It looked last night as if Kenyans had voted for a complete political change with the defeat of President Mwai Kibaki’s bid for a second term and the victory of his one-time political ally Raila Odinga.
The final results will become clear only later today, according to the Electoral Commission of Kenya, one of whose officials admitted that ballot boxes had been coming in too slowly from some 22,000 polling stations. Some opposition figures feared the delay may have been due to government efforts to rig results. However, even if this were true, the outcome is already startlingly clear. Voters have swept away many of the political old guard, including ten Cabinet ministers in the outgoing government.
If all the indications are correct, this will be the first time in Kenya’s postcolonial history that a president has been voted out of office. On the face of it, Kibaki’s defeat is surprising because his administration has presided over strong economic growth of around 5 percent a year since he came to power in a landslide victory in 2002. The problem, however, has been that the benefits of this new prosperity has not filtered down as it should to the poor. Whatever its economic achievements, Kenya has become a byword for venality and fraud. It was almost certainly Kibaki’s failure to honor his original election pledge to clean up public life which counted against him in this vote.
Odinga, by contrast, is 14 years younger and has a moderately radical background and a successful business career in which he acquired a reputation for getting things done. Initial hesitation by the Kenyan financial community about his candidature seemed overcome when the charismatic Odinga visited the stock exchange. After his visit, the index actually went up.
It appears, however, that it was not merely a change of political faces that the electorate sought. Throughout the hustings, it was notable how many voters interviewed by journalists said they wanted to move away from tribal-based politics and hoped that people would now view themselves first and foremost as Kenyans.
Kibaki, from the dominant Kikuyu tribe, continued the favoritism toward Kikuyu that has been a fixture since independence from the British. Odinga however is from the Luo tribe. It must be hoped that in power, he will not distribute the same tribal-based patronage that has often unbalanced the country. Decisions must be made on merit alone.
The outside world has focused extensively on South Africa and the remarkable early achievements of the Rainbow Nation in terms of peace and reconciliation. But now South Africans face the problem of a dominance of the ANC and the lack of a political alternative. Kenya, where multiparty politics was first introduced very shakily in 1992, appears with this week’s election to have finally come of age. If it is Odinga who is confirmed as the new president, he must recognize the important new political inheritance he has been given.
