno, a local community worker. ‘Kisumu was never mentioned in any manifesto. You look at that and you start asking yourself: “Is this tribal?”'

But in December 2007, all that looked set to change. Finally, Kenya's game of musical chairs was about to turn in Kisumu's favour. The opinion polls agreed: Raila was heading straight for State House. Four decades of calculated neglect were about to end, and it would all be thanks to ‘Agwambo' (‘Man of Mystery'), ‘the Hammer', ‘the Bulldozer', ‘Mr Chairman', a local hero who enjoyed near-god-like status in his own fiefdom. Given Kenya's political tradition of ethnic patronage, a Raila presidency would surely mean new jobs, fresh investment, new roads, hospitals and schools for the Luos, just as it had for the Kikuyu under Kenyatta and the Kalenjin under Moi. On the podium, Raila might insist on presenting himself as a national unity candidate representing all Kenyans. As they queued to cast their ballots on 27 December, Kisumu's residents had a clear sense of what was their due. ‘We're voting for change,' was the politically-correct formula. But many quietly added: ‘It's our time.'

Turnout, bolstered by the addition to the electoral roll of nearly four million voters, most of them youngsters, was at a record high. For many that meant day-long waits in the sun. But with the exception of the lynching of two policemen suspected of planning to rig the vote–a hint of the suppressed tension in opposition ranks–voting across Kenya was calm. After a day spent touring Kisumu's ballot stations, I returned to my hotel impressed by what appeared to be a quiet demonstration of mass trust in the electoral process. Things seemed to be going smoothly. ‘You know, I'm not the sentimental type, but today I really feel proud of my fellow Kenyans,' a journalist friend texted me from Nairobi.

The following day felt equally promising. In defiance of the rule
that Africa's elder statesmen, no matter how undeserving, automatically enjoy the respect of the younger generation, the parliamentary results showed that Kenya's irreverent new voters had turned their backs on the dinosaurs. Across the country, government ministers were falling like ninepins: more than twenty would be rejected by their local constituencies. The vanquished included several Anglo Leasing names, Kibaki's pre-election reinstatement proving not quite the canny move he had anticipated. Out went David Mwiraria, the finance minister who had signed off on the dodgy contracts, his concession speech interrupted by calls of ‘Loser!', ‘Thief!' Out too went vice president Moody Awori–‘Moody will be feeling moody at home,' chortled a radio commentator–and the brawny Chris Murungaru. Out too went Nicholas Biwott, AKA the ‘Prince of Darkness', president Moi's sinister right-hand man, and three of Moi's sons, the famous name no protection against the ire of voters disgusted by the two presidents' last-minute marriage of convenience.

With the results from Kenya's western provinces and much of the capital swiftly announced, Raila was well in the lead in the presidential poll and the ODM was wiping the floor with the PNU in the parliamentaries, just as the opinion polls had predicted. But in the Kisumu Hotel's packed restaurant, where diners sat with eyes glued to the television screens, no one dared celebrate. New arrivals slapped hands with friends in a gesture of quiet triumph, but no one allowed themselves more. ‘People are hiding their feelings. You can see it in their faces, but they don't want to be proved wrong,' said a friend.

‘Any dancing in streets?' a British film-maker friend texted from Nairobi. ‘Still too early,' I cautioned. And as the hours ticked by, the atmosphere grew uneasy. Something strange seemed to be happening. The television announcers faithfully relayed one set of figures after another, bludgeoning their viewers with statistics. But where, crucially, were the presidential results from Nairobi and Central Province? Geographically, these constituencies were the closest to ECK headquarters, yet their results were dribbling out at a snail's pace. No one was slapping hands now.

By the morning of Saturday, 29 December, Raila's advantage had
been whittled away to the slimmest of leads. Worried guests, gathered around the TV sets, nodded approvingly as ODM leaders in Nairobi angrily demanded to know why ECK was announcing parliamentary and civic results from the Mount Kenya area, while omitting the presidentials. By this stage of the game in 2002, the losing candidate had already been preparing to concede defeat. Why, this time, was everything taking so long?