It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  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?

  Kisumu’s poor did not wait to hear the answer. To them, it was obvious: once again, the Luos were being royally screwed. The government in Nairobi had conspired to rob their community of its rightful turn at the trough. ‘Funga mlango, Funga mlango!’ (‘Close the door!’) shouted a hotel security guard as we all spotted the same thing through the glass: a ragged mob of youths running towards us, fleeing a police charge. Behind them drifted a pall of dark smoke from barricades of burning tyres. Outside on the streets, the looting had started.

  It seemed we were stuck with one another: the Ugandan AIDS worker–a man, by his own admission, ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’–the bewigged mother-of-two, the US-trained entrepreneur with his American twang and techno-savvy son, the angry young law graduate and a handful of tut-tutting staff. Like passengers trapped in a lift, none of us had expected to spend quite so much time in each other’s company, but fate had brought us together and refused to let us go.

  Just around the corner from Kisumu’s main shopping street, the Kisumu Hotel, built in the 1930s to cater for passengers on the Johannesburg–London flying-boat route, turned out to be the perfect vantage spot from which to observe a day-long looting spree. Locked inside by solicitous staff, the hotel’s guests–mostly members of the Luo diaspora who had returned to Kisumu to celebrate Christmas and cast their votes–kept up an appalled, sardonic running commentary on the spectacle of a city tearing out its own entrails.

  In Kisumu’s outlying shanty towns, ODM supporters were taking their fury out on Kikuyu and Kisii residents assumed to have voted for the government, setting fire to kiosks and homes, sending their terrified owners fleeing into police stations and churches. In the city centre, the focus was different. For years, I’d wondered what eventually happened in a society with such a high proportion of jobless, prospectless youngsters. Here was the answer. Some hidden signal seemed to have been passed through the slums–‘Today, anything goes’–and their inhabitants were pouring into the city centre.

  First came Bata, Kenya’s cheap and cheerful shoe chain. There were so many bulging red-and-white plastic bags on the street, you’d be forgiven for assuming the makers of ‘The shoe that says you know Africa’ were staging a clearance sale. Then came the electronics stores. Generators, microwaves, ghetto blasters, salon hair-driers. Double-compartmented freezers were herded along the street like cattle, wheels screaming on tarmac. ‘And you can bet none of these guys have electricity at home,’ mused a guest.

  If the looting initially looked random, the impression was misleading. The premises being targeted were all owned by either Asians or Kikuyu. A sitting target, with its glass-paned veranda, our hotel appeared to be protected by an invisible force field. Looters sat on the steps, trying on their stolen clothes for size, but never attempted to enter. ‘Why isn’t anyone breaking in here?’ I asked a clerk, mystified. ‘Oh, we’re fine. The manager is a Luo. Now, if this was a Kikuyu hotel, they’d already be inside.’

  Generous funders of Raila’s campaign, Kisumu’s Asian businessmen had expected to come through the elections unscathed. They spoke Luo, had lived in Kisumu for generations, saw themselves as loyal supporters of the ODM electoral machine. They had not bothered to take the obvious precaution of running down their stocks. Now they were being administered the sharpest of lessons on the impossibility of integration.

  Scores of televisions were wheeled past us on the backs of boda bodas. ‘Check it out, that one’s got a plasma screen…isn’t that a Super Slim?’ asked the US-accented entrepreneur. ‘No, not a Super Slim,’ his son corrected him. One sensed a heated family debate, back in the States, about which model to buy. The screen promptly crashed to the ground. ‘Oh, leave it, just leave it,’ muttered the father as the looters struggled to right it. ‘Don’t you know a dropped TV is always wrecked?’

  Next were the furnishings: rolls of linoleum, fake Persian carpets, sheets of corrugated iron, entire velour sofas, balanced on heads or carried between two men, piled high with goodies. ‘Terrible, just terrible,’ muttered the matron, lifting her daughter up to give her a better view.

  The local MPs whose victories had recently been announced were nowhere to be seen–they had no intention of putting their fragile authority to the test. And events in distant Nairobi, relayed over the television and radio, were doing nothing to calm this frenzy of impotent rage. Rumours circulated that the chief justice had already been called to State House, on standby for an imminent Kibaki swearing-in. At a tumultuous press conference Kivuitu admitted that the delay in announcing results was ‘unacceptable’ and revealed that he had lost telephone contact with many Central Province returning officers. What, speculated viewers, could these key officials possibly be doing, apart from conjuring u
p the extra votes needed to ensure a Kibaki win? ‘We don’t know where our returning officers are,’ confessed Kivuitu. ‘In State House!’ called a member of the audience.

  Watching the chaotic scenes on TV, the law student from Mombasa waved at the screen in contempt. ‘This is black democracy,’ he pronounced with terrible bitterness. ‘It’s giving me an ulcer,’ he muttered, departing for his room.

  Occasionally an army truck drove by, firing teargas in a desultory fashion, and everyone scattered. But it was like trying to dam the tide: five minutes later the looters surged back. A curfew was desperately needed, but none was announced. Arriving guests said the security forces had been spotted shooting the locks off Asian properties and stopping looters in order to claim a share of the booty. This looked more like collusion than incompetence. What, after all, did it matter to the powers that be in Nairobi if the Luos fouled their own nest?

  We began recognising faces on the street. The same looters were coming back for second, third and fourth helpings. Some were children. A surprising number were women. Two strapping Amazons, running along in kitten heels, breasts bouncing, wigs askew, made a strong impression. ‘These are thugs, women thugs,’ said the hotel clerk with a shake of his head.

  On it went, hour after hour. Sure of their ground, tired looters were now strolling along the main drag, not bothering to run. Much of the centre of town was aflame, sending angry charcoal clouds billowing into the air, gas canisters exploding like bombs in the heat.

  As the sun set, the looters finally ran out of energy. Their occasional ‘No Raila, No Peace’ chants had come a definite second to the most vandalistic operation of self-enrichment I’d ever witnessed. In the space of twelve hours, Kisumu’s shopping district had come to resemble a war zone, its shops reduced to blackened husks, its streets crunchy with glass. Carrying out the task their government in Nairobi was so unwilling to perform, the wananchi had done their bit to redistribute Kenya’s assets. The laborious ‘trickle-down’ so beloved of World Bank economists had been replaced by the far quicker smash-and-grab. ‘It’s not your turn,’ the Kibaki elite had told them, and they had shown exactly what they thought of the message.

  So much for the trouble-free election. ‘In future, I will never, ever write about a country being “stable” when so much of its population lives below the poverty line,’ commented a Dutch colleague in Nairobi to whom I was relaying events. Behind me, a hotel security guard mused to himself as he watched the stragglers trudging back to the slums, ‘When you go home and you have looted like this, what do you think to yourself?’

  Long after they could have played any useful role, riot police in helmets deployed across the smouldering centre. The hard work would come the following day, when they would ruthlessly exert their authority over Kisumu’s slums, shooting without discrimination. I heard one of my fellow guests, in surreally chirpy mode, on his mobile phone to a friend. ‘Hey, don’t bother coming shopping down here tomorrow. There’s nothing left to buy.’

  The rape of Kisumu city centre was just a taste of what was to come.

  By Sunday, 30 December, Kenya’s elections were a fiasco, the country’s worst crisis since independence. There was growing evidence of ballot-stuffing, glaring disparities between the figures announced by returning officers at constituency level and what the ECK was releasing in Nairobi.41 There had almost certainly been ballot-stuffing in the ethnic strongholds of both the ODM and the PNU, but since the outcome looked set to be a Kibaki win, all eyes were focused on the government side.

  At a last press conference in Nairobi, furious opposition leaders stormed the stage, determined to prevent the harried Kivuitu announcing the results. The GSU brought an end to the event by turning off the power and firing teargas. The final tally, which the chairman read out to a camera from the side room where he had taken refuge, demolished Raila’s seemingly unbeatable advantage. In the closest electoral race in Kenya’s history, Kibaki had won by 231,728 votes. The result not only flew in the face of pre-electoral opinion polls, it jarred with parliamentary results giving the ODM ninety-nine seats and the PNU just forty-three.

  ‘If it was up to me, I wouldn’t sign off on this,’ Kivuitu had privately told EU observers, showing them returning officers’ forms bearing obvious signs of tampering. ‘But I’m alone here, and I want to live.’

  Less than an hour later, Kivuitu reappeared on Kenyan television screens, this time witnessing an inauguration on the State House lawn so swiftly arranged conspiracy theorists immediately speculated that it had actually been filmed ahead of time. Staged in the absence of the Kenyan public, neighbouring African presidents and the diplomatic community, the surreptitious ceremony was in the starkest possible contrast to Kibaki’s gloriously chaotic 2002 inauguration in Uhuru Park, when the nation had come together. ‘Like a Muslim funeral, the swearing-in of Mwai Kibaki took place before even some of the relatives of the deceased knew what was going on,’ was the sardonic comment of Ugandan columnist Joachim Buwembo. The head of the Institute of Education in Democracy, Koki Muli, captured the feelings of many Kenyans. ‘This is the saddest day in the history of democracy in this country. It is a coup d’état.’

  In the days that followed, independent election-monitoring teams from the EU, the East Africa Community, the Commonwealth and Kenya itself lined up to denounce the vote-tallying process and slam the ECK, whose reputation was not helped by Kivuitu admitting he ‘did not know’ whether Kibaki was the real winner. But by then the election’s flawed conduct would almost seem a mere detail of history, such was the magnitude of what was happening on the ground. Within minutes of the announcement of Kibaki’s victory, the multi-ethnic settlements of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Eldoret and Kakamega erupted. Luo and Luhya ODM supporters armed with metal bars, machetes and clubs vented their frustration and fury on local Kikuyu and members of the smaller, pro-PNU Meru, Embu and Kisii tribes, setting fire to homes and shops.

  The approach was brutally simplistic. Many Kikuyu, especially the young, urban poor, had actually voted ODM, regarding Raila, ‘the People’s President’, as far more sympathetic to their needs than the aloof Kibaki. But mobs don’t do nuance. Fury needs a precise shape and target if it is to find expression, and ethnicity provided that fulcrum. The attackers claimed they took action because they could not bear the sound of Kikuyu celebrating ‘their man’s’ victory. But their victims said they would have never been so brazen or so foolish, and pleaded with fellow slum-dwellers to remember they were all poor people, suffering together.

  Some Western reporters wrote of ‘atavistic tribal tensions’ bubbling to the surface, implying the hostility between Kenya’s communities was a mindless, irrational thing. But under a system which decreed that all advancement was determined by tribe, such hostility was entirely rational. Had all Kenyans believed they enjoyed equal access to state resources, there would have been no explosion. As Bill Clinton said in another context: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’

  This violence was horribly up-close and personal. In Korogocho, Mathare, Dandora and Kibera, neighbour raped neighbour, husband murdered wife, schoolmate killed schoolmate. As Wangui Wa Goro, a London-based commentator, put it: ‘When you’re unleashing decades of frustration, you’re not going to hunt out some stranger down the road. You’re going to go for the noisy woman upstairs who’s been driving you crazy for years.’

  There were terrible echoes of the Rwandan genocide in the tactics involved. ID cards in Kenya don’t show tribe, but they give paternal birthplace and family name, often ethnic giveaways in themselves. At makeshift roadblocks set up on Kenya’s main thoroughfares, passengers were forced to descend from matatus and buses and to show their ID cards. They were then beaten or killed if they belonged to ethnic groups deemed likely to vote PNU.

  In the Rift Valley, Kalenjin warriors systematically torched Kikuyu shambas on the hillsides, the farmers fleeing before the chain of fire reached their compounds. Issued with arrows, spears and jerrycans of fuel by local eld
ers and community leaders, Kalenjin youths were ferried around in trucks, evicting hundreds of thousands of so-called ‘foreigners’–many of whom had never lived anywhere else. When their victims hid in a church they set that ablaze too, burning women, old people and babies inside.

  Brushing aside the official election result, ODM’s supporters had collectively moved to put their majimboist interpretation into practice on the ground. Challenging the very notion of the unitary state, they set about systematically reversing decades of Kikuyu expansionism. It was no coincidence, commented British historian David Anderson, that 95 per cent of the Rift Valley clashes occurred in areas where land had been distributed as part of Kenyatta and Moi’s notoriously corrupt government settlement schemes.42

  Kenyans had expected a rocky election, but nothing on this scale. Before the poll, I’d spent an afternoon with a garrulous young painter in Mathare slum. Bubbling with political convictions, he’d treated me to a warm Fanta in his ‘seven-in-one’, the windowless shack that served as sitting room, artist’s studio, study, bedroom, storage facility and kitchen. A Kikuyu in a largely Luo section, he sold his works to the international market, but was proud of never having left Mathare. He had stowed his most valuable possessions with middle-class friends, but was confident he could see through any coming storm. He ran painting workshops for slum children, played a high-profile role working for community integration and had more Luo friends than Kikuyu. ‘If trouble comes, I’ll just put on my ODM shirt,’ he said with a relaxed shrug.