The Challenge for Africa

by Wangari Maathai

  In some polling stations it was said that kerosene and candles by which to count the votes had run out, and when poll workers returned the next morning to continue counting, they found that new votes had materialized overnight. The chairman of the ECK was under pressure to announce the results even before he was ready. Kenyans watched and listened in disbelief. Had the country's nascent democracy been dealt a huge setback? Had the electoral process been interfered with?

  In the eyes of some politicians, the misfortune of the 2007 Kenyan election was not that irregularities occurred, but that they were discovered. This is an all-too-common feature of elections in Africa: one African president is even alleged to have asked his colleague how he could lose an election he had organized. Given this history, the challenged performance of the ECK and the hurried nature of the swearing-in ceremony, it is understandable that many people in Kenya began to wonder whether there was something to hide. This unease was only enhanced over the next few days as impartial observers both within Kenya and in the international community—including the head of the European Union observer mission—detailed serious voting irregularities. When, several days after he had declared the result, the chairman of the ECK was asked who he thought had won the presidency, he replied that he didn't know. (A commission that later looked into the irregularities of the voting came to the conclusion that it may never be known who legitimately won the 2007 presidential election.)

  On that same Sunday in December, only hours after the presidential result was announced, Kenya plunged into a war with itself, and the country, long considered one of the most stable in Africa, experienced perhaps the greatest level of violence since the time of the Mau Mau uprising against British rule fifty years before. Unfortunately, some citizens took their anger about the outcome of the presidential contest out on their neighbors—nearly all of whom were as poor and powerless as they. The police seemed ill-prepared to deal with the growing mayhem and even contributed to the death toll by firing live ammunition into crowds and engaging bands of young men in running battles through the streets. Tragically, some police were reported to be partisan and therefore unwilling to stop the killing and destruction if members of their own micro-nation were committing the crimes.

  The attackers knew perfectly well that it was not their neighbors who were responsible for their anger and frustration, and that the only “crime” those neighbors may have committed was that they belonged to or voted for a different micro-nation or candidate—but that was enough for them to be assaulted. Some of the violence appeared preplanned. Reports circulated that some politicians not only were stirring up people along ethnic lines to attack their opponents, but were also paying young people to kill or burn down people's houses. It became clear that behind the agenda of gaining power, there was another one: to drive from the Rift Valley members of one micro-nation whom the attackers, from another micro-nation, considered “foreign settlers.”

  Tragically, however, violence begets violence. No matter how orchestrated the protests may have been in the beginning, eventually the leaders lost control, and, as could have been anticipated, atrocity piled on atrocity—even to the extent that gangs of young men blockaded roads and demanded passengers in passing buses to show their identity card, which in listing a person's name also usually reveals his or her ethnic origin. Or passengers were required to speak their mother tongue, another way of determining their ethnicity. If they were from the “wrong group,” they were attacked and many were killed.1 It is estimated that between 1,200 and 1,500 people lost their lives; many others were scarred and wounded by machetes or bows and arrows wielded against them. Over half a million people were forced to flee from their homes, some of which were looted or razed to the ground. Women were raped, and, in one terrible incident, as many as fifty people, mainly women and children, were burned to death when a church they had taken shelter in was set on fire.

  While the violence may have been shocking, what came as no surprise to Kenyans—and, no doubt, other Africans—was that what emerged on the night of December 27, 2007, and plunged the country into turmoil for weeks reflected the challenges to genuine democracy that have plagued Africa ever since most of its nations achieved independence. As is almost always the case, it was the innocent who suffered from the vanity and obstinacy of their leaders. Many people paid the ultimate price for their leaders' refusal to consider dialogue and mediation. In such conflicts, the African peoples always lose. From Liberia and the Ivory Coast in the west to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, and Rwanda in the heart of Africa, to Sudan and Somalia, two of Kenya's neighbors, it is women, children, and the poor who have been the main victims of leaders' or would-be leaders' stubbornness, corruption, and divisiveness.

  The impression of a lawless and ungovernable Africa is, undoubtedly, what the outside world has come to expect from the continent. What is rarely reported on in the global media are the many individuals who look beyond their own communities to embrace their fellow citizens. Stories usually do not focus on civil society groups who are promoting conflict resolution rather than ethnic chauvinism, or employing dialogue rather than the machete or the gun as a way of sorting out grievances. (It is also hard to determine in news reports which actions have nothing to do with the community someone belongs to but are either the basest forms of thuggery and extortion or a desperate reaction to seemingly hopeless poverty—the marginalization many people experience when it appears that nobody cares about their thoughts or their lives.)

  Indeed, notwithstanding the risks, during the strife after the 2007 elections, groups of men and women from different micro-nations throughout Kenya, in some of the poorest as well as richest neighborhoods, came together to call for peace. Religious leaders, businesspeople, editorial writers, bloggers, and ordinary citizens spoke out against violence and voiced their hope that politicians would begin serious discussions to end the conflict for the good of the country and the region.2

  Echoing former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, whom the African Union appointed to mediate the electoral dispute, the Green Belt Movement repeatedly called for a power-sharing arrangement between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga that would be ratified by parliament and placed within the constitution so it could not be easily dismissed—as the memorandum of understanding had been after the 2002 elections. On the grounds of the GBM headquarters in Nairobi, we erected a “peace tent,” where concerned individuals as well as victims of the violence could come to convey their sorrow for those who had died or been displaced and express their hopes for a peaceful resolution of the crisis.3

  Some members of Green Belt Movement groups, as well as staff, were victims: one's house was burned to the ground, and another's extended family was forced to flee their home. Some of the tree-planting programs and seminars on Civic and Environmental Education were disrupted for a time, and thousands of young trees in the nurseries had to be abandoned. We were lucky that the Kenyan army, under the leadership of Chief of General Staff Jeremiah Kianga, was able to rescue some one hundred thousand seedlings and take care of them. (The army has an initiative to plant trees in the barracks and in the forest.)

  When the dialogue between the two sides finally started and the violence subsided, I felt as a Nobel peace laureate that it was incumbent upon me to visit those who had been displaced and were living in makeshift camps, and others who had sought refuge in towns. Staffers from GBM's peace tent and I wanted to bear witness to their suffering and console them, as well as urge them toward reconciliation; to encourage them to forgive, but not forget. It was difficult to see such misery and destruction and to realize that so many people had died or been displaced in a conflict that could so easily have been prevented if Kenya's leadership had listened and engaged in dialogue during the preceding years.

  I had already discovered that perceived disloyalty to one's own ethnic community was politically dangerous; I was soon to discover that it could be physically dangerous as well. When, in the wake of the 2007 electoral stando
ff, I urged the president to be less recalcitrant and to engage Raila Odinga and his team in dialogue, the government I had only recently left was not pleased. The day after I lost my seat in parliament, two of my police bodyguards were reassigned. Fair enough: I was no longer a member of the government, so no longer entitled to such protection. But when I began urging the two sides to find a resolution, the last of my bodyguards was withdrawn. He had been assigned to me specifically after the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. The government did not wish to share power, and by removing the final bodyguard its principals were seeking to punish me for my perceived rebellious behavior—not supporting the position of my micro-national leader. Not long after, death threats were sent to me via text message. When I made these public, the government reinstated the bodyguard (in its own time), and pleaded ignorance about why he'd been reassigned in the first place.

  Whatever their source, death threats are always unwelcome and very disturbing. I have never been physically harmed by members of any of the forty-two distinct micro-nations that live in Kenya, and count people of many ethnicities as friends and colleagues. The sending of such serious threats with no fear of the consequences was a sign to me of how polarized things had become in Kenya.

  The violence that rocked Kenya in the aftermath of the 2007 elections did not happen in a vacuum; nor was it without precedent. In the run-up to the elections at the end of 1992, and until 1997, the same area where the 2008 violence was concentrated—the Rift Valley—was roiled by similar, politically instigated disturbances. At that time, the cry from the one-party government, which had ruled Kenya virtually since independence, was that the country was not ready for multiparty democracy—because, they said, it would inevitably lead to “tribalism” and discord. To prove their point, elements in the administration stirred up the very ethnic violence they stated would occur. Communities fought each other over land and political power. Then, as in 2008, hundreds were killed and thousands were displaced. Many still haven't returned to their homes.

  In 2008, however, there was a notable difference from the period between 1992 and 1997. In 2008, the international community, remembering how it had ignored the warning signs and done nothing as hundreds of thousands of people were brutally killed in Rwanda in 1994, resolved to act. Mediators such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, three former African presidents (Kaunda of Zambia, Chissano of Mozambique, and Quett Masire of Botswana), John Kufuor, then president of Ghana and chairman of the African Union, and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, U.S. assistant secretary of state Jendayi Frazer, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all made efforts to bring the two parties to the negotiating table. Finally, the AU deployed Kofi Annan as its chief mediator. He was joined by Graça Machel, the former first lady of Mozambique and wife of Nelson Mandela, and the former president of Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa, to form a team of eminent Africans to facilitate dialogue.

  After six weeks of active diplomacy, Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga agreed to share power and then hold elections in 2009. The post of prime minister was created and the cabinet shared between the president's party and the ODM coalition. In addition, they agreed that the long-standing constitutional and political problems that had ended the coalition in 2005, and the pressing issues of land ownership and distribution, would be addressed.

  Naturally, like all Kenyans I was relieved when this deal was signed in March 2008. But like many, I was also mystified and appalled as to why this agreement—which many of us had recommended from the outset of the electoral impasse, and which indeed had formed the bones of the 2002 memorandum—could not have been reached before so many Kenyans had died, been displaced, or had property destroyed, not to mention before so much ethnic hatred had been unleashed. In this regard, the accommodations and compromises for which many had been calling for more than five years could have been made (in 2005) without dismissing the cabinet or even, perhaps, the vote for a new constitution devolving into a battle between constituencies over who would retain power.

  Although there were moments when I was genuinely fearful for Kenya's future, I was hopeful that the country would not descend into the horrors of a Rwandan-like genocide—precisely because of the efforts of the AU, other African nations, and the large international community to bring the two protagonists to the dialogue table. Nevertheless, the image of Kenya as a stable democracy, a place where business could invest safely and from where humanitarian missions could be launched to other countries—in other words, a place where persecuted people fled to and not from—was shattered. A country I thought could provide a model of the peaceful transfer of power in Africa had been plunged into the sort of senseless bloodletting that the outside world all too often associates with Africa.

  Ironically, in the end, perhaps no community suffered more losses of land and lives because of the recalcitrance of the leaders they supported than those who belonged to the president's micro-nation: the Kikuyus. And after so much bloodshed and displacement they were forced to share the very power they were so fearful of losing. In the refrain of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Pete Seeger's anthem against militarism and the Vietnam War, “When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”

  PEACE AND RECONCILIATION

  In the midst of negotiating the power-sharing deal that ended Kenya's postelectoral crisis in 2008, Kofi Annan offered his observation that Kenya needed its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This kind of commission, pioneered in South Africa under the auspices of Archbishop Desmond Tutu after the formal end of apartheid, is an approach that has also been adopted in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda.

  In the case of South Africa, everyone who took part in the post-apartheid process knew that simply having the victims of wrongs confront the perpetrators would never be enough to balance the unquantifiable horrors of apartheid or recompense the generations whose lives were thwarted by its pitiless laws and practices. But the commission gave voice to those whose suffering had been silenced. It returned a portion of dignity to those who had been dehumanized, and in turn pricked the conscience of a nation, and indeed the world. More important, the commission understood that only when the truth was known and justice received could wounds begin to heal. Only then could reconciliation start and the people as a whole look to the future with hope.

  In Kenya, it will take more than the realignment of constitutional powers and access to land to heal the wounds that were opened by this most recent conflict. People were forced to move to their ancestral homelands, even if they had never lived there, as groups of young men incited by their leaders sought both to kill, and to avenge killings perpetrated by other groups of young men. The Kenyan economy lost over a billion dollars, much of it in the area of tourism, which dropped by a third in the first half of 2008.4 However, the greatest loss is in those who died, as well as the destruction of the goodwill and comradeship that Kenyans from a majority of micro-nations had for each other in 2002. It has yet to be recaptured.

  Indeed, even as I write, it is clear to me that the trauma that Kenya experienced is still present, and the price of a settlement has been exorbitant. The two main political blocs created an enormous government cabinet, Kenya's largest and costliest ever, with an unprecedented forty-four ministers, which, given that each minister has at least one assistant minister (and some have two), means that nearly half of all MPs are either ministers or assistant ministers. To run these ministries will cost, between 2008 and 2009, according to Kenyan government estimates, 563 billion shillings ($8.66 billion). The total budget is 760 billion shillings ($11.7 billion), which means that the cabinet alone will consume three-quarters of the entire government's budget. By contrast, the government has apportioned 31 billion shillings ($476 million) for reconstruction in the aftermath of the 2008 violence.5

  On April 1, 2008, I along with other members of civil society and the clergy met at Freedom Corner in Uhuru Park in downtown Nairobi. Freedom Corner has long been a location where people could speak their mind and, in the years before
the 2002 elections, had been where the Green Belt Movement and others had protested against human rights violations, poor governance, corruption, land grabbing, and deforestation. This day, we were there to call upon the main protagonists of the postelectoral conflict to put the Kenyan people foremost by agreeing to a small, efficient cabinet that could govern effectively and not consume a disproportionate level of national resources. We also had gathered to memorialize those who had died in the conflict and to plant a tree to encourage the peace and reconciliation that was so essential.

  That day in April, an open letter was read out to the three hundred or so assembled citizens and journalists, calling upon the president, Mwai Kibaki, and the prime minister designate, Raila Odinga, to place the needs of Kenyan citizens before theirs or their parties’. Speakers noted the pressing need for funds to resettle those displaced by the violence, and that a substantial portion of the budget would be required to rebuild property that had been destroyed. But when the organizers of the gathering tried to march to the building where, it was said, Kibaki and Odinga were meeting, to present the open letter, the police reacted with tear gas as a way to disperse the crowd. Their actions were an unhappy reminder of the incivility of the Kenyan government toward the citizens it claimed to represent: the arrogance and contempt were palpable.

  The panic of people running, the tear gas stinging the eyes and burning the lungs, the police chasing people through the park with their batons at the ready—all this a response to the peaceful exercise of democratic rights—were a sad reminder to me of decades of similar assaults by the authorities. That it was happening again, and that the police were receiving orders from the same government for whose inauguration many of us had gathered in jubilation at the same location just five years previously, was deeply disappointing. Equally depressing was the fact that, when elected, the same government had promised genuine change and to honor the same rights it was now denying.