Geneva: A vigorous dialogue after all

When the parties to Kenya’s Grand Coalition government gathered in Geneva, Switzerland for “The Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation: One Year On,” the signs were not, at first, auspicious.

It was preceded by anxiety and bickering about whether or not ODM would try to use the meeting to renegotiate the mediation agreement — and petulant power plays by PNU to prevent the same — resulting in the eventual no-show of both the principals.

But, as everybody else signalled their willingness to engage with the meeting in a constructively critical manner, the meeting eventually progressed — vigorously but without open acrimony.
Convened by the Kofi Annan Foundation and the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, with the support of the government of Norway, the meeting was intended both to take stock of implementation of the mediation agreements as well as to extract what lessons can be learnt from the mediation process — not only for Kenya but for comparable crises around the world.

That being the case, the meeting was attended not only by the parties — senior representatives of both the Orange Democratic Movement and the Party of National Unity — but by all who had engaged, in one way or another, with the mediation process.

They included civil society, the private sector including the media, the local diplomatic community and representatives from their capitals as well as representatives from the multilateral agencies that had supported the mediation process.

Organised in three plenaries, the meeting covered the mediation process itself, as well as implementation of all four Agenda items.

While the three plenaries were conducted under Chatham House rules to enable frank debate, the opening and closing sessions were open to media coverage. What follows now is thus an attempt to summarise, without attribution, the analysis that emerged.

The now disbanded Electoral Commission of Kenya lacked competence. Public confidence in the ECK had also been eroded by the manner in which the last appointments to it had been made, without consultation among the ruling political party and the opposition.

The mediation agreement that established the Independent Review Commission of Kenya (IREC) chose to focus its findings and recommendations on how to re-invest the electoral process in Kenya with both competence and confidence.

To focus on electoral reform broadly rather than to go into the nitty-gritty of what precise errors or fraud had occurred and who was responsible for the same.

The question is whether, in the long term, this will prove to have been the wise thing to do. Certainly, emotions are still strong over the presidential results.

There would have been real risks had the IREC chosen to declare one way or another — which it claims it could not have done given that all materials available had not been secured in a reliable manner. And certainly, in the long term, electoral reforms are required.

But without accountability in an individual legal sense to ensure future deterrence, can electoral reforms alone ensure a non-repetition? Has the process of appointments to the interim ECK met the standards required for both competence and confidence?

Will the process of reviewing our constituency boundaries meet similar standards?

Can the gerrymandering of the past be addressed in a manner that both restores the principle of one person, one vote and recognises regional disparities in terms of representation?