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Fear and loathing envelop Kenya as the poll nears

Thursday August 03 2017
oldvote

A poll official helps an elderly woman to cast her vote in the 2013 General Election. Kenyans go to the polls on August 8, 2017. PHOTO | NMG

By MUTHONI WANYEKI

A couple of weeks ago, I received an advisory from a diplomatic mission.

The warning to its citizens in Kenya was to either get out for the duration of the elections, or stock up — including with supplies of prescribed medicine — and sit tight.

At the time, I was highly entertained and shared it with my colleagues.

A Kenyan colleague’s dry response was: “Kwani? They think we’re going to be in an Aleppo-like situation, under bombardment?” A non-Kenyan colleague’s response was that we weren’t taking the risks posed by the elections as seriously as we should be.

But my response didn’t arise from casualness. I don’t disagree with the risks everybody’s broadly agreed upon. The intensity of political competition — particularly for the seats of Governor and the presidency. The highly ethnicised nature of that competition and the xenophobia the electoral process therefore seems to unleash. Those risks are real.

But to my mind — as was the case in 2007 — the biggest risk is that the handling of the counting and tallying of the presidential poll is mismanaged.

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This past week alone, Kenyans have become more nervous than they were. Nobody believes the incumbent will “allow” an opposition win. Nobody believes either that the opposition has a Plan B to manage its supporters in the event of a loss.

Listening to a conversation at a Nairobi hotel this week, I realised Kenyans are making their own personal contingency plans.

A Kenyan man was explaining to a non-Kenyan colleague that he and his family were off this weekend, somewhere abroad, to sit out the situation. He explained how chaotic 2007 had been, claimed that [a wildly exaggerated figure of] 15,000 had been killed and that the incumbent had ended up before The Hague. He had no intention of exposing his family to that sort of madness again.

The Kenyan man seemed either unaware of or sceptical about Kenya’s national contingency plan for the elections.

The humanitarians are preparing for about 400,000 requiring assistance, including about 220,000 internally displaced. And the plan’s costed – to the tune of a staggering Ksh5.5 billion ($55 million).

On the one hand, we should be glad that there is a plan. On the other hand, the triggers mentioned under each scenario are confusing.

Then there’s the fact that the safety and security pillar is the responsibility of the police. With no reference to the fact that the police were responsible for the majority of deaths in 2007/8.

The point is that we need to call a spade a spade. The biggest trigger of electoral violence is the process of handling the polls — especially at the presidential level.

The buck stops with our EMB. The biggest perpetrator of electoral violence (resulting in death) is the police. The buck stops with the police. Both our EMB and the police are public. The question is whether they have the msimamo to act impartially in the public interest.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes

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