The Moi regime was facing a more organized effort this time. While political parties remained weak and given to infighting, civil society was beginning to coalesce. Seeking to update the constitution before the elections, the non-governmental organization Citizens Coalition for Constitutional Change organized a National Convention Assembly to press for reforms. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the group demanded changes to the constitution and threatened civil disobedience if the demands were not met. A number of key political figures, including Kibaki, attended the meeting.
Once again domestic unrest and international pressure were closing in on the government. The regime promised to consider reforms but did virtually nothing. Fearful that civil war was indeed approaching, moderates within the president’s own party sought compromise with moderates from the Citizens Coalition.
Against the backdrop of worsening chaos, in the fall of 1997, Moi endorsed the moderates’ package of reforms, wrong-footing civil rights advocates, clergy, and politicians who were pushing for more dramatic moves. There were important changes nonetheless, reducing state authority, ending preventive detention, and creating a new election commission with wide powers. Finally, the reforms called for a review of the constitution.
Realizing that he had split the opposition, Moi called for elections to be held on December 29. There was, of course, no time for reforms to take hold, though the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) was constituted to oversee them. The chaotic elections produced confusion, and for a time it appeared as if neither Moi nor the opposition would reach the 25 percent threshold in several provinces needed to avoid a runoff. When the smoke cleared, however, the president was declared the winner. Despite all the benefits of incumbency and considerable fraud on his behalf, the president won only about 40 percent of the vote. In a harbinger of things to come, the major ethnic groups voted for their kinsmen: the Kikuyu for Kibaki; the Luo for Raila Odinga (the son of Oginga Odinga); Luhya for Michael Wamalwa; and Kamba for Charity Ngilu.
The results seemed to have a chastening effect on the president. “My next government will be more sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the people,” he said.16 And, slowly, Moi began to keep his promise and loosen his grip. International pressure was growing again, this time from the United States and the Bush administration, focused squarely on political reform. When Secretary of State Colin Powell visited in May 2001, he urged Moi to allow the election of a new president and to step aside. The constitution prohibited him from running again, and though some urged him to do so, Powell appealed to his sense of legacy.
Knowing that he might have to step down, Moi tried to arrange the succession. He threw his weight behind Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s founder. Uhuru was a dashing figure, young, Western-educated, and charismatic. But many Kenyans worried that he would just be a continuation of the Moi regime. The president didn’t help his protégé by making it known that he would be around to help.
Kibaki succeeded in uniting the opposition in a “Rainbow Coalition.” His platform focused on eliminating corruption and establishing the rule of law. Though there were sporadic reports of cheating by both sides and considerable violence, the elections were held on December 27, 2002. Kibaki won and Uhuru conceded. Kenya had reestablished a multiparty system and committed to a democratic path.
Another Opening but Kibaki Disappoints
Early on, observers of Kenyan politics gave Mwai Kibaki high marks for his personal qualities and commitment to a better Kenya. On inauguration day, he told Kenyans that he was “inheriting a country… badly ravaged by years of misrule and ineptitude.”17 It was not particularly gracious to say so with Moi sitting next to him on the dais. But it resonated with the Kenyan people, who had high hopes for their newly elected government.
To his credit, Kibaki launched a serious campaign against corruption. Just two months after he took power in 2003, the government suspended the chief justice and created an independent tribunal to investigate allegations that he had tortured opponents and engaged in corruption. A month later, the governor of Kenya’s Central Bank stepped down in a major scandal. A private bank that held pension funds and proceeds from state-owned enterprises had collapsed, leaving the depositors with losses of almost $18 million. The same events brought down the commissioner general of Kenya’s Revenue Authority, who was somehow, despite an obvious conflict of interest, the co-owner of the bank.
There were also wide-ranging probes of the judiciary. A special commission found evidence of corruption and misconduct implicating about one-third of the country’s magistrates and about half of the judges on the high court and the appeals court. Kibaki himself declared, “The writing is on the wall. We are sending a clear message that the day of reckoning for those who engage in corruption has come.”18 Kenya was among the first countries to sign the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. The move was both symbolic and practical. The convention promised to make the seizure of assets across international lines easier—a promise largely unfulfilled to this day.
Kibaki also pursued populist policies like ending fees for primary education. The government pleaded with its citizens to use their democratic institutions and petition for justice. And they obliged. One time, for example, 650 women were allowed to sue the Ministry of Defense. They claimed to have been sexually assaulted by British soldiers during joint exercises with the Kenyan military. The very act of bringing legal action against the state was widely praised by domestic and international human rights groups. And the government undertook prison reform, freeing thousands of young first offenders and working to reduce overcrowding and improve conditions for those incarcerated.
The president was a breath of fresh air, and he was celebrated internationally for his efforts. The IMF resumed lending to Nairobi on November 21, 2003, opening the way to accelerated international funding from a variety of donors. The country seemed to be well on course for economic recovery and political stability.
Kenya moved as well to institutionalize reforms by revising its constitution. A 629-member National Constitutional Conference spent months debating a new draft before eventually agreeing on the language. The reforms were intended to decentralize power to national, regional, district, and local levels. The executive was to be weakened by separating the functions of president and prime minister, who would choose the cabinet. A bicameral legislature, with women making up one-third of the members, was to be created. The reforms were breathtaking in scope. They were finally put to a referendum in November 2005. They failed.
That disappointment was a kind of watershed event for Kibaki as reforms began to slow on a number of fronts. This was due in part to the president’s worsening health. Shortly before the elections in 2002, he had been involved in a car accident but rallied to finish the campaign and win. He was left with far more serious injuries than he admitted at the time, though. In January 2003, he was hospitalized for high blood pressure and blood clots in his leg. The septuagenarian president never seemed to fully recover. When Kibaki came to the White House for a state visit in October of that year, he clearly struggled to walk and had trouble remembering the names of some of his new cabinet members. After Colin Powell met with him in January 2005, he reported that Kibaki was still having difficulty moving around and that his mental faculties were continuing to decline.
Moreover, even prior to the failed constitutional referendum in 2005, Kenyans were again growing impatient. Promised economic reforms were stalling and Kibaki’s election pledge to create half a million jobs was now haunting him. Few if any had materialized. The heavily publicized campaign against corruption was slowing, leading to the resignation of the anticorruption czar, John Githongo, who accused the government of continuing graft. His stand unnerved international donors, who yet again threatened to cut off aid.
And pressures were again growing for political reforms. In July, demonstrators took to the streets of Nairobi to advocate for changes in the constitution, particularly a weakening of the executive. They wer
e met by riot police and one person died.
Kibaki had championed a weakened executive. Now in power, he and those around him retreated from the high-minded campaign promises to circumscribe presidential authority. Instead, the new constitution submitted to the parliament created an essentially powerless prime minister, although it did give parliament a say in cabinet appointments. The vice president explained, according to the New York Times, that “presidents are father figures in Africa, and the voters would not put up with having someone outside the family rivaling the father.”19
In fact, Kenyans begged to disagree. Kibaki managed to go from reformer to defender of the status quo within a matter of a few years. A challenger emerged in the person of Raila Odinga, a Luo minister in Kibaki’s government who was appalled by the president’s actions. He joined an effort to defeat the constitutional draft from inside the ranks of the president’s own government. Kibaki thus found himself on the defensive among his supporters, calling those who opposed him “stupid.”20
The younger, wealthy, and charismatic Odinga led an indefatigable campaign against the president. And he won. The referendum on the new constitution failed. Kibaki conceded defeat. But when people spilled into the streets to celebrate, the president tried to ban political protests. It didn’t work. “Our rallies will go on,” said a spokesman for those who had opposed the president.21
Kibaki was severely weakened by the events, and the opposition was emboldened. From that point on, after the crucible year of 2005, it was clear that an electoral showdown was looming.
“Save Our Beloved Country”
In 2007, Kenyans participated in what would be a landmark election that would pose a significant challenge to its fledgling institutions. Kenya’s electoral law posed obstacles to the participants, but particularly to opposition figures. A candidate was required to win 25 percent of the vote in at least five of the country’s eight provinces. The threshold was difficult to reach because multiple candidates split the vote. A third-party candidate, Kalonzo Musyoka, decided to stand for election instead of joining Raila or Kibaki, which denied them close to a million votes that would have created a clear victor. The rules set up a likely scenario of thin margins of victory and the potential for a runoff.
In the days leading up to the election, Odinga was the front-runner, but the race had tightened by election day. Early returns showed him ahead: A day after the election, with about half of the votes counted, he held a sizable lead. Several of Kibaki’s key cabinet members lost their seats in parliament. It looked as if the government was headed toward defeat.
But as the counting continued into the next day, the margin began to shift in the president’s favor. Odinga’s lead was shrinking—nine hundred thousand votes, three hundred thousand votes, then less than one hundred thousand votes—and by the end of the day, the president’s party was claiming victory. Odinga and his supporters cried foul.
We were watching Kenya closely in Washington. I checked in with the State Department operations center just before turning in for the night. The outcome was very much in doubt. I immediately called Jendayi, now assistant secretary for African affairs at State. “It’s a mess,” she said. “Everyone is accusing everyone else of cheating and it is really hard to know who really won.” The next day she reported that the head of the ECK that had first called the election for Kibaki now wasn’t willing to certify the results from his own organization. International electoral observers suspected significant fraud on both sides, but the vote was so close that it wasn’t really possible to say whether it had mattered. “Maybe Kibaki did win. But maybe he didn’t,” one group reported.
Throughout the next two days, the embattled ECK tried to make sense of the vote count. Odinga was certain that the commission was trying to further alter the results. He called a press conference and made the charge publicly. Kenya was on the brink.
That Sunday morning, I followed my usual routine, talking to key aides and then to the British foreign secretary before heading to church. I suppose the weekly calls with the Brits underscored how special the relationship really is. I’ve always said that if the Brits weren’t with you, you were alone. Sunday morning was a time to make sure we were on the same page, and somehow checking in with London just seemed like the right thing to do.
December 30 was all about Kenya. My phone rang at around 7 a.m. Jendayi was reporting that rumors were flying in Nairobi that the ECK was going to declare Kibaki the winner. “If they do that there will be blood in the streets,” she warned. I called David Miliband, the British foreign secretary. The Brits too had heard the rumors, and, yes, chaos was about to break out across the country.
A few hours later, the commission chair, Samuel Kivuitu, came out and announced that Kibaki had won 4.6 million votes and Odinga 4.4 million votes. “Why,” people asked, “would the ECK declare a victor with a thin margin of two hundred thousand votes when not all had been certified?” Undeterred, Kibaki was sworn in at the State House under heavy guard. Odinga rejected the electoral outcome. It didn’t help that some members of the ECK emerged to say that there had indeed been vote rigging on both sides. Kenya was plunged into political crisis and tribal violence. More than a thousand people would die over a period of a month. The New York Times wrote vividly that the “streets of Nairobi are beginning to look like war zones, with trucks of soldiers rumbling through a wasteland of burned cars and abandoned homes.… Gangs of young men have built roadblocks between the neighborhoods of the Kikuyus… and those of the Luos.”22 By New Year’s Day, Kenya was on the verge of civil war.
Another New Year’s Day crisis, I thought as I read the morning papers. During my time as national security adviser and then secretary of state, I almost came to dread the holidays. Like clockwork something always seemed to happen right around Christmas and New Year’s. In 2001 it had been the prospect of war between India and Pakistan. In 2004 it was a devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The year 2005 brought Vladimir Putin’s threat to cut off the gas supply to Ukraine. In 2006 it was Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia. Then in 2007 Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on December 27. Now, within twenty-four hours of that tragedy in Pakistan—Kenya was headed toward a meltdown.
I knew that the international community had to do something, but, frankly, it wasn’t clear what to do. David Miliband and I issued a joint statement on January 2 urging calm. We welcomed the calls of the African Union (AU), the EU, and the Commonwealth for an end to the violence. And we pledged our diplomatic and political efforts to support reconciliation and national unity at this “vital time for Kenya and the region.”
Then I kept doing what diplomats do in these circumstances—issuing statements, calling other foreign ministers to get them to issue statements, and ultimately having the president speak to the situation to lend weight to what we had been saying. It is hard to convey how frustrating these moments can be. You hope that your words will have an effect, but deep down you know that they probably won’t.
More fruitfully, I sent Jendayi Frazer to Kenya to assess the situation and to represent me in working with the parties to calm the situation. I called Odinga and Kibaki on an almost daily basis, making clear that the United States was watching and ready to help. We tried to find leaders who could speak to both sides. John Kufuor, the president of Ghana and chairman of the AU, went to Nairobi to urge peace talks between Odinga and Kibaki. But the going was tough. Calling the proposed talks a “sideshow,” Odinga added, “We want to meet with him but we don’t recognize him.”23 Kufuor pushed Raila to recognize that his party’s majority in parliament offered an important power center and counterbalance to the presidency in governing the country.
Finally, in consultation with the AU, we agreed that Kofi Annan, the highly regarded former UN chief, should go as a mediator. We had come to the conclusion that a government of national unity was the only way forward. The United States issued a statement saying that “irregularities in the vote tallying” had made the final result “impossi
ble to determine with certainty.” We reminded Kenyan leaders that the United States would not conduct business as usual until they sorted out their political problems.
At the beginning of 2008, I had a lot on my plate with Afghanistan and Iraq and North Korea and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but the secretary of state can’t put an unfolding catastrophe on the back burner. We had invested so much time, energy, and resources in our policies toward Africa in general and Kenya in particular. The president and I had spent hours with African heads of state, trying to support democratic transitions; launched PEPFAR for AIDS relief, the single largest global health initiative in American history; and quadrupled foreign assistance to Africa. And now Kenya, one of the most stable countries in the region, was coming apart. I’ve often been asked how one sets priorities as secretary of state. Sometimes events do it for you. Kenya was now at the top of my agenda.
Every day the news just seemed to get worse. Annan succeeded in getting Kibaki and Odinga to meet. But within minutes, Kibaki was out publicly accusing his rival of stirring up violence. Odinga, for his part, returned the insult. The ethnic character of the unrest was becoming more marked, with revenge killings among the tribal groups. People were being driven from their homes to “purify” neighborhoods.
As fate would have it, President Bush was scheduled to visit Tanzania, Kenya’s neighbor, on February 17. He had decided not to go to Nairobi, saying that he instead wanted to focus on the “success stories” of the region, especially U.S. policies for countering AIDS and malaria. The comment didn’t go over well, sounding tone-deaf at that particular moment. But we knew that it made no sense for the president to go. The delicate talks were moving at a snail’s pace. If the president were to visit, he would be expected to deliver a breakthrough. The stakes would be too high and the chances for failure were strong.
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