8 Months in Nairobi

Great Kenyan Politicians Wanted

2008-11-05T22:28:00.000-08:00

It's a national holiday today in Kenya. There were fireworks in Nairobi last night and I hear that Kisumu has become one big carnival. Hawkers are walking lanes of ever-jammed Nairobi traffic, selling Obama '08 bumper stickers, campaign signs, and t-shirts with pictures of Barack Obama and "Made in Kenya" written below.

Obama's warm reception across the country was not always so widespread. During a 2006 speech at the University of Nairobi, he talked about the nearly ubiquitous corruption among public officials in Kenya. He also criticized the government for a weak anti-terror policy, and politics shaped by negative ethnicity. Those comments ticked off some of the political elite and their supporters.

The government's spokesman, Alfred Mutua, issued a statement a couple of days after Obama's speech saying that Obama was "poorly informed". I wasn't living in Kenya back then, but people here tell me that one national newspaper (which is typically government-supporting and Kikuyu-leaning) was full of criticism of Obama. Some writers said he was only pulling a JFK-style "back to the roots" political trip; the Senator from Illinois was certainly not Kenyan.

Now President-elect, Obama is all Kenyan, as far as most people here are concerned. The Kenyan papers are full of praise for him and speculation about what he might be able to do for this country. When I talked with people a couple of months ago for a Man On the Street story, Nairobians seemed pretty realistic. No one thought that an Obama presidency would mean great change for Kenya. Some people hoped that Kenya's tourist industry might benefit. They were proud that a man with Kenyan heritage was going so far in such an important political race, but they didn't think that U.S. aid dollars to Kenya would suddenly increase.

Aid dollars aside, I think there might be another way that coming together over Obama might benefit Kenya.

It was less than a year ago that Kenya surprised the world with a largely undemocratic and violent election. Kenyan politicians used the negative ethnicity that Obama talked about in 2006 to garner votes and spur protest.

If this country can rally behind a politician with Luo heritage, not because he is Luo but because he seems to be a good leader, a man who communicates ideas in a clear way, a person apparently guided by strong principles, maybe the ethnic drive behind Kenyan politics will ease a bit.

Obama was born to a Kenyan father and a white American mother. He spent his early childhood in Indonesia. His middle name is Hussein. Kenyans can see that voters in the United States, a country alternately lauded and criticized for equality or xenophobia, have cast their ballots for such a person.

Maybe that will give Kenyan voters the courage to rally behind another Kenyan politician. Maybe someone will emerge who has a bright mind, strong principles and great leadership skills. Maybe that politician will run in a Kenyan election. And maybe he or she will win on the merit of their political vision and skill, not their ethnicity.

Infrastructure + entrepreneurship = development?

2008-06-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

George had a plan when he moved to Nairobi from Western Kenya. He shared a room in Kibera and worked for a year as a construction laborer. Making less than a dollar a day, he saved up enough money to put himself through driving school. He worked as a day laborer for another year until he found a job driving for a NGO. He's now saving money to buy his own vehicle. Once he's driving for himself, he'll save money to buy land in Western Kenya. After he's saved a little more money, he will go back to Kisumu and build some houses. He'll do the work himself. When the houses are up, George says the rent income will support his retirement.

George is in his late 20s. He knows that this plan will take him many years. It will not make him rich, but it will make him financially independent.

George is one of the most hard-working and determined people I have ever met. He is also deeply optimistic that he will achieve his goals.

Here in Kenya, I've met quite a few people like George, people with plans for how to build modest or great wealth for themselves.

I grew up in Canada. I nursed at the teat of a great social welfare state. I came out of university with a journalism and political science degree that had only reinforced my left-leaning tendencies (no fault of my professors, I studied what I wanted to study). But the longer I spend here, the more I see the power of business. I also see the critical role the government must play in supporting business development without stalling it with too many licensing and registration rules. I am increasingly convinced that infrastructure (and maybe micro-finance, though my internal jury is still out on that one) is key to helping George and other entrepreneurs to improve their lives.

Good roads make it easier for people to move materials to manufacturing centers, then to move finished goods to market. Electricity makes it possible for businesses to open earlier and close later, and for small manufacturing industries to increase their productivity.

The Kenyan Slum Upgrading Program is working slowly to provide some of that much-needed infrastructure in various communities around the country. The program is not perfect. The work is slow and sometimes involves displacing people who live in the slums, but in the end it may help improve the entire economy. If people start their own businesses, they can provide for themselves. They can also hire other people and, eventually, pay taxes that could (minus corruption and mismanagement) be invested in more infrastructure development.

I did a story for marketplace about the potential for business creation in the slums.

Someone pointed out to me recently that a more stable domestic economy is another benefit of small business development. Currently Kenya's economy depends greatly on foreign aid money, tourist dollars and internationally-owned agricultural businesses. If the country sees another, more lengthy round of domestic unrest like we had in January, the tourists and the foreign farmers may flee. But Kenyans aren't going anywhere and the money they make tends to stay in the country.

I know it's not quite so simple but for now, my hypothesis is that Infrastructure + Entrepreneurship = Widespread, Stable Domestic Development.

What do you think?

Food for thought

2008-05-13T05:34:00.000-07:00

When I first moved to my apartment, the red roadside kiosk up the hill was selling eggs for five shillings (six cents in USD) a piece.

In late February the price went up to six shillings.

One day in mid-March I went to buy some eggs and they cost seven shillings each. The next day, the price had gone up to eight.

"What?" I asked the Ethiopian kiosk owner, "Yesterday the eggs were seven?"

"I know, I know," he said. "Everything is going up. Bread used to be 25 shillings. Now it's 35. Milk is up too. What can I do?"

There are many factors affecting food prices in Kenya right now. Global prices for fuel, fertilizers and seeds are going up. The economy is struggling since the post-election violence. The rainy and dry seasons are no longer predictable, so farmers are unsure when to plant. And many people in rural areas who grew their own food and/or grew food for market are still displaced from their land.

The changes affect everyone: wholesalers, transporters, farmers, vendors and customers.

The government is promising subsidized fertilizer, but it's not clear how many farmers will benefit from the plan in this planting season.

Here's a short report I did for Voice of America that touches on some of the myriad issues.

It's a little frustrating to attempt to sum up such a big, important issue into a little story. Anybody want to pay me to write 2,000 or more words on it?

First person food

2008-05-10T01:31:00.000-07:00

With apologies for being so silent of late, here's a link to some recent work.

Speaking of Mungiki

2008-04-18T00:10:00.000-07:00

Another Kenyan blogger, Lost White Kenyan Chick, has a good on-the-ground update about the Mungiki situation these days.

You can read her post here, and here's an excerpt:

I was talking to someone in the morning who lives in Dandora. Now personally I would have said that Dandora was really one of the better areas of Nairobi in which to live. Rents are far from being the cheapest and it is most definitely not a "bad" area of town with minimal violence, thuggery or anything else going down there - even in the post-election skirmishes - but now it seems Dandora is not the place you wish to be calling "home" anymore.

Now it seems that if you live in Dandora, first of all, you'll be lucky if you can find transport at all, as all the matatus (or mini buses) that run around the area into and out of town have been warned off the roads, and those that are operating are charging over 150/- (over US$2) per trip, which when most wanainchi make not much over that in a day is not exactly conducive to bother going to work at all. Then she tells me that all the ladies in the area have been given leaflets telling them what to wear.

It must be a skirt and the length must reach below the knee. Penalty for not following the dress code is a humiliating stripping and public beating.

Last night, SMS's were sent round all over saying that you must leave the city centre by 7.30pm or you shall be killed. Then this morning new SMS's stated that all those who work in the Industrial Area should not go into work.

It's all just fear mongering but hey how much is your life worth, and is it worth ignoring these warnings because by doing so Eric Kiraithe [the police spokesman] says you're doing the right thing ??

The public demands from the Mungiki are that they are mourning the death of the wife of their leader (who is currently inside being entertained at the country's expense), who was shot last week together with her driver, and they believe the police were involved and should be brought to book for it, and that they want some police force group that has been formed to crack down on them all, to be disbanded.

However, the leaflets now circulating on the ground "explaining" this reign of terror go with a slightly different, yet more realistic reasoning, and that is that the "Mungiki" say they have not been paid their "protection" monies from various government ministers for the last few months. They had no part in the general election and therefore gained no rewards from that, and now that the Kikuyus have not taken a majority in the parliament and just to prove how powerful they are, they are going to paralyse operations in Kenya just to show that "all is not normal" just because a cabinet has been named and all is "apparently well".

That said, there is a story in the Standard newspaper today that the Mungiki have ordered members to stop fighting. The call for ceasefire came after Prime Minister Odinga made a public request for the group to stop its protests. Public statements from Mungiki leaders promised to work with Odinga. It's a curious turn of allegiances, since the dominant public perception is that Mungiki is partially aligned with the Kikuyus and the so-called Mt. Kenya Mafia.

But maybe the Mungiki are turning into politicians, shifting allegiances and all. The group has even been holding press conferences over the past week!

"Let them eat cake"

2008-04-15T03:44:00.000-07:00

Food has been on my mind a lot lately. Food prices in particular, and food scarcity.

The World Bank, the UN and countless other organizations are attempting to sound the alarm about rising food prices around the globe.

Here in Kenya, the food prices have already risen significantly over the past three months. That inflation is precipitated and exacerbated by domestic politics, climate and many other factors.

An op-ed in Monday's Daily Nation sums it up nicely. Rasna Warah writes:

A researcher at the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa has noted that the impact of the food crisis will be felt most acutely in African countries, where there is already a lot of anger in urban areas around issues such as unemployment and lack of basic services, especially among the poor.

Kenyans are not known to protest over food prices - we tend to take to the streets only to voice our support or opposition to a political party or leader, not because we cannot afford to feed ourselves or our families.

But given our fragile political situation, rising inflation (now at more than 20 per cent), high unemployment, an impending drought and a declining economy, it won't be long before people begin to protest in other ways - through crime, looting and violence.

High food prices can thus lead to other forms of social instability and anarchy. The scenario is too horrific to even imagine.

Peeling the onion

2008-04-14T04:47:00.000-07:00

There is a resolution, in principle, on the question of how to shape the Kenyan cabinet. Other questions remain about how these leaders will work together to run government. If it's taken them six weeks to agree on the cabinet matter...

Despite the weekend announcement of the cabinet decision, there are disturbances around the country today. We woke this morning to phone calls and SMSs about fighting in Nairobi neighbourhoods. Word on the street is that the fighting is retaliatory violency following the apparent murder of the wife of the Mungiki leader last week.

Mungiki is tough to define. They're a group with many faces: organized crime, religious sect, Kikuyu-led gang, political agitants for hire. The violence in Kenya that followed the December elections has increased the powerbase of Mungiki. The fighting along tribal lines also stimulated the growth of rival gangs who began by promising protection to members of certain tribes.

So although the cabinet question is resolved for now, this morning's violence is a reminder of the multiple layers of Kenyan politics. Here's hoping not every peel of that onion will bring tears.

Two steps forward, too many steps back

2008-04-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

It's been a wildly winding road toward the establishment of a functional government in Kenya.

As Kenyans watch the post-election confusion and violence in Zimbabwe, things are not much brighter at home. Although there are agreements in principle on powersharing in Kenya, the actual act of sharing power seems to be difficult.

The sticking points in the current round of talks are the size of the shared cabinet, and which party will control which portoflios.

As recently as last Friday, there seemed to be an agreement. The cabinet would include 40 seats: 20 for ODM, 20 for PNU. The posts were doled out.

But a meeting on Sunday to finalize the details over five key posts broke down. The questions were over who will run Foreign Affairs, Cabinet Affairs, Local Government, Transport and Energy. The parties did not agree and this week Kenyans are back to: Cabinet, question mark.

As the leaders retreated from face-to-face talks to memos and envoys, protests in a few isolated parts of Kenya turned violent yesterday. Once again, PNU is pointing to the constitution while ODM is protesting that Kibaki's party must abide by the deal signed a month ago. PNU is threatening to dissolve parliament and call for new elections.

As in February, international figures are making public statements calling for a resolution to the dispute.

The Kenyan shilling is falling against the dollar. In a country where inflation is ongoing - where a cabbage that cost 20 shillings in December is now selling for 60 - the political instability is bad news for Kenyans.

If you want to keep track of what kind of agreements have been made, and the reconciliation efforts, here is the site to visit.

8 Months and then some

2008-03-18T04:54:00.000-07:00

The mosquitoes woke me up at two and five this morning. Our hot water heater exploded a couple of days ago; I haven't washed my hair since Monday. The frozen shrimp I bought for dinner last night were slightly off. My dinner guests and I are on the watch for food poisoning.

My ever-overloaded backpack just exploded all over Yaya Center. The bottle of sunscreen I was carrying popped out and wheeled through the air, leaving sticky white goo all over me and the counter of the coffee shop where I'm sitting. The French ex-pat down the counter from me is drinking his first Tusker of the morning and looking at me like I couldn't be more crass.

It's one of those days. You know, the days when Murphy's long arm is meddling in all your business.

And still, somehow, I am laughing. This is what Kenya has done to me. I am just happy here.

Despite political turmoil. Despite not being able to walk safely on the roads at night. Despite being constantly overcharged for fruit and taxi rides. Despite no access to fresh seafood. Despite an ever-expanding network of fine lines, a product of fair skin and the equatorial sun. Despite horrific traffic on bad roads. Despite a steadily shrinking bank balance and no steady income.

I am just happy here.

I came to Kenya seven months ago. Journalists for Human Rights sent me here to "build the capacity" of Kenyan journalists to report on human rights abuses. I had never been to Africa before. I took a leave of absence from a fun job as a news producer and fill-in host for the Maine Public Broadcasting Network.

I expected culture shock. I expected professional frustration. I expected sunburns and a lingering sense of groundlessness.

But this happiness, I didn't expect it.

This blog is called 8 Months, but I've decided to extend my time here indefinitely. My work for Journalists for Human Rights and the African Woman and Child Feature Service is over. I have no guaranteed income. I am staying anyhow, and not just for the inexplicable happiness.

I am staying for the myriad professional and personal challenges I face here every day.

It's not only bad shellfish. Every day I find out how little I know: about this country, about reporting, about myself. Every day I have to negotiate unexpected circumstances: attempting to file audio clips when all the Internet connections in Nairobi are slowed to a snail's pace, trying to find an electrician to fix the blown hot water tank, sweet talking security guards who want to confiscate my equipment before a big interview.

I am never bored in Kenya.

Every day there are more juicy stories on my want-to-cover list. Sometimes I wish for more hours in the day. Sometimes I wish I needed less sleep. I have never been so professionally stimulated.

I look at the list of want-to-cover stories taped to the wall above my little desk and my blood pressure spikes. It's not stress. It's excitement. There is so much work to do here. There are countless stories going untold.

As a freelancer, I am free to focus on the stories behind the stories. I am able to spend time on multiple, long interviews with one person who is not a news-maker. I can assign myself a story about local musicians, another about new agricultural technology and a third about international business. I can choose to ride my bicycle around the city for a day because, after seven months here, I know a great story will find me if only I keep my eyes and ears open.

That's why I'm staying in Kenya.

I have so much to learn. My Swahili is elementary. Kenyan political history is a tangled knot of tribe, party and corruption that I am only beginning to understand. But somehow, being an ignorant white woman works for me here. It gives me license to ask elementary questions, to play dumb, to be consciously oblivious.

And now that I am beginning to figure out how to be a reporter here - it requires a different skill set than North American reporting - I can ask those elementary questions of all sorts of people. I trust my intuition, and my naivete. I also trust my ability to bring notes back to my little desk, pump out a decent story and cross one more idea of my want-to-cover list.

As long as that list keeps growing, I will stay here. As long as I continue to be elated at new story ideas, I can't imagine why I would choose to be anywhere else.

Sometimes my joy here does leave me feeling guilty about not feeling guilty. Why should I be so happy in a country where many people are struggling on multiple fronts?

I soothe my conscience by reminding myself that Africa is still a 'dark continent' as far as much of the world is concerned; there are still people who think Africa is one country.

There are countless people in this country and this region whose stories are going untold. In some small way, I can help carry a few of those voices around the world. I can use my pen and microphone to help us understand one another a little better.

The art of coalition

2008-03-10T03:39:00.000-07:00

We are learning all sorts of things about coalitions and democracy here in Kenya these days.

This weekend's East African had a great interview with the German ambassador to Kenya. Walter Lindner talked about the utility of so-called grand coalitions when major national changes are underway that require broad consensus.

He spoke of Germany's recent experiences with a grand coalition: the hiccups, the tentative cooperation, the pull of party versus broad reform.

One of my favorite quotes was a response to a question about who oversees government when there is no official opposition.

"I guess the press will have to play a crucial role in keeping the government in check. Secondly, public opinion will be very important and things must be done in a way that everybody knows what is going on. But most of all, Kenya needs internal checks and balances within the coalition. This could be done with proper balancing of ministerial posts..."

One young woman, changed

2008-03-07T00:46:00.000-08:00

March 8 is International Women's Day.

In preparation, the reporters of the African Woman and Child Feature Service have been traveling around the country, gathering women's stories about the post-election violence.

I went to Eldoret, a community that was briefly in the international spotlight after dozens of people were killed in a church where they were taking shelter from post-election violence.

I talked with women who are living in camps for displaced people, Kalenjin women who are married to Kikuyu men, people who are left without jobs because their Kikuyu employers have fled.

All of the stories are moving. However, for those of us living here, none of them are particularly new.

The tale of Mercy Moses surprised me, though. She's a 21-year-old woman from a middle class Kalenjin family. Nothing particularly terrible has happened to her directly. Nonetheless, the way she thinks about her safety and her future has changed significantly...

Mercy Moses is wandering the dusty roads of an estate on the edges of Eldoret. She's fashionably dressed in a skirt, blouse, and long white scarf. She greets friends in the road. Most are people who she's known for most of her 21 years.

As she walks through her neighborhood, she points out houses that were abandoned during the post-election violence. She gestures toward hills that are scorched black by the fires that razed Kikuyu shambas to the ground.

She says the chaos at home began on December 30.

"After the [election] results were announced, everything went haywire. I knew things were bad when I saw a group of youths - at least 800 - walking together. People had crude weapons: rungus, pangas. I saw police with guns and teargas canisters. I saw houses being burned."

Moses is Kalenjin. She says that at the end of that first day of violence in Eldoret, she called her friends one-by-one to see how they were. It was only then, scrolling through the list of names in her mobile phone, that she realized that her group of friends is a great mix of tribes.

"I never actually though about it," Moses says. "I am of the generation that was brought up to know that this is Mark, this is Nduati, this is Timothy, this is so and so. It never really hit me that, 'You're a Kikuyu, you're a Luo, you're a Kalenjin.' It's only until the chaos began that it hits you."

At least seven of her lifelong friends have fled Eldoret. Moses says she's sure that one family will not return. The others are trying to sell their property and build new homes elsewhere.

Still, Moses says, the recent conflict hasn't changed the way she feels about her friends.

"These are people I call my lifelong friends. As much as they are no longer in town, they are still my friends. If anything happens, it is them that I lean on."

Moses is dating a young Kikuyu man. She says their relationship is still strong, despite the recent bloody revival of long-standing Kikuyu-Kalenjin land clashes. They don't talk about politics together, but Moses says they do pray for peace in Kenya.

While her friendships have not changed, Moses says her sense of safety at home has.

In late January a close friend of hers was raped at knife point. Moses says her friend thought she was boarding a taxi but ended up in the hands of two unknown men. Since then, Moses says she is much more careful about when she travels, and with whom.

"I think I am getting paranoid but maybe it's for the better," she says. "I can't board a private car right now. If I have to travel somewhere, I'd rather use public means. I don't travel past six. I travel only during the day."

She and her friends used to meet in town every afternoon during the holidays, for ice cream and movies and shopping. They would return home by eight or nine at night. Now, she says, they meet mid-morning so that everyone is home long before dark.

Not far from her family's home, Moses rounds a corner to find four young men walking toward her. She looks up at them and edges to the other side of the street.

"Seeing a group of men freaks me out," she says. "I see a group of young people and I think they are up to no good."

Moses is studying business and economics at a school in Nyanza. Their Christmas vacation has been extended to April because of the violence. While at home, Moses has been running a small business of her own, making mandazis and fried groundnuts for her family's shop.

When she graduates, Moses says she would like to start a tourism business. There is not much tourism in Eldoret. Before the December election, Moses says she was willing to move out of her home area to a more tourism-rich area. The recent violence has made her question such a move.

"I think I'll really consider where I settle later on in life," she says. "I'll have to consider how safe it is and the political climate and all. I wouldn't have thought of that before."

She says she never imagined she would see so much violence in Eldoret, or in Kenya. Although she voted in December, she says she does not plan to vote in 2012. Moses believes in democracy but, right now, she's skeptical about the potential for a fair democratic process in Kenya.

She says Kenyans need to come clean about the violence that has wracked this country over the past ten weeks. People who have wronged one another need to sit together and explain their actions. Only then will people be able to move forward as one nation.

"I want to be in a land where people live where they want to live, without the insecurity of the five-year deal. Right now, people are thinking, things will cool and after five years [during the next elections] it will be the same story. I am hoping for a Kenya that will have peace. Not just peace for the moment, but Peace peace."

Power-sharing and quiet

2008-03-05T22:27:00.000-08:00

I apologize for being so quiet in the midst of power-sharing deals, last minute emergency negotiators, regional conflict flare-ups and international acclaim.

Kenya's come a long way over the past week. After power-sharing negotiations broke down last week, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete came in to talk with the leaders. Kikwete is chair of the African Union. He is also reportedly close to the U.S. administration.

There is some speculation that he may have carried in a more stern warning from the United States, as government and opposition teams threatened to leave the talks. The two groups had agreed to the idea of a Prime Minister's post, to be held by Raila. They just couldn't decide what powers that post would have.

There are many details still to be ironed out but last Thursday, with Annan and Kikwete at their backs, the two leaders signed an agreement.

Then Annan, who reportedly said he felt like "a prisoner of peace", left Kenya after 41 days of holding the country together.

What does this deal mean on the ground in Kenya?

I notice that many people, when they talk about the deal, initially call it a "peace deal" and then correct themselves by calling it "power-sharing." People seem relieved that there is some kind of agreement. But they know an agreement is not a guarantee of peace in the long- or short-term.

There are differing opinions as to whether the deal will hold. There is a long history of broken promises in Kenya's political history, particularly between Kibaki and Raila. There is also concern that the 2012 elections will bring a new round of political violence.

When I was in Eldoret earlier this week, the mood was generally quiet. Food prices are still high. The hills around town are scorched from where small farms and estates were burned. There are still 15,000 Kikuyu and Kisii people camped at the Agricultural Society of Kenya's showground.

But for now, at least, tensions seem to have eased.

The great sign of an attempt to return to normalcy in Nairobi came, for me, on the cab ride back from the airport.

Navigating the endless traffic around downtown, my cab driver cut through Uhuru Park. For more than two months that symbol of independence was off-limits. As we cut past the podium and the couples sitting under shade trees, Lucas told me that the armed General Service Unit members were sent back to their barracks shortly after the deal was signed.

There is still a lot to be done. The consitution needs reform. Parliament opens today to consider a couple of bills that would usher in the National Accord and Reconciliation Act. Despite unfortunate newspaper typos, the members of parliament say they will "tow the line" to help usher in a new era in Kenyan politics.

Going forward, 8 Months will continue to bring you analysis, updates, various points of view and the voices of people who have been (and continue to be) affected by the post-election violence.

Voices: shattered by a bullet

2008-02-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

Judy Waguma of African Woman and Child Feature Service went into some of the roughest and poorest areas of Kibera last week. She brought back this story of a woman who was shot by a stray bullet during the post-election violence.

Shattered by a bullet

The road leading to Mashimoni village in Kibera is long and rough. Sewers stream like small rivers under handmade wooden bridges.

Pamela Aoko Ndhiwa has lived here for the last three years. She seems oblivious to the the sewage just inches from her plastic sandals as she crosses the small bridges leading to her house.

Ndhiwa walks slowly along the winding route home. She passes dark bars where, at mid-morning, men are deep in discussion over a local brew called busaa. Children are playing in the footpaths. Women are washing clothes, cleaning houses and plaiting one another's hair.

Ndhiwa does not talk much. Her hands are shoved into the pockets of her grey sweater. Every few meters, she stops to catch her breath.

Her home is one of several mud houses facing each other across a hard-packed footpath. Ndhiwa and her three children live in this single-room mud house. There is one bed, three stools and a small area for cooking.

Ndhiwa has been married and separated. Two of the children she is raising are her own. The third was orphaned when Ndhiwa's brother died.

Ndhiwa says all three of her siblings have died. She says she does not know whether they died of HIV/AIDS or its related infections. At the age of 21, she is the only person left to take care of her family.

"Despite everything, I have managed to look after my children and family well and take the kids to school," she says.

Ndhiwa was born and raised in Homabay. She says when she was a child she wanted to be a nurse but dropped out of school in standard eight. Her parents could not afford to pay her secondary fee education.

"I met my husband almost at the same time I dropped out of school. We then got married and he brought me to leave with him in Nairobi where he worked as a mechanic," she says.

She conceived her last child after being married for two years. Ndhiwa says after her youngest child was born, both she and the baby got sick.

"My baby would get sick frequently, but I brushed it off as a common ailment for babies and that she we will get better," says Ndhiwa.

She says that her husband was involved with a woman whose health she questioned. When Ndhiwa's illness persisted, she decided to get testes for HIV/AIDS.

"The results came positive," she says. "I could not believe it. I went home and pretended that things were fine. My CD4 count was 200 at the time."

That count measures immune system activity. A low CD4 count indicates a depressed immune system. Ndhiwa says she ignored the test results until her health worsened. Then she went back to Medecins Sans Frontiers, a medical aid agency in Kibera, where her HIV-positive status was again confirmed.

"My CD4 count had then dropped to 90 and they had to put me on [anti retroviral drugs]," she says.

After counseling and nutrition training from Medecins Sans Frontiers she says was able to come to terms with her status. She resolved to try to live a long and healthy life so that she could care for her children.

During this time, she says, her husband disappeared. She has not seen or heard from him since.

In her determination to make things work, Ndhiwa started a small shop where she sells various drugs. She also sells fingerlings on the side to support her family. She says business was going well until the post-election violence erupted. Her small shop was looted and claimed by rowdy youths in Kibera.

Facing the loss of her livelihood, Ndhiwa's life was endangered on the 31st of January, when a stray bullet hit her left breast.

"I must admit that God loves me, because the bullet missed hitting my baby's head by a whisker, as I was holding her in my arms," she says.

The shot came at about eight o'clock in the morning when, she says, "I was seated in the house holding my baby in the arms thinking of what I would do for the children this new year."

Ndhiwa could hear fighting and gunshots outside her house. She was cuddling the one-year old baby when suddenly she felt something hit her hard. The next thing she remembers she was lying on the floor.

"I had no clue what it was. But I saw blood oozing out of my chest. I got more frightened when I heard people rushing to my house and making a lot of noise. On seeing me lying on the floor they started screaming that I had been shot."

Ndhiwa says she lay on her floor for close to 30 minutes. Her neighbors called for police to take her to the hospital.

She says that when they got to Kenyatta hospital at around nine in the morning, she waited for hours in the casualty department before being attended to.

"I was in so much pain. I sat there from nine in the morning to midnight, when a nurse sympathized with me and took me to the ward."

For three days, Ndhiwa stayed at the hospital without treatment.

"No doctors were attending to me," she says.

She says that there was serious discrimination in the hospital because she is Luo.

"I could hear some nurses saying that I was shot when I had gone to collect stones for my husband," she says.

Lady Luck shone on Ndhiwa when a doctor sympathized with her and looked at her case.

"He wondered why I still had the bullet lodged in my body," she says.

There were many patients at the hospital, Ndhiwa says. She was told that she could not go to an operating theatre since it was busy. The doctor took her to a different ward and covered her eyes with a piece of cloth. He gave her an injection and removed the bullet without general anesthetic.

Tears roll down her cheeks as Ndhiwa remembers the surgery. During the procedure she removed the cloth from her eyes. She winces as she talks about the agony she went through.

"I was in so much pain. It was unbearable, I could not even scream," she says. "I cried slowly, biting hard on my lips. He gave me more injections several times and continued to remove the bullet until it was fully out. All this time I could see everything he was doing."

The bullet was successfully removed. The hospital bill was ksh 6035. Ndhiwa says she could not afford to pay since she had lost her business.

Ndhiwa and the doctors agreed that she would pay installments of ksh 500 until her debt is paid off. But still, she has not fully recovered from the wound and the surgery.

"My health is not good. Now with the bullet wound, I cannot work as hard as I used to. I get weak all the time."

From being a strong and hard working woman, Ndhiwa is now forced to beg for food. She is relying on her neighbors to take care of her children.

Despite her struggles, Ndhiwa considers it a blessings to be alive. She knows she could easily have become one of the 1000 or more Kenyans who have been killed since Kenya's disputed presidential election. -Judy Waguma

Interfaith women for peace

2008-02-26T00:23:00.000-08:00

Before the elections, I spent a day with a group of women from Kibera who are working toward peace in the slum.

The article about Interfaith Women for Peace and Development was just published in the latest edition of Intercultures Magazine.

It's poignant to read the story from the other side of post-election turmoil. But Mama Hamza's message still rings true...

Women need peace. Their children need peace. Who is going to give a woman peace? Who will give a woman power? It is you, yourself, and your sisters.

Voices: living with HIV during conflict part II

2008-02-25T05:01:00.000-08:00

Mediation talks are still going on here. It seems that the government and the opposition have agreed to create a Prime Ministerial post. How they will adjust the consitution to make that possible is not yet clear.

Fighting is still going on as well. A friend called from Kakamega last week to tell me the town was on fire again. There was no mention of it in the local press the next day. Local press give the ongoing violence only selective and marginal coverage. International press give no coverage to these flare-ups.

There are also growing threats of new widespread violence, as some people grow impatient with the pace of the mediation process. There are rumors that both government and opposition supporters are gearing up for more fighting.

There are Mayoral elections across Kenya today. The city councillors are the only people who cast ballots in that process. Kenyan colleagues say the results are unlikely to create any new unrest.

In the meantime, the African Woman and Child Feature Service staff is busy gathering voices of women and children who have been affected by the conflict. Here are more interviews that Joyce Chimbi did with HIV-positive women who have been displaced by the violence.

Ann Wairimu

Before the post-election violence, Ann Wairimu took for granted her easy access to anti-retroviral drugs.

On the 4th of January, Ann fled her house in Gatwekera, Kibera with no medication to keep her condition in check. She says nothing could have prepared her for how quickly her health has deteriorated.

"I don't know exactly when I contracted the HIV virus, but you know the kind of life we lead in the slum. Everyday is a struggle, trying to make a living in whichever way we can.

I have been on Septrin for some time and every day I have grown stronger. The usual opportunistic infections have been there but I have faced them with courage.

Since I fled my house, I haven't been able to eat well. With uncertain food provision, your health can't withstand the blow.

I have been experiencing frequent bouts of brief blackouts. I have been having a running stomach. The chest pains are unbearable and so are the constant headaches.

The sores around my mouth are too painful and even when there is food, it a task putting it in my mouth.

I still take my medication as is required but am beginning to have second thoughts.

Why should I worry about my health when my life is falling apart? Do I have a future in a country where I'm among thousands of internally displaced Kenyans?

As Kenyans continue to devour each other, I have lost all hope of redeeming myself. When you are HIV positive, this kind of constant worry counteracts all the gains made.

I haven't seen my husband since chaos erupted, and now my five children are looking at me as the symbol of hope.

Life for me has taken a very unfortunate turn. Before the results were announced, I used to cater for my household with the little money I made at my stall.

Now I can't even be a source of hope for myself and most importantly, my children, in these very trying times."

Wairimu says is now only hoping for is peace, and for people to embrace brotherhood.

Jane Nyamboka

Lying on the grass, her eyes welling up with unshed tears, Jane Nyamboka relives her life as a HIV-positive mother of three and as a displaced person in her own country.

Her fairly bearable life in Kibera was harshly disrupted on the 2nd of January, by an outbreak of violence in Kibera slums, where she has been living for the last six years.

The sorrow and desperation she feels is evident in her sunken eyes. As she talks about her experience, she is forced to pause as her chest heaves with a persistent cough.

"It is difficult to reconcile what my life was with what it has come to be.

When I tested HIV-positive in 2002, I knew it would only be a matter of days before I died. I started squandering the little money I had set aside for my business.

Why save money when my days on earth were to end soon? But the days passed, and the months, and now about five years later, I'm still alive and kicking.

After life handed me one of the most feared conditions, I realized that I didn't have to catalyze my death.

I started stocking up my hardware shop and taking my anti-retroviral drugs as was advised at Kenyatta Hospital, where I still check in.

My three children have been accessing quality education but all that has changed now. Since I fled my house, my health has nosedived.

I forgot my drugs in the house. With all the chaos and terror, it was the last thing on my mind.

For about three days, I didn't take any medication. Luckily, the International Medical Corps was very swift. They supplied us with the drugs we needed.

Normally, I take the medication twice a day. This is normally coupled with frequent eating so that I can be strong enough for the drugs.

In addition, I have to eat quality food. The uncertain quality of food provision at the camp has meted a hard blow on my health.

My skin is now covered by a very painful rash. Around my chest, there are tiny blisters which have made my life a nightmare. The persistent cough is now driving me to the edge.

This, I feel, will catalyze my situation from being HIV positive to having full-blown AIDS."

For Nyamboka and many other women in her condition, only peace would reassure them that life will go back to normal.

Hannah Wambui

Hannah Wambui goes into deep thought as she wonders where she will go when she leaves the Jamhuri grounds. She has sought refuge here for a month since the post-election violence erupted.

Wambui is 40 years old. She is a single mother of two children, who are both in their upper primary school. She also cares for three orphans whose parents succumbed to HIV/AIDS. With her dependants sitting around her, she ponders what life holds in store for all of them.

Everything that she owned was stolen and her house burnt to ashes in the Kianda village of Kibera during the violence. Like many other victims of the chaos that followed the December 2007 elections, Wambui saw her life change in a few moments.

"I have nowhere to go to since I virtually lost everything that I ever owned in my life," Wambui says.

On top of homelessness and poverty, Wambui is also managing and HIV/AIDS infection. She was diagnosed in 2003 and has been taking anti-retroviral drugs. She says the stress and disruptions of early 2008 have taken a toll on her health. She is emaciated and says she has developed several chest complications due to sleeping in the cold at the Jamhuri fairgrounds.

For over 15 years, Wambui and her family survived on rental income from a property she inherited from her mother. Wambui also owned a small shop where she sold dried grains.

Wambui says, although she has been ill on several occasions due to opportunistic infections, she always continued working to earn enough money to take care of herself and her children.

She confesses that what is now killing her is not the fact that she is HIV positive, but stress from the worry over what the future holds for her family.

"Even if I take [anti-retroviral drugs], I am not able to take piece my life together and I am really worried about my children's future," says Wambui.

So far, her children have not returned to school for the new semester. Wambui says although schools have opened, they lack the basic supplies.

Although, she receives medicines from the International Medical Corps, Wambui says the challenge has been getting a decent meal to support the drugs.

She wonders at how she has been reduced to being a burden to the community, while she was used to caring for herself.

Wambui says she separated with her husband about six years ago because her husband was irresponsible. The only close relative is her sister who lives in the outskirts of Nairobi. Wambui says staying with her sister would only be a temporary solution, as her sister struggles daily to meet her own family's needs

With tearful eyes, Wambui says she hopes that calm will be restored, but she would be happier if even she had a roof over her head and capital to start any kind of business.

New report reviews post-election violence, looks ahead

2008-02-22T04:02:00.000-08:00

If you are looking for a comprehensive overview of some of the worst that has happened in Kenya since the December 27th elections, the Oscar Foundation has released a report today that might interest you.

WARNING: There are some graphic images and stories in this report.
Download ethnicity_failed_democracy.pdf

The foundation runs free legal aid clinics here. Their paralegals have been gathering stories and documentation of some of the worst violence of the past two months.

The report's particular focus is on the failures of the government and police force to maintain the peace in Kenya. It also gives some good background on localized violence. The foundation details the planning that went into some of the attacks and opines on what is needed to prevent more violence in Kenya in the short and long term.

8 Months multimedia: displaced business people

2008-02-20T20:03:00.000-08:00

At the Marketplace website, you can hear a story that I produced about Kenyan business people displaced by the post-election violence.

Voices: living with HIV during conflict

2008-02-19T22:41:00.000-08:00

Being poor and HIV-positive is not easy on a good day.

Approximately 50 percent of the residents of Kibera have HIV/AIDS. Many of them get regular supplies of antiretroviral drugs from medical aid groups, but they struggle to get adequate nutrition to support their immune systems.

When the protests and violence swept Kibera after the December election, many people were left without homes, work or access to their regular medicines. The health of many people with HIV deteriorated because of the stress, and poor shelter and nutrition.

As part of the African Woman and Child Feature Service's Voices project, Joyce Chimbi visited HIV-positive women who have been displaced from Kibera. Here are the stories of Rose Gakii and Grace Oloo.

Rose Gakii

Rose Gakii has gone through a whirlwind of emotions since 2003, when she was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. She has gone from denial to withdrawal and even attempting suicide.

With counseling, Gakii says she overcame the crippling desperation she felt after testing positive for the dreaded virus. With renewed outlook towards life she has worked hard enough to feed her seven children.

Her life crumbled again on January third, when violence erupted across Kenya. Since then, her once tranquil days in Kibera's Makina village have become a nightmare.

I envy the dead, when you die; you go to a better place, a place of rest.

These tears that are streaming down my face are those of bitterness. I am 44 years old, a poor woman who has not stolen even a single cent from anyone. But look at me now. I have become a refugee in my own country.

I have been at Jamhuri Park for the last one week.

I tested positive [for HIV/AIDS] in 2003. My husband has been dead for the last five years. I am the sole breadwinner.

I have seven children; three of them orphans. My stall has enabled me to pay my rent, which is Ksh 600 per month [abou 10 USD] and to put food on the table. But everything was destroyed in the fire [following the election results of 2007].

My 16 year old boy is in Kabete prison. He was arrested on the 16th of January. I'm his mother and I know that my boy is innocent. They said that he was among the youths who stole and slaughtered a cow.

The constant worry and the overbearing nervous tension is driving me to the edge, I feel like I'm running mad. You can imagine what this is doing to my health.

I feel as if my head is a well of tears. Tears and my children are the only things I have left.

For the mother of seven, although life will never be the same again, she says if peace was restored the sense of security would be an impetus toward rebuilding her life.

Grace Oloo

Grace Oloo's life had taken a predictable but comfortable path since she tested positive for HIV/AIDS almost four years ago.

Every morning, she would wake up with the cock crow, see her children off to school, tidy her house, and open her business in the Soweto village of the Kibera slums.

Like most people, Oloo says she had never imagined Kenya sinking into chaos. As fresh incidences of violence flare up across the country, she says her personal turmoil escalates.

Everything I have worked hard for has been reduced to ashes. Having triumphed against great odds to get this far, the sorrow within me is overwhelming.

In March of 2003, I had been bedridden for quite sometime. I was suffering from Tuberculosis and despite treatment, doctors said I wasn't making progress. They tested me for HIV, which confirmed their suspicions. I was HIV positive. At only 33 years, my world fell apart.

But with four children of my own and a grandchild, I had to soldier on. My husband, also positive, resorted to taking cheap brew. As the sole breadwinner, I began selling fish.

It was a very humble beginning but I have expanded the business over the years. I have been able to look after my children. My 18 year old daughter and my orphaned niece are also HIV positive.

After the general elections results were announced, Kibera was transformed into a madhouse. I live in Soweto, which was terribly torn apart.

My children and I fled on the third of January. It was the worst experience I have ever had. Even though I didn't leave my antiretroviral drugs behind, without a warm place and quality food, I knew my health was in jeopardy.

I wasn't really as worried for myself as I was for my one-and-a-half year old niece. Besides being HIV positive, she suffers from pneumonia and asthma. I had this cold fear deep within me that it was only a matter of time before she died.

For the two nights she spent at Jamhuri Park, I stayed up all night frantically trying to warm her shriveled body. The sores on her body were getting worse and she was too weak.

Her sunken eyes would stare at me for most of the night, the cold being too much for her to sleep for long periods. Her health has deteriorated to alarming levels.

I am not any different from her, I have been experiencing constant headaches. The three nights I spent at the park have put my health between a rock and a hard place.

During the destructions, I lost fish that was worth about Ksh 25,000 without profit [about 400 USD]. I take my orders from Tanzania and I have been making good progress.

At the moment, I feel like I'm just about to write the last chapters of my life. The devastating desperation I feel erases any traces of all the dreams I once had.

Oloo says with some investment capital, she would be ready to start afresh.

Voices of women and children: launching a new project

2008-02-19T04:27:00.000-08:00

It's the same story every time. Women, children and people living in poverty are the most affected by violence and unrest.

But each woman and every child has their own story to tell about the confict in Kenya.

There are stories of fleeing hometowns because people with certain last names were suddenly not welcome. There are stories of struggling to find food, clean water and medicine. There are stories of lost husbands, fathers, children. There are stories of rape, riot and murder. And there are stories of hope, of brotherhood in the face of ethnic violence.

The African Woman and Child Feature Service is launching a project to help women and children tell the stories of how they are affected by the post-election violence. The Urgent Action Fund is supporting the project. Over the next couple of months, the reporting and editorial staff will be gathering these stories. We will be distributing them to media around the region and I will be posting some of them here.

Here is the first Voices posting. It was written by Joyce Chimbi, a program officer and junior reporter at AWCFS.

Double jeoprdy for refugees in Kenya

When Hamida Sheikh fled Ethiopia in 2002 and took refuge in Kenya, she hoped that her life would take a turn for the better.

In her home country, Sheikh was associated with an anti-government rebel group. She says that endangered her life, and the lives of her five children. She had to take some drastic measures.

"My husband was arrested for allegedly supporting a rebel group. Life became very hard. Without him for protection, I knew it was only a matter of time before I was killed," she says.

Her husband is still in detention back in Ethiopia, and it has been a long time since they saw one another. Her youngest child is a constant reminder of the humiliation and assault she endured at the end of her time in Ethiopia. It's a child born out of rape.

Hamida is one of the estimated 310 refugees who have been camping at Nairobi's Jamhuri Park. She is caught up in a struggle that she does not even comprehend.

The hardship these refugees are now facing, in a foreign country torn by conflict is not unique. In search of safety, many refugees have sought asylum in countries that are themselves ablaze with conflict.

When violence erupted in Kenya following the December elections, people seeking asylum in Kenya were not spared the disruption in many parts of the country.

"Although we have no political affiliations, when the supporters of the two main political protagonists crashed, we were caught in the middle," Sheikh says.

She says people in her community did not initially feel threatened because, as foreigners, they were neutral, as far as tribal identities were concerned. In the end, she says, that was not enough for them to avoid the chaos that has pervaded the country.

Hamida says that she knew it was time to seek protection at the displaced persons' camp when leaflets were dropped at night, ordering the refugees to vacate their houses or face dire consequences.

Having been at the camp for about three weeks, most of the Ethiopians sit in groups smoking tobacco and chewing miraa, as they contemplate a way out of their predicament.

"This is called shisha," says 25-year-old Kadio Wako, gesturing to tall, colorful pipe. "It's a form of tobacco from Egypt .It has helped us to remain sane because it stimulates our nerves, keeping away stress."

He says they have had tobacco throughout conflict, because they bought plenty of it in Garissa, before the violence erupted.

Wako was studying law in Ethiopia when the political situation there became too volatile in 2003 and he decided to flee the country. The fact that his father was actively involved in politics and had been a Minister of Finance, put him in a very dangerous position.

"I'm Oromo, the majority ethnic group which in Ethiopia. That automatically qualifies you as a rebel against TPLF [Tigray People's Liberation Front] government," Wako says.

Wako's experience of strife and flight in Ethiopia is unfortunately being repeated in Kenya. He says that having to live through it again is tragic. Wako emphasizes that most of the refugees cannot go back to their countries, because the situations that instigated their exile have not improved.

"The TPLF government is still in power, and I'm still an Oromo. It would simply mean going back to where all this begun," Wako says.

His sentiments are echoed by Radia Hassan, who has been living in Kenya since 1999.

"The thought of returning to my country paralyzes me with fear," she says, as she pauses to blow smoke between her teeth.

"In Ethiopia, I was threatened, humiliated and abused," she says. "Under [the United Nations High Commission for Refugees], I was recognized as a refugee and registered right here in Kenya."

Hassan left her five children in Ethiopia. She settled in Kenya in the hope that she could rebuild her life and have her children join her.

Even though life in Kenya has been difficult owing to what she terms "hard economic times," Hassan has been grateful to be free to live her life.

"It's hell always watching your back, for fear that your enemies might make good their threat on your life."

Radia also says that it has been quite nerve wrecking living at Jamhuri Park. The constant sounds of gun shots in the near by Kibera slum has been a nightmare.

Although those staying at the camp have been assured of security, most of the nights they can hardly sleep for fear of being ambushed. The women seem to be the most affected by the conflict. Even at the camp, reported cases of rape are a constant reminder of their vulnerability.

"It is unfortunate that even with the situation as it is, sexual assault within the camp has persisted," says Doreen Bwisa, who is an administrator at the camp's medical clinic.

Most of these refugees have been in the country for many years. Some of the children running around were born in Kenya and have no memories of their parents' troubled past.

"I fled Sudan eight years ago," says Yong Sumi. "In Kenya, I have managed to rebuild my life but as things stand now, I feel like my future is hanging in the balance."

For these people now displaced in a country where they once found solace, their future is becoming more and more cloudy.

They say that they feel as if history is repeating itself. Their desperation is apparent and most of them feel neglected because, amidst the chaos, the particular needs of people in the refugee community seem not to be addressed.

Sumi says that since the government announced its plan to close the camp, he has worried every day about where he will go next.

"On Sunday the 27th , when most of the displaced Kenyans began leaving the camp in droves, we the foreigners huddled together in utter hopelessness," Sumi says

Standing next to him, Wako interjects, "Some of the displaced Kenyans have gone back to their houses, others are going to their rural homes, but where can we go?"

They feel that being a small group among the estimated 300,000 internally displaced people in Kenya has made it difficult for their plight to be addressed.

According to Margaret Wanyiri, the camp coordinator under the National Alliance of Churches, these are Sudanese, Rwandese and Ethiopian people currently staying at Jamhuri Park.

Wanyiri says the plight of the refugees is being addressed, and practical measures are being undertaken to relocate them to Kakuma refugee camp.

"We are actually hoping to have the exercise of relocating the refugees by Wednesday, 30th of January," Wanyiri says.

Kakuma camp, established about 12 years ago, is one of the world's largest and oldest refugee camps. Situated in the northern part of Kenya, the camp is home to an estimated 86,000 refugees from nine different countries.

Kakuma has seen frequent food shortages and incidences of sexual assault. That reputation does little to reassure the refugees at Jamhuri Park as they look at an uncertain future.

According to statistics by Church World Service, at the end of 2006 there were 2,932,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Africa.

Most refugees in Africa flee to neighboring countries. In the 2006 Church World Service statistics, Sudan produced the highest number of asylum seekers. Kenya hosted the second-highest number of refugees, Tanzania hosted the highest number.

In their report, the Church World Service said the statistics reaffirms the presence of conflict in many African societies, mostly due to ethnic intolerance.

"[The statistics] are symptomatic of the tragedy of the ethnic conflicts, social disintegration and political anarchy prevailing in some countries in Africa," the report says.

According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugee, people will only stop needing to flee their home countries when African political leaders embrace politics of inclusion. This would consequently create a solid base for responsible and accountable governance, which would in turn create room for a just and fair society.

Coalitions, constitutions and Condoleeza

2008-02-18T06:36:00.000-08:00

Kenya seems to be heading toward a coalition government and a new constituion.

Representatives of the party in power and the opposition assemble again today to continue hashing out some kind of agreement about how to handle the political turmoil following last December's elections. Details of the talks are not public. Increasingly, however, the parties and Annan seem to be suggesting that they are working out a framework for a coalition government.

How such a government would function, how long it would be in power, when the next elections would be held: all of these questions are still up in the air.

On the ground, however, there does seem to be some public support for the idea. The international community is pushing it. In Benin this weekend, George Bush said there must be power-sharing. Ban Ki-Moon and other world leaders have issued similar statements. To reinforce the United State's point, Bush is sending Condoleeza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State, to Kenya today.

So, on this Monday morning, as talks resume and Kenyans get ready to receive yet another high-profile international visitor, I went to the heart of Nairobi to gather some opinions on coalitions and Condoleeza.

Peter - unemployed

For us, we want peace, and for our country to get back where it was. We need a coalition government because people are suffering right now. If [the fighting is] going to continue, the common man is going to suffer. I think a coalition can work. As long as these leaders will be apart from their selfishness, it will work.

Rice, I think it is good for her to come to Kenya. We need such people to come and bring peace into our country.

Mary - aspiring journalist

I really don't think a coalition government is going to solve the problems in Kenyan right now, especially if it is supposed to be a coalition between Mwai Kibaki and Raila. I don't see it working. The two parties both believe that the seat should be theirs, the Presidency. When you have two people contesting over it strongly, as they are, I don't think it is going to work.

Either way, they are both selfish. Kibaki is not going to give Raila what he wants. Raila is not going to give Kibaki what he wants. If either side should take the Presidency, it's better for Kenya than a coalition. I really don't think it can work.

Condoleeza is just going to stamp what Bush's agenda is, that is a coalition government. At the end of the day, it stands with the Kenya people. What do they want? Are they going to go for Bush and Condoleeza's aspirations? I really don't think so. And I think it is an insult to the work that Kofi Annan has been doing here.

Vivian - student

I think it will be a good idea so long as there is peace and everything resumes back to normal. When it comes to the coalition government, I wish both of them can agree on basic factors, not favoring either party.

My take on Condoleeza's visit in Kenya? I think it's a good thing, as long as it builds peace. She will come to support Annan.

David - banker

[Whether a coaltion can work] remains to be seen. This is a fairly new concept as far as we are concerned. We have not had such a situation in the past, since independence.

About Rice, it shows the importance the American government is giving to the Kenyan crisis.

Maureen - fashion designer

We are ready for [a coalition]. In fact, that is what we want. If they agree, they should [work together]. Those who stole our votes should agree, we work together as a team. And then maybe after two years, we go for new elections.

I'm sure that at least we will get a solution by the arrival in Kenya of Condoleeza Rice.

Eunice - unemployed

A coalition might work but I am not so sure that it might happen. We are just waiting.

The visit will be important because it will help the government to know that we are being supported by a country like the United States.

James - newspaper vendor

It should not work. Because even per our constitution, it does not work. If one has won an election, he has won an election. If one has been thrown in an election, he has been thrown in an election. If we form a coalition, there will be none who will accept a defeat. They will always be wanting to share the power. Even our constitution does not allow that.

Rice should come and calm down the situation. But we have no calamity in Kenya. I don't see how she can be useful.

John - consultant

It's all a waste of time. If you rig elections, you have lost trust of everybody. The only way to recover that is to find a way that elections can be done. The person who wins fairly, leads the country.

Rice's visit might add value to what is going on.

Judith - business person

According to me, the coalition government is not bad. The opposition side is saying they won the election, and the government is also insisting that they won the election. You see the way the country is having a lot of problems. So we think if they do coalition government and they work together, people will be happy. They will see the way forward. I think people should work together.

I think Condoleeza's visit is useful. We, as Kenyans, can't make this thing alone. This stress we have found, we can't solve it alone. If there are some people who can come from outside, they can help us because they are seeing what we are not seeing. If they come in between, they will help the two. They will tell them what will make them convinced to make that peace.

Waweru - taxi driver

The coalition government won't make it. Raila is the one who brought multi-partyism. If you bring them into a coalition government, will there be any multi-partyism? There won't be. It would be better to remain with a single government. Then, if we elect ODM, then we shall have another government. We would rather wait. After the present President is over, Raila will take over.

Giving power to both presidents, they rule the country, that will come as if it is a single party system. We have the official opposition to be minding the current government. If there is any trouble, the opposition will raise oppositions. So at least the government will have a chance to be opposed. Then, after five years, we will give the opposition a chance to lead us.

Rice can help. Maybe she will talk to Raila and tell him to be patient. Five years is not a big deal.

Peter - lawyer

The issue of a coalition government is still a problem. If you look back to the year of 2002, they had to sign a [memorandum of understanding] for the purpose of forming something like a coalition government. There were several parties coming together for the purpose of forming that government. But they did not even honor that MOU, What makes you think it will last this time around if they come with a coalition government. How long can it stay? Can it last? The issue of a coalition government right now, it might not work.

People need to go back to elections. Let people elect a popular President. We need an interim government that will see to issues like the amendment of the constitution, disbanding of the electoral commission of Kenya. Once that is done, we can go for elections in the next two years. I think this animosity will have subsided within the next two years.

The coming of Condoleeza Rice is a good thing. People in Kenya, some of those ones who have taken power, are greedy people. They need some pressure from outside the country. Now they will see that the whole world is serious about the issues in Kenya. Now, if there are some issues in the negotiations, they can take them seriously.

People in Kenya are used to doing things with impunity. I do hope that the coming of Condoleeza Rice from the U.S. will show them that things are serious in the country. If they are going into negotiations, they do it knowing that everyone is watching.

-------------------

Peter and James both bring up the tangled history of constitutional politics in Kenya. The current constitution dates back to independence. It concentrates power in the presidency and gives little room for opposition parties or members of parliament to impact policy.

Numerous attempts to ammend it have failed. Most notably, a 2005 draft constitution failed to get adequate support in a national referendum after the splintering of its supporters. But last week, staff from Annan's team said the government and the opposition had agreed to write a new constitution.

Some Kenyans says, perhaps the greatest silver lining of this post-election conflict will be the push to finally enact a constituion that will enable true Kenyan democracy

Reporting on conflict: a conversation with John Keating

2008-02-15T12:55:00.000-08:00

John Keating is a veteran journalist and journalism trainer from Canada. He has worked with IMPACS, and the Media and Democracy Group, training reporters in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Guyana, Brunei and Kyrgyzstan.

He spent the past three days leading a conflict sensitive journalism course for 25 reporters in Nairobi. His work was supported by International Media Support.

What are you finding that reporters are struggling with most, covering this conflict?

The thing that keeps coming up again and again is how, even if they write their stories in a balanced way, many of the editors will change them because there is a lot of corruption in the media here. People admit that pretty freely, even a few of the senior people are brave enough to say it. A lot of the media is owned directly or indirectly by politicians. They put pressure on, or pay off editors and owners to skew things to their point of view.

How much of that frustration on the part of journalists is due to a concern for their own safety?

That does come up. They say they go out for something, a demonstration or something, and the people say, "oh, you are from the Kikuyu paper." That can make them feel unsafe or frustrated because they don't see themselves as [affiliated to one particular side]. There is also a lot of division in the newsroom now. People are telling me, "People who used to be my friends, they are from a different tribe, and we don't even talk any more..."

There's one guy up there who is one of the displaced persons who had to leave his town because he didn't feel it was safe any more. He was saying, "How do I write about this stuff when I am part of the story?"

How do you define conflict sensitive journalism?

It's just a different way of looking at how you report conflicts such as the one here in Kenya. It means doing good basic journalism, not sensationalizing things, being accurate and fair and balanced but also not simply reporting what the two warring sides are saying. Report it from different points of view. If the economy is in trouble because of the conflict, you talk to business leaders. You go do stories about the family whose house was burned out by the riot, rather than only report on the riot. There's also another story there, a human story.

It's basically doing the solid journalism that we should be doing anyway. It also tends to teach people a rudimentary conflict theory: what causes conflict, how it is resolved, how does the media play a role in resolving it.

Why, in particular, is it important to have fair and balanced domestic reporting in a situation like this?

Well, how are you going to solve any problem if you don't have any proper communication about it. Most of the violence in any conflict is about power and money, who's got it and who doesn't. But it is easily seen as an ethnic or religious divide. It creates a situation where you start thinking that, "The other side is the bad guys. The other side is the one I don't trust. I don't know very much about them but I know they are bad." You don't clear up those kinds of mis-perceptions until you have communication and you don't have communication if you don't have a decent media. Communication is the key to resolving any conflict.

What can domestic reporters do that perhaps foreign press can't do?

Obviously they live here, they know the culture, they understand the situation better than outsiders. The majority of the media that people here consume is local media. A lot of those small villages, their only source of information, or at least the only one they listen to, is the FM station. So if you have a FM station that is whipping people up and encouraging people to spout hate propaganda against other groups, you are never going to resolve anything.

The fighting has died down now. Things are relatively calm as far as I can tell but the problem hasn't gone away. The problem doesn't go away unless you talk about it and the way you talk about it is through the media.

The media can frame the conflict in a certain way, if they are smart enough and good enough journalists to think about it, they don't have to just frame the conflict as one part against the other. They can frame the conflict as one group is disadvantage and another is not. They can explore the common ground that both sides share, which is where you are going to find the solution.

What is your sense of how the issues are being covered by local press?

From the little bit I have seen, there has been a tendency to have this message of peace. They have suddenly become peace advocates rather than conflict sensitive journalists. It's almost like, "let's sweep it under the carpet and let's hold hands." In my view, that's not the answer either.

I will just give you an example. I picked up one of the papers this morning and looked at the front page. It was a story about how Sweden and Britain are trying to put pressure on them to settle the situation. But the lead was "A noose is about to be put around the necks of the people standing in the way of a peace settlement."

On the face of it, it sounds like a colorful lead. When you look at it more closely, it is still taking this position that there are bad guys and good guys and the bad guys are standing in the way and they won't be able to stand in the way much longer. They don't tell you who the good guys and the bad guys are, but if you read that newspaper and you live here, you know exactly who they are talking about.

That's exactly the kind of thing that I am trying to tell them: even something like that, that on the surface appears subtle or harmless or just overwritten, is in fact damaging to any attempt to get a settlement. It still divides.

What are you advising reporters in terms of doing stories about the way forward, not just covering events?

That's another thing I have been saying over and over again. Maybe the leaders don't have the solution but there are other people out there who do. There are other people and other ideas. There are academics and diplomats. You could even write a story about how another country solved a similar problem in the past. You don't have to wait for the press release from the government and print it saying, "The only way forward is for the opposition to pull up the pins and leave."

It's just good basic journalism, really.

If you were to paint a picture of the ideal composition of a newspaper in the middle of a conflict, what would you like the content of the newspaper to be?

First of all, I'd like it to have the news. That is one thing I kept reinforcing: don't hide it. The idea here is not to hide anything or sugarcoat it. We're journalists and what we are supposed to be doing is the news. And then I would like to see several points of view, not just the government and opposition. Several points of view from all levels, from the government level down to the person who has to stay with their relatives because their house was burned down.

I'd like to see articles about how similar crises were handled in other countries at other times; stories about the basic things that are wrong that have contributed to the situation, such as the institutionalized poverty here. There's no end of social issues that contribute in small and big ways to [the conflict]. I think somebody should be starting to point out the corruption and the problems.

In this idea of sensitivity, is there ever a point where you pull back from being explicit?

This came up in the class. What I hope I got across is that, of course you should say the names of tribes if it is relevant to the story. If it's not part of the story, why put it in?

That's maybe harder to do in practice but to give a more practical example, you might say "Six people died in a riot," and not have the lead sentence be "Six Kikuyus were massacred by a crowd of outraged Luos" It'll come up a lot of times that it is part of the story. The bottom line is, this is journalism. If it news, put it in. If it is irrelevant to the story, why is it there in the first place?

What positive role do you think first-person journalism can have in this kind of situation?

That also came up today. The guy I mentioned, who had to flee because he felt unsafe, when he finished telling me [about fleeing], I said "That's a great story. Did you write it?" And it turns out he did. As long as you can do it without turning it into revenge, as long as it is something that is dispassionate and tells the story. The less sensational you can make it, the less emotional you make it, the bigger impact it is going to have. If it's news, it's news, do it.

What are the key points that you cover in terms of basic journalism skills?

It's just a review of the basics: accuracy, balance, fairness and responsible journalism. Avoid inflammatory language. Call people what they call themselves. And just be aware that you as a journalist, you are part of this. Everyone is getting their information from you and if you don't give them the right information or you give it in a way that favors one side over the other, the trouble is just going to keep going, because nobody is going to know what is going on.

[The conflict theory focuses on] the sources of conflict. The four main ones are ethnic differences, political differences, lack of resources and lack of power. In fact, if you look at almost any conflict it looks like one of the first two and it's almost always one of the second two.

Have you found resistance to any of the ideas you are presenting?

No. It's surprising how talkative they are and how much they care about these issues. I think journalism here seems to be more sophisticated than most places I have been.

I think people really want to do something. I was at this roundtable on Tuesday and the very first guy is a big shot editor at [one of the papers], he gave a very passionate off-the-cuff speech about how the media had failed and about how he had failed. And how much shame it has brought to journalism. It was very moving, really. I was very surprised because he is a fairly senior editor, apparently. Everybody in the room sort of agreed with him.

There are still corrupt owners and there are still corrupt politicians who control much of the media and there are still corrupt editors. That is the biggest stumbling block: corruption. It's what is really going to make it difficult to change anything. But there is a will there among the day-to-day journalists and some of the senior people as well.

These are great people, really smart and engaged. They really want to change things for the better, if only their bosses will let them.

Feet on the ground

2008-02-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

I am back in Nairobi now, getting my feet back under me for what I hope will be a long, fruitful journalistic journey.

I've published a new essay for an international relations website out of Oxford University. Since retuning, I have been writing indoors and not yet in the field much.

From what I've seen so far, the mood in Nairobi is calm. The corner food kiosks in my neighborhood are open again. The produce kibandas are heavy with fresh fruit and vegetables.

At the African Woman and Child Feature Service office, the staff is busy working on various projects to document and address the conflict that is ongoing in the country. There is talk of the peace and conflict training for journalists, a book of women and children's voices, media roundtables.

But the situation is not so optimistic in much of the country. There was fighting yesterday in Thika. A friend told me the story of a friend who sent his family from Nairobi into theoretical safety in Western Kenya, only to have his wife attacked this weekend.

Although there is less acute violence in Nairobi's slums, people are still struggling to find food and to return to work. The government has planned to close the camps for internally displaced people in Jamhuri Park and elsewhere. Some people have left on their own, looking for somewhere safe to resettle. Other people, among them refugees who have fled conflict in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, are being shuttled around the country in search of safety.

The government is moving some people to refugee camps in Eastern and Northeastern Kenya. Thos areas already host a sizable population of people who have fled conflict in neighboring Somalia and Ethiopia. Although there has been comparatively little violence in those regions since the elections, residents say they are suffering from lack of food and funds.

The news from the Annan-led peace talks is vague. One BBC analyst suggested that Annan is intentionally starting slowly, getting the leaders used to agreeing before they face more contentious issues.

I had a long talk today with my colleague Wilson about whether or not the political question is still at the heart of this conflict. Some people had suggested that now the fighting is less about the presidency and more about revenging old and new grudges, about desperation and anger. But he said, no, the presidential race is still the crux of the matter.

When the midday news briefing came on at one o'clock today, the staff ran downstairs to watch news from the peace talks. There wasn't much to hear.

But people watch because, as Wilson says, Annan is the thread that is holding the country together right now. Echoing the sentiments from my last post, he says a friend on the street told him today, "When Annan leaves, then we will have real war."

At the end of a day-long meeting with business leaders today, Annan said, "This is not about individuals. Individuals may be ready to destroy themselves but we must not let them destroy Kenya."

Here's hoping that individual leaders and individuals on ground hear his message.

Going home

2008-01-31T10:38:00.000-08:00

Somewhat rested, with more perspective and a little trepidation, I am preparing to return to Kenya this weekend.

It has been challenging to watch international media coverage of the conflict. Media houses broadcast an endless stream of images of towns aflame and men with panga wounds to the head. There is little transparency about the Annan-led negotiations between ODM and PNU. They give thin coverage of the human struggle of people living in poverty in rural and urban Kenya.

From friends in Kenya, I hear that the situation in Nairobi is relatively calm, but that there are flare-ups of violence in areas that have not seen much conflict to date.

Some people who have been sent out of the country by their employers have returned or are due back this weekend. Others who have been on the ground the entire time are talking about a new way of working, about armed guards on work and home compounds.

But there are some positives. My flatmate went to her Brazilian dance class downtown on Monday night. Journalist friends say domestic media are working together to try to cover the conflict without exacerbating the violence. People are doing what they can to move forward despite the sense of suspended animation.

Today I got this message from a Kenyan friend who is generally optimistic. I think it speaks volumes, so am sharing it with you.

"The mediation process is ongoing but both sides are bogged down by their hard-line positions. Many of us are holding our breath because we know that an uneasy calm prevails only because Kofi Annan is still in Nairobi. The day he gives up and boards his plane home, all 34 to 40 million of us would want to be on the same ride out of Kenya."

When I return, my intention is to continue to focus less on news updates and more on personal stories and perspective. If there is something in particular you would like me to write about, please post a comment or send me an e-mail.

If you have any suggestion for media outlets that might want to pay me for my work, I would be glad for those suggestions as well!

Before I leave the UK, I have to keep a promise to a friend in Canada. I'm going to visit the Tate Modern. I'll see what's on the walls, but am more interested in Shibboleth, an installation by Doris Salcebo.

It's a great crevasse down the floor of the Modern's giant installation space. It is intended to respond to "a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world."

Shibboleth will perhaps be a chance for new reflections on bridging the deepening divides in the nation bisected by the great Rift Valley.

Fairness and justice: a perspective from abroad

2008-01-28T03:52:00.000-08:00

Carol moved from Kenya to the UK more than 20 years ago. As the post-election confusion has unfolded, she has been doggedly followed the news and blogs from Kenya. She also tends her own blog, A Political Mugging in God's Own Country.

She describes herself as "a mother of three children and keeper of two cats. Studying international politics at uni and a writer diametrically opposed to Fukuyama's 'End of History' analysis."

She has graciously accepted 8 Month's invitation to write about her perspective on the current conflict

On Fairness and Justice

Kenya's people are bearing huge losses of life and property since the political fallout following the declaration and swearing in of Mwai Kibaki as president of Kenya, on December 30, 2007.

Fairness and justice matter to Kenyans. The majority have clearly expressed their grievances with what they see as an election "stolen" from their democratically-elected leader, Raila Odinga. For 45 percent of the population, the democratic process now seems a sham.

The youth make demands for their president, Raila Odinga, with slogans such as "No Raila! No Peace!" Joel Oduor, a demonstrator from Kisumu, express it this way, "We want Kibaki to resign and pave the way for our rightful President Raila Odinga."

These calls are coming from the slums, historically the hotbed of political activism, and from the regional stronghold of Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement. Street demonstrations are spilling over into violence, in part because members of the General Service Unit of the Kenyan armed forces have used lethal force on demonstrators.

In response to these challenges, Mwai Kibaki has instituted a ban on all live media broadcasts. Some Kenyans see this as an effort to prevent Raila Odinga from mobilizing angry and disaffected youth who support him.

In addition, the government has banned all demonstrations. Under Kenya's constitution people have the right to peacefully assemble and demonstrate. The police say a ban on all rallies is necessary to prevent "criminal elements" from taking advantage of the situation.

It is ironic that this is happening under Kibaki, whose first administration lifted restrictions on freedom of speech and introduced progressive democratic reforms. When I visited Kenya last February, there was palpable optimism and pride in the country's democratic gains. The media was freer than even that of the UK. It seemed anyone could say anything. And now this.

The night Kibaki was hastily sworn in for his second term as Kenya's president, the General Service Unit, under cover of darkness, entered the sprawling Nairobi slum of Kibera, seeking out Odinga's supporters. Odinga belongs to the Luo tribe and about 45 percent of the Kibera population are Luo.

Kenya's General Service Unit is a highly-trained paramilitary force that the government is using to suppress internal dissent. It is made up almost exclusively of Kikuyus. (Decalo S. p.562 and Dianga J. p.135). One of its primary roles during the current conflict is keeping the two million people who live in Nairobi's slum settlements from spilling out into the streets of the capital.

Eyewitnesses reported Luos were being shot and left for dead by the soldiers. In the meantime, some Luos were exacting revenge for the "stolen election." They were attacking their Kikuyu neighbors, most of whom support their fellow tribesman, Mwai Kibaki. The situation quickly descended into a hobbesian war of all against all.

Kikuyus fled Kibera's slum in vast numbers, many leaving behind their property and belongings. Homes were torched, women and children were raped, babies killed. About 75,000 women and children are now camped around the city in make-shift shelters reliant on international aid. [There is now talk that the government plans to disband these camps. It is not clear where the displaced will go from there.]

On hearing the result of the election, Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement called for a mass demonstration at Uhuru Park, in downtown Nairobi. It was to take place the following day. People in Kibera were determined to reach the park all the same and at whatever the price. The General Service Unit's tactics changed from the night before, perhaps because leaders were aware that the eyes of the world were on them.

Water cannons and teargas were directed at crowds of peaceful demonstrators on Nairobi's streets. At the entrances to Nairobi's slums the soldiers fired live rounds in to the air. When these methods did not seem to work as a deterrent, they started shooting at demonstrators.

In Kisumu, Deputy Police Commissioner Grace Kaindi justified this by saying of the demonstrators, "They don't know another language except the gun." The media began to report that many of those lying in morgues had been shot in the back.

Three weeks ago Kibaki calculated that these measures would help to contain people's anger and frustration. Perhaps he assumed that the uprisings would die down after a few days. He was wrong. These measures have only sharpened the feelings of anger and discontent directed at Kibaki and the clique that surrounds him, known as the Mount Kenya Mafia.

Betrayal

Looking at Kenya today, one can see a muddle of groups with competing claims. It is difficult to imagine what might hold the nation together, now these grievances borne of frustration have burst to the surface. The recent violence has deepened cleavages between people of different ethnic communities and economic classes.

What is it that makes Kenya homogenous today, apart from the imaginary border that contains her people? Conflicts over the land itself underpin some of the longest-standing disputes in Kenya.

In the Rift Valley, Kalenjin grievances about land were exploited in the lead up to the December 2007 election. These complaints go back to the era of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first president, and beyond to the colonial administration.

Following independence in 1963, Kenyatta's government bought land from Kenya's white settlers to redistribute to Africans. Some Kikuyu set up companies to buy large tracts of land which were then resold at prices beyond the reach of most Kalenjins. Kikuyus displaced by the colonial administration resettled here. They took up farming and prospered while the Kalenjin community, traditionally pastoralists, languished under successive regimes.

In Nyanza Province, the geographical heart of Odinga's support, people have suffered under years of governmental neglect. They have watched the Kikuyu-dominated Central Province receive the biggest slice of the government's revenue pie.

Forty-four years after independence, Nyanza is still grossly under-developed. On the shores of Lake Victoria, Luos ask why no government has undertaken the task of building a lucrative fishing industry. They say business free people from reliance on the politics of patronage. Many Luos argue that the Kikuyu have "eaten", so have the Kalenjin, and they believed that under Odinga it would be their turn to "eat."

Along Kenya's coast, people complain that Muslim Kenyans have been unfairly targeted and mistreated because of Kibaki's cooperation with the George Bush's administration's so-called war on terror. Some people along the coast have an interest in seeing the back of Kibaki.

With the Luo only making up 13 percent of Kenya's population, it made little sense for Odinga to mobilise people along strictly tribal lines. To win with a clear majority Odinga needed to make appeals that cut across lines of ethnicity. He mobilized these many disenfranchised groups behind ODM's calls for change and his promises to clean up corruption.

This was a good strategy at the national level and ensured that Odinga's ODM won in six out Kenya's eight provinces [candidates need to win a majority of the votes in at least five provinces to win the presidency] but it was marred by politics at the local level. (Klopp 2001)

For instance, in the Rift Valley, it made little sense for ODM's William Ruto, a Kalenjin, to appeal to his constituency on broad national issues. Instead, he championed local causes, in this case Kalenjin grievances over land. He campaigned on a similar platform in previous elections. For Ruto to disavow ethnic difference in the 2007 race would have been disingenuous.

It was politically advantageous for William Ruto to politicize ethnicity by emphasizing Kalenjin identity as being distinct from other tribes in the region. According to Kikuyus who have fled Rift Valley in recent weeks, Ruto preached hatred against the Kikuyu. Now some members of the Kalenjin community have led the massacre of Kikuyus in the region.

Problems of legitimacy

If we can look beyond ethnicity and political affiliations, the problems afflicting Kibaki since his swearing in at the end of 2007 rest squarely on the fact that he does not have the consent of the majority to rule.

By consent, I mean the principle that in a democratic society, a government's right to use state power is granted by the people over which that power is exercised. That consent relies on moral authority and trust.

In Kenya, consent has been shattered beyond recognition during the past three weeks. So has democratic reform, which seems to have been usurped by a clique of power-hungry old men for whom democracy is a hollow concept.

Kenyan institutions such as the judiciary, have been exposed as corrupt entities incapable of dealing with other governmental rot that has been revealed in recent weeks. The shame is, there are many talented Kenyans who could reverse this situation but they are currently being held back.

Mwai Kibaki actions, or more accurately, inactions over the past three weeks have ensured that he has lost the trust of ODM supporters. Odinga, through his tactical errors, has not been able to reach out to flagging Kibaki supporters. In fact he has alienated many among Kenya's middle and upper classes.

Odinga's error was to go to the electorate with promises that the "national cake" would be distributed more fairly than had been done under Kibaki. Odinga trafficked the perception that the Kikuyu had been the sole beneficiaries of government revenues under Kibaki.

It is surprising how quickly this campaign succeeded in turning Kikuyus into the national "other." Sadly, the majority of Kikuyus, like most Kenyans, live on less than 600 USD a year. They are hardly enjoying the prosperity they have been accused of.

Approximately 60 percent of Kenyans live in poverty, surviving on less than two dollars a day. Poverty cuts across lines of ethnicity. While Kenya's political elite point to the five percent annual economic growth that Kenya has experienced under Kibaki, they do not acknowledge that this has come at a price for Kenya's poorest citizens who have seen widening of the gap between rich and poor.

All Odinga managed to do was mobilise the poor against the poor. This is why I say he made a tactical error.

No doubt there are Kikuyu in the political elite who have benefited under Kibaki but Kenya's political elite is multi-ethnic who have more in common with each other than they do with the poor and vice versa. Similarly, Kenya's multi-ethnic poor have more in common with each other than they do with the elite.

What we are really witnessing is an inter-elite conflict which has led to deaths, displacements and disenfranchisement of poor Kenyans across the country. Kenya's poor are deprived of a leader or a movement capable of addressing their diverse grievances and aspirations.

Listening to the voices of the powerless can humanise all of us.

Odinga can not possibly hope to lead a social movement that excludes the 22 percent of the Kenya populace who are Kikuyu. He must acknowledge his campaign has so far engendered fear, terror and mistrust. Why was he unable to foretell that his actions would lead to this?

At its heart, this conflict is about resources. In a country where wealth was distributed more equitably, tribalism would never arise.

Lack of legitimacy

The problems besetting Kibaki stem from the fact that his legitimacy relies on how the people view his right to govern. If close to 50 percent of the population believe he has stolen the election, how can he expect to be given consent to govern? This is a problem.

By continuing to avoid being seen in public, and by refusing to acknowledge that the elections were flawed, he encourages the view that his claims to govern are illegitimate and further undermines the notions of democratic consent on which his governance must rest. In other words, having compromised the democratic process he has undermined his own claims to govern.

Kibaki can not regain legitimacy through coercion. The Kiberan chant of "Democracy or death" is testimony to that. People have made up their minds that the value of attaining democracy outweighs the potential cost of dying in the process.

For too long the poorest Kenyans have been denied work, resources, services and protection by the state. This is a country where a degree holder can work as a night-watchman. A change in power represents their best hopes of reversing this situation. Raila Odinga expressed that hope.

Kibaki can only offer the political status quo. For now, he is tied to placing a fence around the slums and to guarding their exits. He has also shown that he is prepared to continue to exclude the disenfranchised from the political process by refusing for so long to meet with Odinga.

Kibaki must lift all bans on live media broadcasts. He must allow people the right to peacefully assemble and demonstrate. He should prohibit the GSU from using live rounds on innocent demonstrators.

Most importantly, Kibaki must remember that it is only through fair face-to-face negotiations that legitimacy can be conferred. Kibaki ignores this at his peril, and at the peril of countless Kenyans who seem wiling to die for economic equality and true democracy.

Decalo S., (p562), Modalities of Civil-Military Stability in Africa, The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4. (Dec., 1989), pp. 547-578.

Dianga J. W., (p.135), 2002, Kenya 1982, The Attempted Coup: The Consequence of a One Party Dictatorship, Pen Press, London.

Klopp J.M., Ethnic Clashes" and Winning Elections: The Case of Kenya's Electoral Despotism, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Etudes Africaines, Vol. 35, No. 3. (2001), pp. 473-517.

Politics and history: a perspective from the present

2008-01-23T05:42:00.000-08:00

David Anderson is faculty at the African Studies Center of Oxford University. He first went to Kenya in 1979 and has been studying, writing and teaching about politics and history in Africa since then.

He generously took an hour out of his busy schedule to share his views on the political situation in Kenya.

The transcript below is very long but, I think, very interesting. Please feel free to comment.

How surprised were you, personally, by the duration of the violence that we have seen since the election?

I wasn't surprised at all. Violence has characterized Kenyan politics since at least the 1960s, and arguably earlier. From the early 1990s, that violence became increasingly instrumental to the political process itself.

Instrumental?

Yes, in that the Moi government purposefully deployed violence as part of its electoral politics. This is not a matter of debate or speculation, it's a matter of fact. That fact was confirmed even by a parliamentary committee. The great, great sadness of Kenya's politics is that no one was ever prosecuted for it.

Why was the international community so surprised?

Because they don't watch what they are doing. The international community is only concerned about a story once it becomes newsworthy. I returned from Kenya in mid-December and told anyone who cared to listen what was going to happen. Because as those in Nairobi knew only too well, both parties had a plan B. In both cases, plan B would result at the very least in civil disturbance, in the very worst case in violence. And it was obvious, if the polls were anywhere near right, that plan B would be necessary.

Now no one in the British government was very interested in that until the [situation escalated]. So the problem in world politics is getting people's attention before something happens.

How would you characterize the international community's perception of Kenya pre-December 30th?

I think those who work for donor groups and international agencies engaged in the process of fostering democratization and humanitarian rights in Africa and elsewhere inevitably play a double game. They want to encourage the development of the trends and changes they want to see. At the same time, they are aware that they do not live in a perfect world, that inevitably there will be gradualism, limitations to be accepted.

In the case of Kenya, those constraints have been heavily inflected post 9-11 by Kenya's role as the crucial regional ally for the west in its war on terrorism.

So whereas up until 2001, American and British pressure in Kenya was fairly acute, to the extent that, in 2000, within two years of the 2002 elections, some European governments were seriously considering pulling the aid plug on Kenya. But by the end of 2001, that had completely changed. There was no way anyone was going to put Kenya under that much pressure. And every Kenyan politician knows that.

So their bargaining position increased enormously. They realized that they actually didn't need to play the game as cleanly as they might otherwise have done. And they knew that they could get away with brokering solutions that would have otherwise not been acceptable to their international partners.

So since 2001, Kenyan politics has actually got dirtier. The west and the donors have turned a very blind eye to it.

Who gains from this faulty perception of Kenya as a democratic and developmental anchor?

So long as the myth persisted and nothing too dramatic happened, then no one internationally was harmed by it. Although, the Kenyan people and their desire for democracy were severely thwarted by it.

How? Can you give me an example?

In the sense that, we moved into a phase where Kenya's civil society is extremely energetic, engaged and pro-active. It has filled, more than filled, the democratic space that has been made for it.

But it has a political elite that still makes its calculations not on the basis of how many votes it can garner through persuasion and discussion, but how many votes it can garner through political deals and brokerage.

"The push for coalition government actually moves us backwards."

The old guard of autocrats who ruled Kenya for so many years are still there. And their political residue is still there. As the elections have become tighter, more closely run affairs, people commanding relatively small groups of support have greater degrees of power.

In the current campaign, once it became clear that Mwai Kibaki was, indeed, in trouble and that Odinga's opposition might just win, PNU at once began cultivating support among those that they might not have otherwise not have counted as their friends. That brought several old guard politicians back into play and it allowed them to get their hooks into the electoral process.

Now I am not suggesting for one minute that their participation is the sole reason for what happened, but their engagement with PNU certainly didn't help.

In an era of coalition politics, where people need partnerships in order to get power, the Kenyan political elite is likely not to become less autocratic, but to become more autocratic. The push for coalition government actually moves us backwards, not forwards, in terms of democratic institution building.

Why do the West and Kenya's neighbors need at least the image of Kenya as a stable democracy?

We have to be a little careful here. Although you have described it as an image and in my answer, I have been inclined to endorse that, for many of the people involved at senior levels in world organizations and donor groups, it is a reality. Kenya is seen by them as the most stable of their African partners. That may be a relative term but it's an important one.

Also, Kenya is a country they have felt that they can do business with and do business in, in that most things in Kenya are negotiable. Those things are seen by the West as being substantive and important. And even if Kenya is somewhat frayed at the edges, it is the least frayed at the edges of all the alternatives.

So why is Kenya valuable in its current state to the West and its neighbors?

It's still valuable because the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, for example, in 2006, could not have taken place effectively without support from Kenya. And without the bases and the logistic support that the Kenyan government has provided by allowing American and (as far as I am aware) British security forces to operate from Kenyan soil.

Kenya is seen as a very important ally in regional organizations, the East African group in particular but the African Union also, in acting as a broker for Western opinion and in being a sounding board through which the Americans and British in particular can find out what other African governments are doing and how they might behave.

I read somewhere that you think that this conflict is not actually tribal...

It is very interesting when you analyze the voting behavior of the Kenyan people, the very mixed results you get. In some constituencies, in some areas, Kenyans vote ethically, strongly ethnically. But in other areas, they don't vote ethnically at all and never have done.

It's an immensely complex picture and it's often mediated by much more contemporary and current events. People will vote for other reasons than ethnicity and frequently do. And the more urban they are, the less ethnic they tend to be.

All these things need to be factored in because they help us to realize that what has happened since the 2007 "results" were announced, has been an up-swelling of reaction, but that it has had different formulations in different places.

This is not simply the usual academic lament that it is all much more complicated than you realize. It is actually a description of the reality.

So even in the Rift Valley where my colleagues and I have been doing considerable work to try to understand what has been happening, it is quite clear in Rift Valley there are at least four quite different sets of conflicts going on. They are motivated by different people with different causes and different issues at their heart.

None of them, as it happens, are intrinsically to do with the ballot results. They are all mobilizations and activations of other kinds of dispute for which this provides a wonderful camouflage and excuse.

Now, of course, that kind of detail is much too complicated for international agencies to deal with. They don't want to get to that kind of grained understanding. But Kenyans understand it all too well.

So when [a staff person from the Kenyan Human Rights Organization] claims that violence in the Rift Valley was paid for and organized by politicians, she is right. But that that doesn't mean that that is what happened everywhere.

The danger in saying that the conflict is purely ethnic comes from the fact that the international media seize upon it and then present the conflict purely and simply in those terms. Before you know it, Kenya is being presented as the second Rwanda. All the subtle understandings are lost because the comparison is all that then matters.

I think we have a responsibility as commentators, who know Kenya better, not to fall into that trap and to argue against any simple-minded, witless journalist who wishes to make that point.

Is there some kind of comparison that is more fitting, that people in the developed world might be familiar with? Is there something that you would compare it to?

Let me firstly say that the correlation of the Rwanda comparisons that were touted in the press fell exactly in relation to the murders in the church in Eldoret. That single event did more than anything else to trigger those comparisons.

However, the explanation that violence is to some extent controlled by politicians, is to some extent payed for, that people in the Rift Valley in particular sent text messages encouraging others to "finish their work" (which is a direct parallel of the Rwandan case) all of those things do invoke the images of Rwanda to some extent. But I think it is the wrong comparison.

Kenya's struggles are much more localized in their focus and driven by much more intimate politics. I think that there isn't an obvious comparator that one can reach for. What you can do is give an explanation of a political system and what has happened to it.

That explanation begins with Moi [Kenya's President from 1978 to 2002].It begins with Moi's reaction to being pushed into multi-party democracy in 1989. His reaction was to say that this would engender tribal violence in Kenya. He made that comment explicitly. He then made it come true by arming his own militia, training them through his own military and police, and sending them into action against communities that he victimized.

"Violence is not an event. It is a process. It takes on a life of its own."

He and his supporters did this predominantly in the Rift Valley. It's not surprising that three of the main sites of the violence in the last two weeks are the sites that he inaugurated that violence in, in 1992. Violence is not an event. It is a process. It takes on a life of its own. Violence breeds reaction and further violence, whether defensively or aggressively. That, in turn, provokes a further response.

We are now in a cycle of violence in these places that has very little to do with the actual politicians and has now become more to do with people's own sense of shame, fear, vulnerability and anxiety. That is a very dangerous position to be in.

So we have classic instability when people don't feel that they are secure, they don't feel that the organs of the state can protect them, therefore they have to protect themselves. So we move into the realms of vigilantism and militias. And in that situation, unscrupulous politicians will thrive. Frankly, Kenya's Rift Valley province has more than its fair share of unscrupulous politicians.

Now you add to that, in Kenya's case, the issue of constitutional reform and you get a very combustible mix. The constitutional reform issue has revolved around the whole debate about devolved powers. For Kenyans, that revives all the issues around majimboism.

Attempts by noble and honest commentators to retrieve regionalism from the carnage of a majimbo debate have been very earnest and very worthwhile but they have not succeeded in capturing the public imagination. The public still sees majimbo as a violent, ethnocentric campaign to cleanse some parts of Kenya from people who were not born in that part.

That, for Kenyans, is a very serious and real political conundrum. It seems to me that most Kenyans do want some kind of local government, even if they are not sure whether they want some kind of devolved government. Unless they can sweep away the majimbo debate and discuss local government and regional representation with a clear head, we are likely to be trapped in the traffic of this violent politics for a long time to come.

Taking a step back from the straight political discussion, how would you characterize tribalism in Kenya, as compared to other East African states?

We do now have some ways of doing that empirically. There are creditable and credible sources that try to measure it. The best one, to my knowledge, is Afrobarometer, that has conducted questionnaires in may different African countries, dealing with peoples voting habits.

"People in Kenya really do express their identity, first and foremost, in national terms"

If you look at the Afrobarometer findings for Kenya, what you see is people in Kenya really do express their identity, first and foremost, in national terms. They are Kenyan before they are anything else. And the figures for Kenya on this particular question are just about the highest in Africa. So Kenyans are more nationalistic than almost anyone else.

When you ask them about tribal identity, they also identify with that quite strongly. So the point is, they are both, but they really do see themselves as Kenyan. Now I think that is profoundly important. Although they want their regional identity recognized, acknowledged and properly respected, they don't want not to be Kenyan. There has never been a secessionist debate in Kenya. Majimboism has never been about separation, it's been a debate about resource flows, about who gets what and whether it is actually fair.

What hope do you have for a more issues-based political discourse in Kenya?

It would be very pleasing indeed to imagine a political future where Kenya's political parties were organized around issues of principle, ideology and social order, that we had visions of the future as it were. There are Kenyan politicians, I think, who have that now, but they are not yet in the majority. And I think it is going to take us another two decades to get there.

We've had two decades so far in which we have managed to entrench electoral politics as a democratic institution. And this election has not been stolen from Raila Odinga, it has been stolen from the Kenyan people. That is the point. It doesn't matter who won the ballot. It's been stolen from the people who bothered to go and vote.

We've had 20 years of building up elections. Can we now, in the next 20 years, build up the institutions that will allow politics to take an ideas-based route. That will involve strengthening things like the electoral commission, strengthening parliament enormously. The Kenyan parliament, to be honest, is a joke. It seriously needs reform. Kenya does need a new constitution. It has to have one. The failure of Kibaki's government to achieve that, now looks much more important than it did when the government lost that vote.

How would you compare the run-up to December 27th, to the run-up to the 2002 election? In 2002, the world community was saying, "Kenya's done it. Here it is: Democracy."

That's because the world community wanted to believe that it really was a new era. If you look at the serious analysis of that result, all of us analysts who knew Kenya better were much more cautious. Most wrote about the beginnings of a process, not the end of a process. Many of us did say that the hard work lay ahead, not behind us. Having removed the old guard from power, they were still standing in the wings.

And Kibaki is not quite "new guard"...

Indeed not and there were some of us who made that point as well. Kibaki's government in 2002 was appallingly conservative. It was a government of, for and by the middle classes, intended entirely to secure a set of vested interests that were already well-ingrained and well-established.

That was said at the time by many analysts, but it wasn't what the international community wanted to hear. They wanted to champion Kenya as Africa's most mature democracy. They wanted to support the transition, in the genuine hope that by supporting it, you would encourage it along more quickly.

That is where the real naivete and stupidity comes. Because, of course, the African politicians in Kenya are all-too-well aware of what the limits of their powers may or may not be. And they have, in the 2007 elections, exploited the fact that the West and the international community have assumed that Kenya is OK. The electoral practices we have seen in 2007 have been far worse than anything we've seen before. 1982 was pretty bad but this beats it.

What that tells you, if you look at it chronologically, they did it in 1992 because they needed to win. By 1997 and 2002, they were aware that people were watching and you have to be more careful. Some of the practices were more constrained by institutional impositions put in place by the Electoral Commission of Kenya and others. By 2007, they thought, "What the heck. We know how to get around these things."

"What politicians have learned is how to fudge election results."

There is a learning curve here, is what I am suggesting. What politicians have learned is how to fudge election results, what you do in order to avoid oversight. Oversight has also diminished. As international observer groups have come to feel that Kenya is OK, they need further observers. If you recall, the Kenyan government had some debate late year about how many observers Kenya would let in.

When you know so little about the local politics, you have no idea what shenanigans will go on. Some people who were on observer groups simply have no idea of the extent of what went on.

Is that why it's taken so long for the international community to come out with statements of concern about the electoral process and results?

That has a rather different explanation. Kibaki's haste to have himself confirmed in a second term and the fact that the head of the electoral commission was pretty much forced into doing it, tells you something very significant.

What Kibaki was doing there was trading on the fact that the electoral commissioner's reputation was high internationally, that people would generally want to support him, that he was seen as a leading member of the Commonwealth electoral commissioner's group, etcetera, etcetera.

Kivuitu's reputation in Kenya in 2007 came under serious challenge because of what people knew was going on in the interference with the independence of the commission. But externally, international groups felt they should support Sam because he was trying to do a good job in a difficult situation. Now Kibaki and his advisers showed great astuteness in realizing that.

How can Kenya move toward a more holistic development?

That question has to be answered in several parts. There are two main areas...

Firstly, institutional development, boring and dull as it may sound, is absolutely critical. Elections aren't worth the paper they are written on, if they aren't supported by strong institutions. The electoral commission has to be restored, rebuilt and given serious powers.

The judiciary needs complete overhauling and all of the replacements (particularly those appointed on Christmas Eve) removed. Parliament needs to be funded properly, given functioning working committees, the opposition properly instituted in its parliamentary role, review and other procedures of government business inaugurated and carried through to a proper conclusion, drafts persons and assistants appointed and paid for by the state so that parliamentarians can do their business, and so on.

All of those things are functional to any democractic politics. Without it, if you don't win, you lose everything because you have no role. You have to give opposition politicians a reason to be there. That reason comes from a functioning parliamentary democracy. We have to invest in these things and instead of giving Kenyan politicians pay raises, why not simply give them allowances and funds to support their offices properly.

So that is one part. There is another part about coalition governments and how that works.

If you look historically at how democracies evolved in other parts of the world. There are often a number of different phases through which that must take place. In Kenya and in much of Africa, we are at the end of the first phases, which is a phase in which you get rid of these old guard autocrats who ran the rotten burrows and paid for politics to happen. You move into a situation where they have to compete in an election against others on terms that are not purely set by the depths of their pockets.

That's what we've got in Kenya. It doesn't mean that those old guard are yet lost. They are still there, but they are now having to compete in a different arena.

That tends to lead to a much more closely-run politics. Large parties find it difficult to dominate. Small parties proliferate. Lots of small parties tend to be weak, but collectively they gain power, so they form coalitions. But these coalitions are kaleidoscopes: lots of moving parts, people who can be bidded in or out of them depending on who pays them. The corruption that caused autocrats to dominate moves into a phase when corruption is used to buy off smaller groups, one against the other.

This is exactly what we've just seen in the 2007 election in Kenya. People with deep pockets, many of whom may be those who filched it from the state in the last 20 years, still have enormous power.

Now this coalition phase, in my view, is even more dangerous than what went before. Because people can exploit these [cultural] differences to their own advantage. Coalition politics can actually lead both to the entrenching of vested interests and to the slowing down of democratic reform. The people who don't want that reform may be a very small minority but their participation in a coalition may be crucial to its power. That's exactly where we are now.

"What we are seeing is a pattern. And it's a pattern that is not intrinsically Kenyan."

I would argue that it's not jut Kenya that is there: it's Zambia, it's Malawi, Nigeria is heading in the same direction, Uganda will be exactly the same when it moves to multi-party politics. What we are seeing is a pattern. And it's a pattern that is not intrinsically Kenyan. It's intrinsic to the process that we are looking at.

People at the start of this transition to democracy were not honest enough or candid enough about what was going to happen. This is utterly predictable. You can model it. It is likely to happen, not unlikely to happen. But, hey, maybe if in 1989, you'd said to the Kenyan people, "Well, we are going to have 40 to 50 years of turmoil and then you'll have a nice democratic country." Would they have been quite so keen?

I've heard a lot of people say that, while they waited so long to exercise their right to vote on December 27th, they are now wishing the election never happened...

I've heard this again and again and again. My e-mail box is full of it. I have been saying and I will be saying to the British government tomorrow when I meet with them, that democratic participation in Kenya has just taken one hell of a hit. Getting these good people back out again is going to be really difficult.

And if you think they are going to vote for Mwai Kibaki or Raila Odinga again, forget it. Damaged goods, both. They are out of here whether they like it or not. The real problem is, who can replace them?

I quite agree that we have got to rebuild now a sense of participation. That's going to be really, really difficult. And it is one of the hazards of this kind of coalition. Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, exactly the same. People feel that politics just isn't worth the time. And yet, their lack of participation opens the door for all kinds of mischief and any kind of tyrant or autocrat getting power with a relatively small power base.

So I think we are in a very dangerous situation. We are going to have a long time of it. We are in for at least another decade of really quite difficult, fraught, fractured politics where it is going to be very, very touch-and-go whether things can be held together.

So, is culture really just a wedge that people are using?

Yes. I don't think culture is the cause of this at all. I often say to my students that they must be careful not to mistake a description for an explanation.

In Kenya's case, this is very appropriate. The cultural politics is simple a description of what you think you see, it's not an explanation of what is actually motivating what is happening.

What does the international community need to do, in this precarious moment?

In the first place, they need to shut up. One of the grossest errors made in this entire process in Kenya was Gordon Brown's office issuing a press release to tell the world that our hero, Prime Minister Brown, had offered Kenya a solution to its problem. I'm quite sure that Gordon Brown was well-meaning. I'm quite certain that the arbiters he proposed to both Raila and Mwai were perfectly sensible. But why the hell did he have to tell the world he had done it? Did he really need the credit for that?

And in Africa of all places, having former colonialists tell you what to do ain't good politics. Even if, personally, those politicians were happy to accept that advice, they didn't want the world told that they had done so.

So if the West is going to "help" Africa, it can help it first by keeping its opinions to itself and doing things quietly and subtly and giving assitance where it is wanted and not being heavy-handed, and never taking the credit for it.

Secondly, they can do their level best to be more honest and more candid in their evaluation of what progress is being made. Stop kowtowing to tyrants. Stop allowing them to believe they are getting away with it. Be blunter. Be franker. They are not fooling people, least of all the Kenyan people, who know only too well how messy and rotten their politics is. Why are they shy of saying so? Kenyans respect you far more for your honesty and integrity.

So I think we just have to be braver and bolder and more honest. And if we can do that, I think we will find that people come into politics in Kenya with the right standards, qualities and integrity. But they won't come in if they think they are going to be mired in this dishonesty. If we can get them into a situation where they feel they are being treated and supported properly, then I think there are good people who will come forward. It will take a little while. We are not going to see them in the next 12 months, but there will be people who will come forward.

The other thing, if the West is going to give money to something, for God's sake, give money to building institutions and to building up legislators and parliaments.

How are you feeling about all of this?

What I feel most of all, I'm just angry about it.

Angry at whom?

Anger at the political elite, that they can treat the Kenyan people with such complete contempt. That just infuriates me. I have had a lot of contact with politicians on both sides in this process and even those who I respect and admire have stretched my patience to breaking point.

Is it egotism or a power hunger that drives their actions?

I don't think it is always egotism. I think it is power brokerage mostly. They simply believe that if they don't win then everything is lost. And that comes down to the cost of politics, to the fact that both parties raised significant portions of their election funds from people they knew to be deeply corrupt. They took that money and happily spent it. Both candidates allowed their candidate to use Community Development Funds and knew it. Both parties allowed their candidate to use state resources, and knew it. So things have to be settled.

"The whole idea that we can run this election again in six months' time is complete poppycock."

And they know that they can't afford to do it again in the near future. The whole idea that we can run this election again in six months' time is complete poppycock.There is no way we can run it again.

So what is the answer?

There is no answer at the moment. And if one is being really blunt about it, PNU and Kibaki realized that. They realized only too well that if they got the key to the kingdom, there was no way anyone was going to take it off them.

It has been alleged that the United States has offered to fund a re-run. That idea has been bandied around in the European Union as well. The relative costs of doing that are quite small. But what could be more likely to illegitimate the entire process than having it externally funded? It is a good question to ask because it does get to the heart of the problem. If election funding could have been regulated and controlled in an effective way, we would not be where we are now.

So you either spend 20 years building up the institutions to get there, or you let the U.S. pay for the election now and cut out the agony. But, of course, you don't cut out the agony because you still wouldn't have the institutions.

I am not at all sure that we can have another election. I also think that if we did have another election in the next 12 months, the turnout would be around 30 percent. It would be like firing a starting gun for the people who [want violence].

I don't see an easy solution. When I stop running around and doing interviews like this, I will be deeply depressed, because we are not in a good place.

Culture and democracy: a perspective from the past

2008-01-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

As I was waiting for my interview with David Anderson, at the Oxford African Studies Center, I was reading Decolonization & Independence in Kenya, 1940-1993 (edited by B.A. Ogot & W. R. Ochieng').

In the section on the period between 1978 and 1988, I found this chapter. The first paragraph seems particularly relevant to what is happening in Kenya right now.

Here's what Ogot, director of the Institute of Research and Postgraduate Studies at Maseno University College had to say...

The histories of most societies indicate that, in working out developmental priorities, the sequence is usually from the economic and technological priority to social concerns and finally to cultural problems.

The predominant emphasis on output goals, such as capital formation and the raising of gross national product (GNP), soon leads to problems of social justice: equity and human rights. In other words, the reckless pursuit of wealth, unaccompanied by broader social objectives, aggravates social tensions and generates disharmonies and conflicts which are bound to have unsettling effects on the social order.

Often, during these first two stages of development, the cultural objectives of development are either left undefined or stated in very general and vague terms. It is usually when forces of destabilization are unleashed that societies are forced to show some concern for culture. This normally means making an attempt to find an alternative approach to development, and a realization that the concept of development itself is value-loaded.

In short, it is during this third stage that societies realize that the development paradigm is not an economic matter but a cultural one.

Anderson has a more political take on the current conflict. The transcript of our lengthy interview is coming to you next.

Kenya calling - the view from London

2008-01-20T05:21:00.000-08:00

The moment we lifted off the ground in that empty 767 out of Nairobi, it became clear that we all need a little perspective on the current conflict in Kenya.

So, for the time being, 8 Months will leave the news reporting to the people on the ground: bloggers, mega-media houses and local press.

An American friend who has lived in Kenya for about 40 years told me recently that the media are not providing enough context to what is happening.

Why is the international community surprised by this violent manifestation of tribalism in Kenya?

Why are some urban Kenyans surprised by it as well?

What are these old grudges based on?

How can they be reconciled, particularly given the violence that is ongoing across the country?

Do you want to weigh in on any of those questions? Meanwhile, I'm looking for some voices here in the UK (Kenyan and otherwise) who might have something informative to say.

Cheers.

In flight Friday

2008-01-18T01:36:00.000-08:00

The orange sweater is a political statement. I only realised that when a Kenyan woman at the airport cafe made a joke about my being an ODM supporter. Rookie move to wear orange. Clearly, I need a break.

Driving out of Nairobi this morning, traffic was jammed where it is usually jammed, free flowing down Uhuru highway on the way to the airport. There were crowds of General Service Unit soldiers barricading Uhuru Park, as they have for weeks now.

This is the final day of scheduled protests and, word on the street is, they will be the most heated.

Although the protests on Wednesday in Kisumu and Eldoret were relatively peaceful until police tried to disperse the demonstrators, they became more violent on Thursday. One TV reporter shot tape of police shooting a man, then beating him on the ground. A young boy was killed in Kisumu when police fired on protesters. There were more deaths and injuries in Eldoret and Kibera.

There are also reports of the army lobbing teargas into hospitals in Kisumu and concern that troops from the Ugandan army may be operating in Western and Nyanza provinces.

There have been relatively few injuries in Mombasa protests over the past two days, but the BBC is reporting that they expect the situation in that coastal town to be hot today.

Spokespeople for the police are actively defending their actions, saying that the protestors are criminals, that they are threatening police.

It seems that ODM supporters have picked up steam over the course of the week. The European Union, the Commonwealth and the United States are all in various stages of threatening to freeze or freezing aid to Kenya. The European Union is threatening that it will only unfreeze aid once there is a presidential re-run, or a credible ballot re-count.

More international election observer groups are now coming out with stronger statements about the apparent rigging of the elections.

Meanwhile, both Odinga and Kibaki seem to have their heels firmly dug into the red Kenyan soil.

There is no word as to when, or if, Kofi Annan might come to Kenya to help find some resolution. I have no idea what, if any, difference his presence might make.

Although the food situation is improving around the country, people in Kibera damaged the rail line that bisects the settlement. Depending on how soon government staff are able to repair the damage, transport of goods to Uganda and other central African countries may slow again.

But driving out of Nairobi this morning, traffic was jammed where it is usually jammed, free flowing down Uhuru highway on the way to the airport. People are trying to get to work.

Over the past two days, I've asked dozens of people what they are expecting to happen here next week. Nobody has an easy answer.

Thursday - heading out

2008-01-17T12:41:00.000-08:00

Somehow in the shuffle, I seem to have lost my sense of humor.

I've been planning a trip to London for a few months now. A week ago I was considering cancelling so that I could stay here and keep covering the situation in Kenya. Now, I'm ready for a break.

I leave on Friday, but will continue to post. I have some longer features I'm working on and have arranged to get news from some friends around the country. I have also asked some Kenyans to write for you.

In the meantime, the BBC is collecting first-person accounts of the protests. You can also get news from other bloggers in Kenya.

Some members of the blogging community here have set up a site for reporting violence in Kenya.

It's hard to leave right now, knowing that there are hundreds of thousands of people here who do not have the means to escape the conflict.

It will be interesting to see what a few days and many miles of perspective will bring. I'll keep you posted.

Rainy, fiery Wednesday update

2008-01-16T13:54:00.000-08:00

It was pouring down rain when I woke up this morning.

In Nairobi, it rained heavily for most of the monring. There was rain in Mombasa too.

And although the rain slowed the planned protests, it did not stop them. ODM-supporters across the country exercised their right to assemble, despite a government ban on public meetings.

In Kisumu, crowds of protestors demonstrated peacefully and without looting, until police tried to disperse them in the afternoon.

Protestors came out in Mombasa once the rain cleared. They were chased off the streets and three people who claiming to be human rights activists were arrested for their participation.

Some of the worst fighting was in Mathare and Kibera, two Nairobi slums where the majority of residents are ODM-supporters.

By eight this morning, George said there were police roadblocks in Kibera. He said people were leaving the settlement for Uhuru Park, but only one-by-one. Later in the day, as groups of people tried to head into town, the police used teargas and live rounds to keep them in Kibera. According to press reports, one man was killed and three other were shot.

Kenyan press are reporting that in Mathare police also used gunshots and teargas to keep people from leaving the settlement. They also reportedly fired teargas at apartment buildings in an attempt to "smoke out criminals."

Raila Odinga, the opposition leader, and ODM members of parliament tried to get to Uhuru Park today, but they were also driven away by police.

Yesterday, Julianna told me that she was sending her three children to school today, "to make a statement" about wanting life to go back to normal. But she stayed home with her kids instead.

I am beginning to wonder what will happen when children do return to school.

On Monday I heard stories of people stoning buses full of children on their way to school. Another person told me a story of a young woman who was stabbed in the arm by a young man who was a classmate and a neighbour. They were from different tribes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the young man's family was forcefully evicted from their home that night.

Tonight Julianna says, although she wants life to go back to normal, she is not sure when or how it will happen.

Parliament yes, Annan no - Tuesday update

2008-01-15T15:40:00.000-08:00

Tuesday was a big day in Kenya.

Parliament opened today.

In Nairobi, the police closed down many streets leading to Parliament and other roads in and out of town. Depite concerns that there might be protests today, there was little reported trouble.

In the house itself, however, it was a different story.

Although Odinga did not carry out his promise to sit on the government's side of the chamber, the ODM members did not stand when Kibaki entered the room. After that symbolic rejection of his Presidency, there was a long series of votes to determing the new Speaker of Parliament.

The ODM-supported candidate, Kenneth Marende, won with 105 votes. The previous speaker, Francis ole Kaparo, had 101.

Pundits have been forecasting that the ODM's parliamentary majority will make it hard for the PNU presidency to get any work done over the next five years. They say this first day back to business is confirming their suspicions.

There are many important bills that have been carried over from the last parliamentary session, legislation about freedom of information and press freedom among them. It is not clear how ongoing powers struggles in parliament will affect their passage.

Perhaps more importantly, Kofi Annan has delayed his trip to Kenya. The press reports that the flu is keeping him from traveling, but yesterday a PNU minister said that Annan's help was not needed in Kenya.

There is no firm date set for Annan's arrival.

Wednesday could be a big day as well. It is the scheduled start to the three days of protest Odinga called for last week. The government has banned all public assemblies.

On Monday, General Service Unit troops had already cordoned off Uhuru Park in downtown Nairobi, where people attempted to rally last week.

The atmosphere in Nairobi is certainly more tense than it has been in days but I have heard many people say that they are just plain tired of the disruption, of the violence. Maybe that fatigue will take the fire out of protests this week.

But fatigue and a desire to get back to daily life will not solve the political impasse. It remains up to Kenya's leaders to do that. We will see if they take any steps toward that in the coming days.

I am working on a long post about local press coverage, but in the meantime, will keep my eyes on the situation here.

Thanks for staying tuned.

8 Months on tape

2008-01-14T21:30:00.000-08:00

If you haven't heard enough of me, you can listen to a couple of the debriefs I've been doing so much lately.

Maine Public Broadcasting is the organization that so graciously gave me a leave of absence to come to Kenya... http://www.mpbn.net/asx/080104nics.asx

Marketplace is a great business program that folks in the public radio world like to jokingly call "business news for liberal arts majors". In my opinion, they do some of the best radio storytelling in the United States. My debrief is certainly not the best thing on the show, but you can also see more photos from Korogocho there... http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/01/14/kenya_nics/

Humanitarian effort, human challenge

2008-01-13T10:25:00.000-08:00

I have never been so happy to see a man with a gun.

On Friday I went into Korogocho with the Kenya Red Cross, as they tried to bring food supplies to almost 1,000 people who have been displaced from their homes.

Poor security, a few bad apples and desperation born of hunger led to a mob scene that forced the Red Cross to leave after giving food to only a handful of people. It took tear gas and a couple of gun shots to get the convoy out of Korogocho before the situation became violent.

I do not really know how to begin writing about what I saw on Friday, but I have 200 photos. You are welcome to read on for an annotated photo essay.

The Kenya Red Cross operates out of a large complex on the east side of town.

As they try to meet some of the basic needs of the more than 250,000 people who are currently displaced, the offices are open 24 hours a day.

They are accepting donations of food and clothes from the public. Businesses, non-profits and the government are also contributing food and hard goods.

The warehouse on the complex is stocked full of food, water, mattresses, blankets. One corner of the compound is now a makeshift drop point for bulk food and bagged clothes.

When we arrived early Friday morning, most of the outdoor goods were covered in tarps. Trucks of all sizes were easing in and out of the small parking lot. An excess of volunteers were busy loading donations to take to sites around Nairobi, and to other cities and towns around Kenya.

The Red Cross has brought staff from across the country to Nairobi and other crisis centers, to help organize the relief effort. Many ordinary Kenyans are volunteering their time to help as well. Mid-morning, about 40 people from an accounting company arrived to help load the trucks.

It took most of the morning to load three small trucks. We set off with about 30 staff people, heading for Korogocho.

The settlement is part of the expansive Eastleigh area. It is somewhat notorious among Nairobi slums. Like Kibera, it has been in place for many decades. It is built on both public and private land.

Unlike Kibera, Korogocho has a reputation for violence. Theft is widespread. The Mungiki gang is said to be very active in the area. As we were driving in, my friend Felix pointed down one street and said, "That is Kosovo. Even the police don't go down there."

We drove deep into the heart of the settlement. Most of the homes are built out of corrugated tin. Rent is cheaper here than in Kibera. The population tends to be more transient. Many residents have fled conflict in Somalia, the Sudan and other countries in the region. One person told me that, because of that, there are many more firearms in Eastleigh than in Kibera and some other Nairobi slums. Felix says all of those factors contribute to lower incomes, and more crime.

On the way through the slum, I kept an eye on the roadside food stands. Many were empty. Others had only a few items on their dirty, make-shift shelves. There were some greens, a few hanging bunches of bananas. Nothing compared to the bounty of mangos, tomatoes, papaya and pineapple that I normally see on stands across the city.

The convoy of three trucks and two SUVs got a lot of curious looks as we drove to the District Office. The Red Cross had not distributed any food in the area before today. Because of the high degree of violence here, there are fewer international aid agencies working in Korogocho than in Kibera. A convoy of NGO trucks is not a common site.

There were about 200 people waiting at the District Office when we arrived. As we were pulling into the dusty parking lot, one woman yelled from the side of the road, "You will give food to everybody. You will not just give food to people on your list."

Before the Kenya Red Cross brings food into an area, they send out an assessment team to figure out how many people are in need. In this case, they went to the churches, mosques and schools where people are camped since their homes were burned. They make lists of the affected people and come up with a plan for getting food to them. At the Korogocho sight, they had approximately 1,000 people on the list. Most of them were women and children.

It took at least an hour for the Red Cross staff to arrange the trucks and follow the necessary protocol with the District Officer. Despite Kibaki's promise from Thursday, to put more police officers on the ground to protect Kenyans and help "restore peace" I saw only one policeman at the District Office sight. They had been warned that the Red Cross was making a delivery, but there was no security escort in or out of the settlement and there was no visible security presence on the ground.

While we were waiting for the food distribution to begin, I talked with this nine-year-old girl, Pamela. She comes from a family of nine children. They were not on the list to receive food aid but her mother had sent her to the District Office with a small empty jar. She was picking up the stray legumes and pieces of maize that had fallen on the ground from a World Food Program distribution earlier in the day.

How Pamela's mother can feed ten people on such a tiny amount of food, I have no idea. Another person from Korogocho told me that a cabbage that usually sells for ten shillings is now selling for 70. This is a community where, on the best of days, most people are surviving on less than a dollar (about 150 shillings) a day. Feeding a family is a struggle most of the time. Combine gross inflation with a limited ability to get to work or find casual labor, and perhaps it makes sense to send a small girl to pick free food off the ground.

The Red Cross staff spent at least an hour trying to get people to line up. As they do at Jamhuri and other distribution sights, they were asking people to sort themselves into distinct lines. There were rows of old women, old men, people with disabilities, women with children, women alone and men. People were crammed together, holding empty bags and buckets. Although the midday sun was merciless, there was a general air of optimism as people looked at the three trucks full of survival.

A few young men made a bit of a fuss at the beginning of the queuing process. They were angry at having to wait. They were frustrated not to have their names on the right list.

Some of the men were sniffing glue to try to ease the hunger pangs that are a part of daily life here. Long-term glue sniffing can make people a little aggressive, a little irrational. When the young men started yelling and shoving aid workers, the lone policeman escorted a few of them out of the office compound.

The Red Cross staff unloaded only a few items out of the back of the trucks. They arranged the maize meal, milk, bread, oil, sugar and soap so that people could walk down the line with their bags and buckets and quickly collect the supplies.

Since there was no security, a group of young men were conscripted to form a human wall to prevent people from rushing the supplies. The men themselves look thin and ragged, but they joined hands nonetheless.

The first to come down the line were old women. Women with babies were next. Men on crutches and with missing limbs came down the line before old wazees.

About 20 people had collected food before the trouble began. I was shooting photos of one old man who, despite it all, was beaming his grin at the aid workers, when there was shouting at the front of the line.

I looked up and our human security fence had dissolved. Some of the young men were now trying to get food themselves. They were yelling and shoving a small group of aid workers who were trying to manage the front of the line. I watched as hands flew in the air in frustration. Any order disintegrated and suddenly Red Cross workers were yelling, shoving food back into the trucks.

A tiny old woman was being crushed against the side of one of the vehicles. I grabbed her and pushed her into the narrow corridor between two of the aid trucks, and rushed her out of the melee.

In the two seconds it had taken us to get through the trucks, people had rushed the cargo. They were grabbing whatever food they could find.

People were wrestling over packets of sugar, tug-of-warring two kilogram bags of maize meal. Felix caught a sadly beautiful photograph of a man running from the site with only a four-pack of cookies. Certainly not enough to feed a hungry family.

I heard the pop of teargas canisters and did the only thing I could think to do, climbed into the cab of one of the trucks to get out of the way.

Half a moment later, there were three aid workers in the cab with me. The engines were roaring to life, horns were blaring. A woman beside me was yelling, "Just go! Just go! Go!"

Even as we drove out of the District Officer's compound, men and boys were running after and hanging off the back of the food trucks, trying to grab whatever they could find.

We got about 40 meters down the road when the truck in front of us stopped. The people who had been running behind the trucks joined the hangers-on and tried to get in the load beds. The Red Cross worker beside me was shouting, "Go! Go!" as more people who had been in line came running toward the trucks.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a police officer with a big gun was standing beside the truck we were in. The aid worker shouted something to him in Swahili and I saw him point his gun in the air. I had just covered my eyes when he shot two rounds into the sky.

All but one of the people on the truck in front of us dropped off and the convoy kept moving. We sped over potholes and speed bumps, while people on the side of the road looked up to see what all the commotion was about.

On the edge of Korogocho, the convoy stopped again. This time (only in Africa!) a herd of about 80 goats were in the middle of the road. By that point, however, there was only one brave young man still clinging to the back of the truck in front of me. A Red Cross staff person jumped out of the truck and shooed him away.

Although the aid worker beside me kept yelling for the convoy to keep on moving, we waited for the two SUVs to catch up with us. I got into the Land Rover I had arrived in and we all made our way back to the Red Cross office.

Along the way, another aid worker kept saying, "What a shame, what a shame. Because of a few bad guys, only twenty people got food. All those other people won't get any dinner tonight."

I asked her what would happen next in the Kenya Red Cross's effort to get food to people in Korogocho.

"Oh, we will give them some time to cool down. The District Officer will call us when things are more calm. Then we will go in with more security and a better plan."

She did not have an answer when I asked her why there was not a better plan for that day's food distribution.

Despite the aid worker's optimism that homeless people in Korogocho will get food soon, it seems to me that they are going to have to wait more than a few days. After mediation with Kufuor broke down last week, opposition leader Raila Odinga has called for three days of nation-wide protest beginning next Wednesday. The administration has outlawed any demonstrations in the country. Parliament opens on Tuesday. Odinga has vowed to sit on the government side of the room. Any or all of those events could spark more violence in this country.

Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary General is apparently flying in today or tomorrow, to try to broker some kind of resolution to the conflict here.

I have a great deal of respect for Annan. Let's hope he can help. People in Korogocho are hungry.

One face of need in Nairobi

2008-01-11T21:56:00.000-08:00

Walking out of Kibera and into Jamhuri Park, feels like entering an oasis. There are green paddocks and tall eucalyptus trees. At the top of a gentle hill, there is a small sports stadium. This pocket of greenery on the border between Kibera and the Ngong forest is now home to at least 2,000 women and children who have left Kibera, because they have lost their homes or are looking for safety.

Two-hundred and fifty thousand people have been forced to leave their homes to escape the violence in Kenya, according to offical estimates. A country that has been increasingly integrated over the past 30 years seems to be retreating to ethnic regionalism.

The major slum settlements are likewise becoming increasingly segregated along tribal lines. Most of the slums here have dominant tribal groups. As members of minority tribes flee or are run out of their homes, they are moving to slums where their tribe is dominant, or where opposing tribes hold less sway.

As men and boys continue to be pressed into guarding homes and businesses through the nights, many women and young children are trying to find somewhere safe to sleep. The Kenya Red Cross, St. John's Ambulance and Nairobi Women's Hospital are all offering what support they can to people in Jamhuri.

When I visited the park a couple of days ago, there were women and children lined up to get help from St. John's Ambulance. The medics there said they were not giving out anti-retroviral drugs or providing anything other than basic first aid and disposal diapers for young children. More serious cases and people who need HIV treatment are being refered to Kenyatta National Hospital.

There were some young American volunteers on the ground, playing with the children. All the kids seemed to have running noses. Chest infections are very common in Kibera, thanks to poor nutrition, poor sanitation and air pollution from burning garbage. Surely the stress of conflict and displacement has only weakened already compromised immune systems.

At Jamhuri, boys and men had started a pick-up game of football. More men were sleeping on the grass. Likely, they had been up all night, guarding the footpaths in Kibera or watching out for trouble in Jamhuri Park.

Other than ongoing insecurity in Kibera, lack of food and lost livelihoods, one of the greatest problems in the slum is lack of access to clean water. That means no water for drinking or bathing.

I talked Monica, a woman who has chosen to stay in Kibera to safeguard the few houses she has built in the slum. She says they are her only source of income and she wants to make sure they are not burnt down. Although she has sent her daughter out of the area, she and her son are spending their nights in Jamhuri. She has hired one of her male tenants to guard the houses at night.

Here's what she had to say about life in Jamhuri.

How is it where you are staying right now?

Sleeping is a problem. We are fearing being beaten there. It is a problem to get water even here. We can't even bathe in this kind of environment. They are being forced to drink the dam water.

How are you managing without water?

The available water is salty and it is not good for drinking. If you shower, you see the skin changing. I think it could be the dam water, which is not good for drinking.

Right now I am going back to my place to shower in Kibera but there has been an incident a while ago where two young men were attacked. I decided to send my son to try to get me a bed, so at least we can get somewhere to sleep.

Why did you stay?

Because I was fearing for my properties. Here they are getting little help. I have no children here. He is taken to his grandfather.

My daughter is supposed to be joining fourth form this year, which is the final year in her high school. She was supposed to return back on the second. And right now, I don't know what to do because I am in a state of confusion.

The biggest probelm right now is the school fees, that our children should continue to go to school. As you can see, most of our property has been burnt down. We have no clothes. We have no food. We have no means of income. Right now, we are kind of in a confused state.

For us women, we really push for our daughters to get education. If our daughters don't get education, they get can really suffer.

What have you heard about violence against women over the past week?

It's only one incident that I heard of. One woman who we are staying with was abducted by youths. She was not raped but they pushed her and dragged her to the sewer, where she was forced to drink overnight. They stabbed her and left her the following day. She managed to get to the hospital and now we are staying with her.

Human need, humanitarian effort

2008-01-11T13:49:00.000-08:00

Dorcas Ngure is the Kenyan Red Cross's regional manager for Central Kenya. She has been called into Nairobi to help coordinate the relief efforts around the country. They are currently focusing on help for the people who have been displaced from their homes during this conflict.

I spoke with her briefly this morning, as crowds of volunteers loaded worn old trucks with food and clothing supplies for people who have been displaced in several Nairobi slums, including Kibera, Kiambu, Mathare, Limuru and Korogocho.

What are you focusing your efforts on?

We are doing assessments to establish how many people have been displaced. It is changing on a daily basis. We are also distributing food items. In some instances, we are distributing non-food items. We are tying to get some wheelchairs and clothes to distribute. We are also dealing with groups with HIV and AIDS. We are trying to collect special supplements to distribute to them. We are also linking up with those who offer [anti-retroviral drugs], so that those on ARVs can continue with their medication.

How are you helping people with water?

Wherever we have our teams, we have sent them out with an emergency response unit for the water. There are 10,000 liter bladder tanks in Eldoret, Burnt Forest and wherever people are camping. For the food, we have done our best to distribute food. We are doing this daily to various camps.

What is your current estimate of the number of people displaced in Kenya?

Currently, we are working with 257,000. That is the official number given by the government. But we are seeing that numbers are increasing.

What potential do you think there is for people to be taken back to their homes?

What we are seeing is the government trying to relocate the displaced people to their homes of origin. But we don't know how long that will take.

We are [expecting that people will need our help for] a period lasting about six months... people were supposed to be harvesting in March, but because of the destruction of crops, people can only plant again after the short rains and they will be able to harvest again in June and July. We are looking forward to that season, when people will be able to produce their own food.

What are the greatest challenges in the work you are trying to do?

The large number of groups that are turning out. We register 500 people, then 3000 turn up when they hear there is a distribution. Trying to control that crowd is a challenge.

What kind of support are you getting from the government?

The government is giving us some food items like cereals. It is also giving us some logistic help, not transportation but security. We are working with the District Officers and the Chiefs. That is how we are able to maneuver in these areas. Our food distribution is mainly in the DOs or the Chief's offices. The government is also giving us information about how many people are dead or displaced.

What are the needs of people with HIV/AIDS who have been affected?

They are affected because they do not have their normal supplies of supplements. Maybe these are people who received them from organized groups. The other [need] is anti-retroviral drugs, since they are displaced, they can not get them from the clinics where they were [usually] supplied.

What do women and children in particular need?

In fact, these are the most affected. We need the sanitary towels for the women. We also need the drugs for the children who are getting some minor infections. For the women, we also need a kind of protection and shelter.

If people want to help you, how can they do that?

There is an on-line donation on our website. We require a lot of support. It is to be used not only in the current operation, but over the next six months. Currently, people need food.

In the next two or three months, we will need to start reconstructing the houses of these people. We will need to start reconstructing the schools, the churches that were burned down. We are looking at a larger picture.

Those who are giving us food and non-food items, we sincerely appreciate but we also want people to come out and help us in the long term.

Thursday update

2008-01-10T06:47:00.000-08:00

I was unexpectedly on the edge of my first real Nairobi protest today. Of course, for once, I didn't have my equipment with me.

It was a medium-sized march of female ODM supporters. They were chanting, "No Raila, No Peace!"

Things here have settled to a steady simmer. Every day there seems to be a little trouble somewhere in town... protests on Junga Road, trouble for Kambas in Mathare, a woman's march in Hurlingham.

The unrest continues, in part, because of some people's desire to revenge the violence and property damage against their community. The larger cause is the continuing political tensions.

Although Odinga and Kibaki's meetings with Ghana's Kufuor and other international visitors are still going on, there seems to be little movement on the road to resolution.

Kibaki has assigned half of his cabinet seats. Some people here are speculating that he left the other half open as a gesture to Odinga to say, "If we can strike a deal, there is still some room for your supporters in high office." Other people think the open seats are meant to lure ODM members of parliament to jump ship to PNU.

ODM's parliamentary majority is close to the number of seats needed to pass a vote of no-confidence that would force a new election. But that would require MPs to be willing to face another poll race as well, unlike a re-run of the Presidential ballot.

Odinga continues to vow not to stand down until there is a new Presidential race. He called off a scheduled ODM rally on Tuesday. Supporters around the country were planning to converge on city centers to name Odinga "The People's President." Despite the cancellation, and agreeing to meet with international delegates, Odinga has done little to encourage his supporters to stop their protests. He has been repeating the names and poll numbers from sites around the country where there is suspected poll-rigging.

On Tuesday, Odinga appointed the Presidential runner-up, Kalonzo, as his Vice President. That has led to violence targeting the Kamba community, as some people feel Kalonzo's acceptance of the post means he is taking Kibaki's side in the dispute.

Some street-corner political commentators here suggest that, by naming Kalonzo as VP, Kibaki is trying to dissuade Odinga from continuing to push for a new presidential ballot. They say Kibaki is hoping Odinga will fear that the nine or ten percent of the vote Kalonzo won last time, would go to the incumbent in a re-run.

Meanwhile, it is the poorest Kenyans and people in neighboring countries who continue to suffer. Thousands of businesses have been burned. Many people who were skating on the thin ice of small business are now without livelihoods. As prices for staples continue to rise (someone tried to sell me bananas for 10 shillings a piece yesterday... that is twice the regular mzungu price of five shillings), no regular income is leaving people without resources to buy food.

And then there are the approximately 250,000 Kenyans who are displaced from their homes. Many of those people are unlikely to return any time soon. Increased inter-tribal tensions are one reason for finding a new place to call home. Other people have no homes to which they can return.

Kibaki made an announcement yesterday that he would send out the police and the army's General Service Unit to maintain the fragile calm in the country. He also promised to help resettle people to their homes. As news crews were filming his speech, smoke was rising in the background from more homes in flames.

True to Kibaki's promise, today there are more security personnel on the ground. As we drove through one round-about today, a group of GSU in green fatigues were clustered around one copy of a newspaper, catching up on politics.

Report from Uganda

2008-01-08T10:57:00.000-08:00

Christopher Mason, a colleague working in Uganda, sent in this report and photos. You can read more from him at his blog, Caked in Red Clay.

Thanks, Chris!

Here in Uganda there is a widespread sense of disbelief over what is happening in Kenya. Since the era of independence more than 40 years ago, Kenya has been the stable neighbour for not just Uganda but much of East Africa. Uganda's history has been pockmarked with coups, military leaders, civil wars and tribal clashes that have, at various times, sent Ugandan refugees fleeing into Kenya.

Today, thousands (the last report said 5,000 but it is higher now) of Kenyan refugees have fled into eastern Uganda, seeking to escape the violence. On a recent reporting trip to the border, the conditions of those coming into the country revealed the extent of the violence in western Kenya.

Some had been hacked with pangas and machetes, and had the deep, bone-revealing wounds to prove it. Others were limping or bandaged from having been stoned. Most I met at an impromptu refugee camp had lost their homes and businesses.

And that's what makes this class of refugees unique. Today they are typical refugees, with little more than the clothes on their backs. But barely a week ago most of them owned homes and businesses.

"Two weeks ago we were business people, but today we are typical refugees. We have nothing," one refugee, who owned a dairy a week ago, told me. He said his house and business have since been destroyed.

"They even took my clothes," he said.

This status as business owners is why, they say, they were targeted. In western Kenya, the Kikuyu form the bulk of the business-owning class. They moved west from central Kenya, into lands dominated those from the Teso and Luo tribes. The Kikuyu owned businesses, ran hotels and were generally better off than the rest of the western population. Over the years this led to a previously-hidden hostility that exploded when last month's election results were announced.

Ugandans have so far been welcoming to the refugees. Many of the relief workers in eastern Uganda say they are happy to return the hospitality that, over the years, Kenyans often offered to fleeing Ugandans.

"Ugandans have been refugees and it was Kenya who sheltered us," said one Ugandan relief worker I spoke with. "So when Kenyans began coming across it was a form of payback."

Here in the capital, Kampala, people are far enough away from the border that they rely on media reports for updates on the situation. But the election and violent aftermath have had a tangible effect on the region.

As a landlocked country, Uganda relies largely on Kenya's port in Mombasa for supplies of all kinds. That supply route dried up because of the violence and with a couple days the country's fuel supplies had completely evaporated. I was flying back into Uganda on the 2nd, and arrived at the airport to find taxi drivers charging 100,000 Ugandan shillings (about $60) for the taxi trip back to Kampala, rather than the normal 45,000-50,000. They were doing this because prices at the few stations that still had fuel had quadrupled to 10,000 shillings a litre (about $6 a litre).

Gas prices have now gone down to 3,500-4,000 shillings a litre, though many stations are still dry. But many drivers have still left their vehicles at home, unable to afford the cost of driving and unwilling to spend hours waiting in line for fuel.

When the worst of the shortage hit, Uganda worked out an agreement with Kenya that Kenya would provide armed guards to escort supply trucks to the border so they could reach Uganda. Once the crisis has passed, many here hope leaders will have learned a lesson that a more reliable system of supply, and reserves, needs to be established to avoid this from happening again.

Widespread sexual violence: an interview with Dr. Thenya

2008-01-08T04:56:00.000-08:00

Sam Thenya is the CEO of The Nairobi Women's Hospital, a 57-bed hospital that offers ob-gyn and other sexual health services to women.

We met for a brief interview. He was watching the latest news update while we talked, trying to stay up to date about the ever-shifting situation here.

Here's what he had to say about the sexual violence that has been part of this conflict:

We�ve seen a lot of post-election violence. One of the most disheartening issues that we have been handling are gang rapes that are occurring in the areas where the skirmished are taking place. We are seeing women, girls, even boys sodomized in front of their families. People are breaking into their houses and gang raping these women and children. The women who have come to us are telling us that there are many other people who are unable to come to the hospital.

Currently, we have teamed up with the Kenya Red Cross and the Kenya Association of Psychologists to give psycho-social trauma counselling to these survivors who have been displaced.

The Red Cross is providing the food and all the other things that they need. St. John�s Ambulance is providing transport. We are providing counselling services.

We have set up camps within Nairobi. We have sent two people to rift valley to assess the situation and we will be setting up camps in Rift Valley and Western Province.

How many people do you have in your hospital?

Yesterday we saw at least nine survivors of gang rapes. We are providing emergency care and then we send them back, unfortunately, to the camps. We are also following them up for counselling.

I don�t think we have anybody physically admitted. We only admit those who have severe unjuries that need hospitalization. And, of course, children. They get severe injuries and they need to be reconstructed. It�s only in extreme cases, because we don�t want to crowd the hospital.

What are the patterns you are seeing in the people who are coming in?

They seem to be targeted, but I don�t want to give the details of who is targeting who, because I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. They are happening both during the day and during the night. These people are gang raping with impunity. They are not worried about anything. It�s really really bad out there.

What do you think needs to happen for that part of this conflict to ease?

The first thing, of course, the political crisis needs to be sorted out. And of course the violence has to stop. That is the only way we will be able to stop the gang rapes. It is very clear that the gang rapes are occurring because of the lawlessness that is already existing on the ground.

What are some of the long-term impacts that you would expect in communities and for individual women and children from this kind of violence?

When we went down to provide this psycho-social support, we discovered that women and even men who have been displaced, some of them are HIV-positive. They don�t have their anti-retoviral drugs.

We also discovered that in the places where they are camping, in showground and other places, there are no formal structures. The next thing you are going to find, there is also rape and a lot of HIV-transmission amongst those who are displaced.

The gains made in the country in terms of HIV control is going to be lost. The other thing we are going to have is resistance, because these people are discontinuing their treatment. So you are going to have resistance to anti-retroviral drugs. It�s a big problem.

Taking these people back to their homes later and resettling them is going to be a big, big problem. One of the things that they have told us on the ground, is that they are very, very worried. The hatred, they don�t know how to handle it.

We have gone into teaching them about conflict resolution. They are very bitter. They need to know how to live harmoniously with their neighbors, even after all they have witnessed. It�s going to be a big big problem but we are doing the best we can do in the given circumstances.

Who are you calling on to help you with your work right now?

We are calling on the media to let people know where we have set up camps to help. That�s an immediate need. We are also calling upon anywhere which has counselors, medical personnel who can volunteer, especially to go outside Nairobi for at least a week. We are working closely with the Red Cross. Any help that can also go to the Red Cross, we�d be very happy.

Back in the office - Monday morning

2008-01-08T04:00:00.000-08:00

On Monday morning, the African Woman and Child Feature Service opened after the holiday break.

Some of our colleagues are still marooned in their rural homes. Others are unwilling or unable to leave their Nairobi homes to travel across town to the office.

The talk amongst those of us who were in the office was all elections and post-election violence (as the broadcasters here have seemed to name it). Everyone had stories of shock at the conflict here, of friends in trouble, of threats to personal security and of hopes for peace.

African Woman and Child Feature Service is a diverse group. There are staff of all ages, from late teens to late forties. There are people from many tribal groups.

Our director, Rosemary, gathered us all to take tea late in the morning. We had a long talk about the conflict and the way forward.

The meeting was a great taste of the different viewpoints people have on the conflict and on what needs to happen to move toward long-term peace and true democracy.

Here are some excerpts from that conversation. You can read a longer transcript in the expanded version of this post, below.

"When God says, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself," he didn�t say that your neighbor will be [a certain tribe], he said your neighbor can be anybody. It is that neighbor that, when you are in distress, you call. "

"...my name is Juliana and I come form Busia or wherever. That won�t change. Even the attorney general can not help me with that one. That is part of my identity. But it does not give me permission to desecrate another person."

"When we went to vote, I remember we were on the line and I have my friends who are [supporters of another party]. And we were talking so positively. You don�t care whether they were voting for PNU or ODM. It was your democratic right. At that level, people didn�t care. What they wanted was just justice, a free and fair election. People were saying, �if you win, you have won. We are Kenyans.�

You know the other time I voted when Moi was in power, you could not even talk that. People feared. People did not want to know your political affiliation. This time people were talking openly.

Then this thing happened and you can see, if you listen to international media, some people are saying they wish this election had never happened."

"Ordinary people in Kenya, are just normally resigned to bear fate and say, �OK, I think the best we can do is pray.� But I think right now we must very pro-actively begin look for strategies in the work that we do that bring leaders to account for the things that they have done. We have to use our work to demand for truth and justice. That is the only way we can realize long-lasting peace.

Peace is something that people build over a long period of time. In Rwanda they are still building peace. Civil society people like us have the space and the means to begin to show that route to everyone else in our society."

"We are on the edge of the abyss. We cannot afford to go down. Not us. Us as individuals and us as a country. As Kenya. We can�t. It is too terrible to imagine... I am praying that we will be a model of leadership as individuals and as an organization. That we speak that word of power, that word of peace, reconciliation and moving forward. "

Here's the longer transcript of the meeting...

Rosemary

We don�t take it forgranted that we are all here. There are those of us who are still stranded�

When God says, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself," he didn�t say that your neighbor will be [a certain tribe], he said your neighbor can be anybody. It is that neighbor that, when you are in distress, you call.

So even as we are going to interact here, let�s ask God to give us the wisdom to pronounce peace, to pronounce love, to pronounce justice and harmony among us. Any change starts with you and with me�

AWC, we can be the model of Kenya, we are so diverse here. If we live in harmony, we will be a center for peace�

People have to talk. Let�s no censor ourselves. Talk anything. Even if you feel somebody is talking bad about your tribe. Let�s find solutions in an amicable way, knowing that we are here for each other. We are sisters and brothers. We care about one another�

It�s so sad to see people being displaced, people losing their livelihood. Three-quarters of people in Central, in Rift Valley, their life will never be the same. One week ago it was normal, now it is all gone. What is gone is years and years and years of hard work and investment and planning and energy�

Juliana

I thank God. I don�t take it for granted that we are back here. Even the people who are stranded wherever they are, they still have their lives with them.

We lost a friend, actually. He was an aspirant [for political office]. He came in second or third. We don�t know who shot him or why. We have lost friends. It hurts. When I think of him, I think, shame� this country has lost one more fantastic, brilliant person. Of course, he has left a very young family. I don�t know how that will be�

We have the power, in our own individual ways, to stop this rubbish. We just can�t go on this way. Being sensitive to the fact that my name is Juliana and I come form Busia or wherever. That won�t change. Even the attorney general can not help me with that one. That is part of my identity. But it does not give me permission to desecrate another person. I am just praying that out of this mess, something good will come out.

I am praying that we will be a model of leadership as individuals and as an organization. That we speak that word of power, that word of peace, reconciliation and moving forward. We are on the edge of the abyss. We cannot afford to go down. Not us. Us as individuals and us as a country. As Kenya. We can�t. It is too terrible to imagine.

Rosemary

We need to look at righteousness and truth and justice and mercy.

If only, we can open our eyes, to use our diversity in a very positive way, Kenya will go very, very far. All of us didn�t apply to be who we are. We found ourselves in this. You don�t punish another tribe because of who they are.

Ruth

I thank God for being here today. It�s taken the hand of good. Because us, we have been staying here. Everybody has been calling me, �What is happening on Ngong Road?� because everybody is watching Ngong Road on TV. But the lord has kept us safe. In the midst of all that confusion, tear gas, we all get scared. We got a chance to go to Kibera and we�ve seen massive, massive destruction in Kibera�

If we work hard as a team, love one another, cherish one another, we will be able to speak peace to the other people who are scattered all across Kenya.

Arthur

When we went to vote, I remember we were on the line and I have my friends who are [supporters of another party]. And we were talking so positively. You don�t care whether they were voting for PNU or ODM. It was your democratic right. At that level, people didn�t care. What they wanted was just justice, a free and fair election. People were saying, �if you win, you have won. We are Kenyans.�

That was the talk on the lines. I could not imagine. You know the other time I voted when Moi was in power, you could not even talk that. People feared. People did not want to know your political affiliation. This time people were talking openly.

Then this thing happened and you can see, if you listen to international media, some people are saying they wish this election had never happened. People were saying, you stay with somebody for 20 years, and it�s just because of an election, someone is burning your house and you are being chased out.

These are people you have lived with, people you have helped, people you fall back to when you have a problem. I think the public is taking leadership. They don�t even now want leaders to steer the process. Only by us taking leadership, we shall change things.

Juliana

Yesterday at church, there was this reverend, she said �I want to stand here as a representative of [my] community. There are things that we have spoken that have not been good. I want to confess on my behalf and on behalf of the community I represent, that we have not always been fair.�

And she called up another member of [another community]. She said, �come and stand here. I want to face you. I want to apologize publicly for things that we said and did that were not right, even as people of the church and as individuals.� It was really powerful.

Then they said, �now we are going to pray.� It was a very long, powerful prayer. People cried. People actually wept. For me, I thought there was power in the public acknowledgement that wrongs had been committed on both sides.

This man who came up, he said, �you see, when you listen to my prayer and even my apology on behalf of the people I represent, it is many years of heartbreak, many years of being put down, many years of injustice. And all this bitterness and the fact that there is no justice. People have been crying over the years and there has been nothing coming through. And now there is rage. And now we are associated with all this violence.�

I thought that was really powerful, even within the church. Even the church leadership admitting they were divided� For me that was a very deep acknowledgement. I was just thinking that if that model can be replicated, maybe that is where we need to begin.

Those images we see. Those SMSs we have received. Frantic phone calls from friends, relatives. You know us, we have friends across every tribe. You know, when people call you at one AM in distress. All you can tell them is, �let me look for whoever I can find, the best I can do right now is just pray but keep your phone open, we will see how it goes.� I didn�t sleep this whole holiday, this whole week.

Rosemary

You know what is happening now, we see Eldoret [on TV] but the people in those small, small towns, they are starving. They are stranded.

Arthur

I talked to [a TV station] and I told them, �don�t� just focus on Nairobi and Eldoret.� There are things which are happening in other towns. Even in the villages. Even in Nairobi, they were just focusing on Nairobi and Kibera.

I went to Eastlands, even now, by six pm, people are not walking. People are walking and at eight, somebody just stops and asks you to produce your ID. And yet the police commissioner says there is peace. There is peace and calm during the day. At night, there is no peace.

The night before we were attacked, I found men outside when I was coming back at around eight, men with pangas [machetes]. You know we are near this slum. They said, �you guys, you are there in comfort, we are coming to attack.�

Rosemary

Hunger is going to bring another face of war.

Juliana

A friend of mine in Langata says people are going around, just begging. Her landlady said we can�t help them. But even if you don�t, it will reach a point when people will jump over. You�ve barricaded yourself inside your gate, your walled compound and people in desperation are going to come through.

Arthur

You saw what happened, in Kibera, with the police, with their food. It was on [TV news]. People just took the food and the police were helpless. And children. Grown men grabbed food from children.

Joyce

When we say that it starts from the individual, it�s very important. Because even in this organization, we didn�t support one person but we are all getting along. In the queues, I heard people say ODM, PNU, but we got along. Starting from the individual level, interpersonal relationships. The little thing we can do as a person. If we all put it together, it�s a lot. I think we should not undermine our personal efforts.

Trying in the little way and subtle ways we can, to make a better place.

Yesterday, I tuned into the one hour of prayer and I liked what I saw. I didn�t see any political leader. Just church people, poets, musicians, people coming out to say, �we have lived together as one, why are we having issues right now?�

Why are we trying to fight other people�s battles? People are just trying to settle their own scores. As individuals, we just go on with our lives. As individuals, try to do the best we can.

Even if Kibaki has been our president for five years, he doesn�t know me and I am a Kikuyu. He doesn�t. He doesn�t know how I went through school. I never got a bursary or anything. I coped, just like every other Kenyan. So this belief, that if someone form my community becomes our president, my life will change, it wouldn�t�

Alix

Whatever is happening, at least at AWC we are all together, regardless of where you come from. When I was coming from home, I told the people there, �I am going back to Nairobi, I am going back to work.� So they asked me, �What kind of people do you work with?� �With everyone. With different people.� �And who is your boss?� I told them my boss is a Luo. They told me, �Gosh. And you are going back to Nairobi?!?� <everyone laughs> I told them, �Don�t worry. I�m confident, where I am going to work, everyone is intelligent and, at least, when it comes to the office work, we all stand together.� I am happy. We are together. We are in peace.

I called my father this morning and I told him, �I am in the office. And everything is OK.� He wishes AWC a lot of peace. But Kenya, if there is no peace in the country, even if there is peace here in AWC, we don�t exist. We don�t exist on our own, actually, alone. We work with partners, with donors and the government.

Wilson

There are many things in my mind. I wonder how to frame them. The work that we do as civil society from now, onwards, should aim at bringing leaders to account for these things that are happening now and for the many other things that have happened in the past. We sort just prayed and let leaders off the hook.

Ordinary people in Kenya, are just normally resigned to bear fate and say, �OK, I think the best we can do is pray.� But I think right now we must very pro-actively begin to look for strategies in the work that we do that bring leaders to account for the things that they have done. We have to use our work to demand for truth and justice. That is the only way we can realize long-lasting peace.

Anne

As Rosemary said, nobody chose to be born a Luo, a Kikuyu, a Mehru. I realized that [many people I know and work with are from another tribe]. I have no reason to have hatred towards them because of all these clashes. Let�s work as an AWC tribe.

Alex

There�s a quote that says a successful organization is one that finds opportunities in problems, not problems in opportunities� So we can maybe look out for things we can cover in this post-election violence. We just bring our means together and see what we can do.

Rosemary

AWC has partnered with the senior women editors to start a white ribbon, heal the nation campaign� Then there is a project we are working on to bring a peace journalism training to all the journalists here. Because when we were having a meeting last week with the senior editors, one thing came out, language is key in this peace process. Even they, themselves, they don�t know how to deal with the situation� Language and portrayal. You can not do it if you have never been exposed to a war like now and if you have never been taught�

Arthur

I like what the archbishop said, you can never push for peace if you don�t push for justice. In Zimbabwe, you remember, they started with �Peace. Peace. Peace.� But they realized, you can pray, but as long as there is not justice� Even if you look in the bible, there are places where justice has to be done. Where there is justice, there is peace�

Where we are now in the crisis, the moment people will see this justice, you will not see any other problems. We need an open forum, just to ask why certain tribes have lived together but how something small can ignite a massacre.

Report from Tanzania

2008-01-08T03:03:00.000-08:00

My good friend Allison Dempster, another JHR trainer and CBC journalist, has sent in this essay about how this conflict is affecting Tanzania. She also writes about how the tribal tensions that are flaring here right now have got her thinking about the role of tribes in Tanzania.

I'm hoping some friends in Uganda and Rwanda will file reports from their stations soon.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here's Alli:

While more reports come in from Kenya on the numbers of dead and displaced, and the International Monetary Fund sounds the alarm about the effect of the post-election violence on East African economies, I made a trip to the Village Museum in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

I learned about tribes I had never heard of: how they build their houses, prepare their food and celebrate rites of passage. There are more than 120 tribes in Tanzania and I felt a little ashamed that I knew so little about them. It occurred to me that while I've lived in Tanzania for almost six months and I probably could have named just as many, if not more, Kenyan tribes as Tanzanian. And I've only been to Kenya once for a long weekend.

It's not a good excuse for my long overdue trip to the museum, but many Tanzanians have told me that tribes aren't really a big deal here. Sometimes they add the comparison, '...at least not the way they are in Kenya'.

I've even come across safari companies in Tanzania that have managed to work the country's history of being generally free from tribal conflict into their sales pitches. Against an animal print backdrop, one company's website boasts, "Thanks to its political stability and ethnic unity, 'tribalism' or tribal conflicts have never been a problem. Christians, Muslims and other religious denominations co-exist peacefully."

As Tanzanians watch Kenyan democracy flail, bloggers, editorialists and sidewalk newstand commentators here muse on tribalism. They are talking about what fuels it and what transcends it. This almost always leads to a discussion about 'Baba ya taifa', the 'father of the nation', Julius Nyerere, who led the former British protectorate of Tanganyika to independence in 1961. He became its first Prime Minister, later its first President.

Nyerere's African socialist experiment with community-based farming collectives may have failed economically, plunging the country into debt, but he is widely credited for bringing Tanzanians together with a national ideology that went beyond tribal allegiances. With so many tribes to unite over signifcant distances, this may have been a politically pragmatic move, as much as an ideological one. Nevertheless, described as a 'skilled nation-builder' Nyerere is championed for fighting tribalism, rather than using it to his political advantage.

Tanzanian writer Godfrey Mwakikagile puts it this way: "We may not have conquered tribalism in Tanzania, but we have been able to contain it effectively. And that's no mean achievement; a rare feat on a continent where the idea of nation as a transcendent phenomenon in a polyethnic context remains a nebulous concept."

Tanzania is now host to hundreds of Kenyans who have crossed the border to escape the post-election violence. One report estimates 1,000 people have made the trip.

The Kenyan conflict is putting Tanzania in the economic choke-hold that land-locked East African countries are experiencing, but debate is stirring over whether the Dar Es Salaam port can handle some of the Uganda and Rwanda-bound goods and fuel that would normally leave from Mombasa.

Back at the village museum, tourists wander through a display of traditional houses made out of different combinations of mud, clay, bambo and elephant grass.

There's also a baobab with a placard explaining the tree's spiritual significance to different tribes in Africa. Some leave offerings and prayers at the foot of baobab trees; even political leaders will pay them a visit to try to get in the good graces of their ancestors. Here's hoping Kenyan leaders find grace soon.

One day of rest: people, power, possibility

2008-01-06T12:46:00.000-08:00

There is a magician downstairs.

He is saying "Abracadabra! Abracadabra!"

Kids are laughing. There are balloons and one of those inflatable trampoline things and cake and a big Happy Birthday sign. Someone is having a party around the sad little pool that borders our parking lot.

The small crowd gathered downstairs includes indigenous Kenyans, white folks and East Indians. It is taking all of my willpower not to go down and start interviewing people about conflict, race, tribes and politics. I would love to ask the magician-cum-clown how he managed to put on that red nose and a smile today.

But it's a party. And today is Sunday. Most of Kenya seems to be taking a day of rest.

I'm at home for the first time in many days. The shops and kiosks in the neighborhood are all closed. I imagine that everyone is at church this Sunday.

I've checked in with people around the country and, other than a sense of suspended animation and the ongoing need for food and paraffin, things are quiet.

On the political front, we have heard talk of coalition governments, vote re-counts and new elections. There seems to be little significant movement on any of those fronts.

Tomorrow some people will try to go back to work. Others will try to rally in downtown Nairobi. On Tuesday, demonstrations are expected in towns across the country.

Today, as people across the country take a deep breath and prepare themselves for a week of uncertainty, I want to take a step back from updates and look at the bigger picture.

The Problem

The Kikuyus and Luos are the two largest tribes in Kenya, where there are more than 40 distinct ethnic groups. Those tribes mingle in Nairobi, on the coast and in many smaller towns around the country. Much of rural Kenya is still largely divided up into tribal regions: Swahili on the coast, Luo and Luhya in the West, Kikuyu around Mt. Kenya.

Kibaki is Kikuyu. Most Kikuyus support him. Odinga is Luo. Most Luos support him, as do other people from tribes that are traditionally associated with western Kenya.The ethnic lines along which Odinga's ODM and Kibaki's PNU coalesced only reinforced the role of tribe in politics and business here.

This country has only had one truly fair democratic election, back in 2002. That's when Kibaki took over from Daniel Arap Moi. Moi, a member of the Kalenjin community, had been in power since 1978. He was constitutionally barred from running in the 2002 race. He had taken over after the death of Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu who led Kenya from independence in 1963.

I have only been here for about five months now. I don't pretend to be any expert on Kenyan politics, history or culture. But I feel confident in saying that tribe is not just a name here in Kenya. It is a culture. There are different languages, different traditions and different social mores.

There is a growing body of writing on the role of culture in development. I am only beginning to scratch the surface in my own reading. But suffice it to say that what is happening in Kenya right now is, in part, an example of what can happen when people from many cultural communities live together in one nation state, with widespread poverty and the general perception that holding political power is an essential way to build prosperity for themselves.

If there was a history of leaders from one community serving the country as whole, of not putting their cultural community ahead of others, then people here might be more willing to support a leader from another tribe. With such a history, we might see a well-formed party structure that is based around issues and platforms, not just tribe and personality.

Perhaps democracy is more than just whether a leader won the majority of the votes without any electoral fraud. Perhaps democracy is also a population that believes that a national government is a group of people who will work together to serve the good of the country.

The People

Whether or not they identify as a nation, the conflict in Kenya right now is affecting people around this country.

There are widespread shortages of food and water. Although people here and overseas aid agencies are donating food, the deliveries are delayed for fear that hungry people along the roads might swarm convoys.

Food is not moving around the country. Neither are people. Either there is no transport available or people are scared by stories of occasional marauding groups attacking cars or the price of transport has risen beyond their means.

In classic conflict fashion, Kenya's currency is faltering. Yesterday, a group of international donors issued a joint statement that urged Odinga and Kibaki to come to some sort of resolution, or risk permanent damage to the Kenyan economy.

The economy has had about five percent annual growth over the past five years. It is slowly weaning itself off foreign aid.

But right now people can not get to work. Goods can not get around the country.

The people living in slums provide much of the labour force in urban areas. With the poor security and limited transportation, they can not get to work. Other people who left urban areas to go to their rural homes for voting and December holidays can not get back to urban centers to and back to their jobs.

Those urban workers support countless family members in rural Kenya. If they are not making money, then they are not sending money home. In a country where the average daily wage is still below $1.50 USD, most people do not have much savings to drawn from.

Goods can not get to stores around the country. Export commodities can not get out. Traffic at the Mombasa port has been slow, if not stopped, over the past week. Trucks full of flowers and produce have had a hard time getting to the planes that would carry them to markets in Europe and elsewhere.

Perhaps the industry with the most to lose in the long run is the tourism sector. Tourism and horticulture (flowers, vegetables, fruit) are the top two industries in Kenya. But some local tour operators say most of their bookings for the next six months have been cancelled. Many European safari operators have voluntarily cancelled tours in the face of warnings or bans against travel to Kenya.

Part of something larger

Many economies in this region rely on stability in Kenya. Goods move through this country on their way to Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Already those countries are seeing shortages in fuel and other staples, as supply lines through Kenya have slowed or stopped. Aid supplies also transit through Kenya on their way to Somalia, Sudan and eastern Congo.

While goods are not moving across the border, people are. They are reports of Kenyans fleeing to Uganda and Tanzania to get away from the fighting here. The idea of taking refuge in Uganda leaves many Kenyans shaking their heads, but a local paper reports more than five thousand people have crossed the border so far.

There is a large diaspora of Kenyans around the world. The conflict here is affecting them as well. There was a demonstration in front of the Kenyan embassy in Washington, DC on Thrusday. People called for an independent audit of the votes here.

On Saturday, there was a march in London, from Parliament, past 10 Downing Street, to the Kenyan Embassy. A Kenyan blogger living in London posted an essay about the event. One part of her story was particularly interesting to me. She wrote:

We walked to No.10 chanting demo slogans like "We want justice! Stop the killing Now!" The police stepped in to stop us from raising banners along Whitehall due to anti-terror legislation. I asked somebody which act they were using and somebody said "I don�t know. I don�t even think that the police know!"

�It was surreal. Here we were demanding that the British government respect the democratic will of Kenyans, but here in Britain 2008 the right to peacefully assemble and demonstrate is under attack.

For a moment I felt a terrible sense of impotence which quickly dissipated when I remembered that this is a matter for Kenyans to resolve, who needs Gordon Brown and his ridiculous ideas of coalition governments?

The Possibilities

A coalition government is what some other countries are suggesting Odinga and Kibaki form. If it is not working in England, with its relative cultural homogeneity and long democratic tradition, what kind of chance does it stand in an emerging democracy such as Kenya?

But maybe it is that kind of brave break from personality politics that will bring about true democracy here. Maybe Odinga and Kibaki can surrender their egos for the good of this country. As a friend of mine said today, "It's not their kids in Kibera or in Mathari, but they should still care about kids dying."

Other people suggest an independent body be brought in to recount the votes. As I have written here before, it seems clear that the ballots have not been secured since election day, so a recount probably will not put to rest all concerns about rigging.

There are reports that the Electoral Commission of Kenya will go to the courts for resolution of the election question. Some people have said that they think Kibaki will just dictate the court's findings. But for that to happen, in terms of Kenyan law, one of the parties must bring the complaint before the court. So far, neither ODM nor PNU has done so.

The other suggestion is another round of elections. Whether that would mean more time to arrange more rigging from both sides and a three-month respite before another round of conflict, I don't know. At this point, perhaps a new election overseen by a truly independent body is the fairest way forward.

Otherwise, maybe ODM supporters will run out of steam and Kibaki will lead the country for the next five years. Whatever happens, I am planning to stick around, to keep sharing the voices of Kenyans.

The Power of Words

"On Tuesday, it will be chaos."

"No, no. They won't rally. It will be quiet."

The crowd around the pool has shifted now. The sky is darkening and the adults have moved in. They are, of course, talking politics. I am, of course, eavesdropping.

It's taken me a long time to write this post. I know it's taken you a long time to read it.

There have been a lot of weighty terms thrown around about Kenya lately. For the first time, I have heard Kenyans use slang terms to refer to various tribal groups. Before last week, people always used formal tribal names in front of me.

During an interview with a Canadian news program last week, the host tried to get me to use the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe the situation here. I told her I had ethical issues with sticking such a weighty label on a sensitive situation.

I am cautious because I know the power of words. Kikuyu. Luo. They shape our perceptions. ODM. PNU. And those perceptions change our actions. Rally. Riot. Our actions change situations. Ethnic cleansing. Civil war. Genocide.

Even though the way forward is not clear, I will leave you with some optimistic words.

Not magic words. But hopeful words.

Somehow, someway, peace is always possible.

On the edge of Kibera - Saturday afternoon

2008-01-05T08:06:00.000-08:00

I'm in a dingy cyber cafe between Jamhuri Park and Kibera.

I won't spend long typing here on this sticky keyboard, but suffice it to say that the situation in Nairobi is not yet normal.

There was a roadblock on my way into town. The matatu driver pulled over to try to find out what was going on, the old woman beside was saying "turn around, turn around." But in the end, the road cleared and we continued on.

A major shopping mall near my apartment was barricaded against the vast crowd of people trying to get in to buy food.

Me and Felix, a freelance friend of mine, have walked through Jamhuri Park, where about 2000 people are camped right now. Mainly they are women and children who have left Kibera out of fear for their security.

Volunteers from the US International University were playing with kids. A couple of games of soccer were going on and women (many with babes in arms) were lined up to get first aid supplies from a St. John's Ambulance unit.

I talked with a nurse there who said she's heard no stories about sexual violence against women. But she says in all the stress, many women have got their periods. No clean water for drinking, let alone bathing, makes for an uncomfortable situation for them.

Because of the insecurity at night in Kibera, many people are back to using so-called "flying toilets," plastic bags filled with human waste that are flung out of doorways.

I had a long conversation with a woman who has left her Kibera home for Jamhuri. She has sent her children to Mathari. I will post the transcript of our conversation tomorrow, along with photos from today.

I am going now to meet a friend to walk through Kibera. Tonight, Felix will spend the night there, documenting how the young men are keeping themselves up through the night, guarding homes and businesses.

Tomorrow we will try to get into some slums on the other side of town. Most of my contacts are here, but the stories from Kibera are only one side of this national dispute. I'd like to get some other voices for you.

Stay tuned.

Saturday morning updates

2008-01-05T03:26:00.000-08:00

The fighting around the country seems to have calmed. People are now working to find shelter, food and other essentials. Others are reaching out to people who have been displaced. They are housing relatives, sending money and food. Land transportation around the country is still limited.

ODM and PNU leaders are making more conciliatory noises, but both are asserting conditions that might slow any forward movement. We will see what the next few days bring.

International media are claiming a little more than 300 people have died in the violence. I find that number a little unbelievable, to be frank. From the people I've spoken with around the country, it seems the finally tally will be at least three times that.

Edwin says he went to the ODM meeting in Kibera, yesterday. Raila was not there. He says some ODM officials came into the settlement to announce that there will be a rally in downtown Nairobi next Tuesday. They also tried to hand out bread, but when chaos broke out around the truck, they retreated without distributing the food.

The shops in Kibera that are still standing are open for business. Edwin says they are crowded and running low on supplies, particularly paraffin.

In Kisumu, Judy says the streets are calm. She says it is eerie going into town with burned shops and the lingering smell of tear gas.

Paul says Mombasa is quiet.

Amos says the situation in Eldoret is relatively calm but tension is still high. He says people are still being evacuated from the city center. One of the people killed in Eldoret during the post-election violence was Luka Sang, a middle-distance runner. Amos says people are threatening to revenge his death when he is buried next week.

I am taking the rest of the day to try to take care of some practical matters and to suss out the situation on the ground. Check in tomorrow.

Friday evening update

2008-01-04T08:31:00.000-08:00

Generally, it seems that the day has been quiet across the country.

The on-again-off-again rally in downtown Nairobi has not materialised.

Late this afternoon, Edwin said there was a rumor that Raila was in Kibera, meeting with supporters there. I've had no confirmation of that.

Publicly, ODM leaders have called for a new election. Desmond Tutu says Kibaki is open to creating a coalition government.

As more international bodies begin to publicly question the legitimacy of the election outcome, it seems unlikely that Raila will agree to form a coalition. Of course, there are also serious doubts about how effective such a coalition would be.

In Kisumu, Judy says people are slowly returning to the streets, looking for food and phone credit.

In Nairobi, downtown was quiet but some businesses were open.

I have been unable to reach Amos in Eldoret. Friends of friends say there is still a lot of tension north of Nakuru.

The worst violence today is reportedly in Mombasa, where people took to the streets this afternoon, apparently heeding Raila's call for a rally today. Security personnel dispersed protesters with tear gas and water cannons. Paul says word in Mombasa is that shots were fired. Maimuna says three people were shot. As of yet, there are no press reports of injuries.

I am still looking for someone to give me news from Northeastern, and Mt. Elgon. Suggestions, please.

More news tomorrow.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting link to an article about the role of bloggers covering the situation in Kenya.

Press-ing media matters

2008-01-04T07:10:00.000-08:00

The radio is on all the time here. At the house, the TV is airing SKYnews or the BBC. There is a cacaphony of whistles, tinny pop tunes and annoying factory ring tones as we receive phone calls and SMSs from people across the country and around the world.

We are information hungry. So are people across Kenya.

Although mobile phones are changing the information map in East Africa (see post, Reporting on the past, presenting the future), radio is still king here.

Talking with Mama Hamza in Kibera on Thursday afternoon, she said food was scarce but she was most hungry for information.

With all the confusion about what is happening around the country, credible information is critical.

At our impromptu office here in Karen, we count on Capital and Kiss FM for updates about what is happening on the ground. As I was listening to news earlier this morning, Caroline Mutoko was railing against what she sees as the failure of all political leaders to take the actions necessary to begin making peace in Kenya.

As she read out her list of greivances with Kibaki and Raila, she kept repeating, "If this is my last broadcast..." and "If this is our last show..."

I started to get worried. Although Kenya has a relatively free media compared to many African countries, there are recent stories of media muzzling. Shortly before I arrived in Kenya, reporters took the streets to silently protest a new law that would have made it easier for courts to pressure journalists to reveal their sources.

A friend who works at Capital assured me that things are fine at their station.

At another station, the news editor told me that, although the government declared a ban on all live broadcasts shortly after Kibaki was sworn in earlier this week, negotiations between media owners and the government had ensured that most radio and TV stations are still up and running as normal.

When I got Kiss FM's news editor on the phone, I asked Carol Radull why her host kept talking about going off the air and about a blackout. She said, effectively, the station managers have decided to push back at the political leaders. She said they are carefully selecting what they air, since they know the power of faulty or propagandistic information to increase tensions here.

"We�ve not given politicians a complete blackout, but we are selecting carefully what to run and what not to run," Radull said. "If a politician says something that we know will lead to more bloodshed, we will ignore it. We will also ignore those calling for peace yet they�re doing nothing about it."

This morning, Mutoko was railing against politicians who, she says, continue to talk big without taking real action. You can hear a clip here (with apologies for the jokers in the background).

Download re_foreign_media.wav

My contact at Capital FM said Mutoko is known to be controversial.

At least, for the moment, she is free to be as controversial as she likes.

There are countless media reports comparing the tribal violence in parts of Kenya to the genocide in Rwanda. Hate messages broadcast by radio are blamed for much of the retaliatory violence that was part of that conflict. Although the Kenyan government has been sending out messages warning people to stop sending SMSs that incite violence (see post, Peace-loving, Peace-building), I have not heard reports of radio being using as a medium for hate messages here.

Kiss and Capital are both airing messages and music encouraging people to build peace and brotherhood in Kenya.

They are telling people where to take donations for people in need. They are reminding Kenyans that, a week ago, they were one nation. And they are talking about the complexities of moving forward from this conflict.

Download the_complexity_of_peace_4_web.mp3

Peace. Justice. Truth.

For all three Kenyans need access to information. They need to maintain a truly free press.

Updates upon updates - rally today

2008-01-04T04:32:00.000-08:00

A reporter friend just told me he is with ODM leaders now, heading into town for a rally.

The cover of one of the national papers announced a rally for today. Maybe they decided to follow through despite the confusion? Maybe there are people who are intentionally seeding the confusion in hopes of diffusing the energy?

Given that there are apparently no large groups of people moving into town to join them, we will see how the rally goes.

Friday morning updates from Kenya

2008-01-04T04:01:00.000-08:00

The ever-shifting situation here makes these posts outdated a few minutes after posting. But for what it's worth...

Confusing information is coming in about when a rally might be held by opposition supporters. Yesterday afternoon, they were calling for a meeting next Tuesday. Then we heard that Raila had called for a rally today, Friday. This morning I hear that people are calling for a rally tomorrow in downtown Nairobi. Nobody seems clear on what might be planned.

From what I hear from people around the country, the situation this morning is generally quiet but tense.

In Nairobi, Felix says some businesses are open. Security pesonnel are on the streets. Many people who have been displaced from neighborhoods around Nairobi are camping out in Jamhuri Park. Individuals and businesses are bringing food and clothing in to the park. Reminiscent of images from refugee camps around the world, Felix says fights are breaking out over the supplies as they arrive.

In Kibera, Edwin says there is an eerie calm. He says at the northern edge of the settlement, noone sees to be trying to move into town, though the roads are now open. Milka says there are growing concerns that the Mathari-based gang known as Mungiki might raid Kibera. She says leaflets and photos have been left on the outskits of Kibera, threatening retaliation for how certain tribes have been targeted in Kibera over the past week. Mama Hemza says, since the already limited electrical infrastructure there is faltering, it is very difficult to get good information about what is happening outside the slum.

In Eldoret, Edwin says the city is dead quiet. We heard yesterday that ten trucks full of people fleeing the town arrived safely in Nairobi.

In Mombasa, Paul and Maimuna say the situation is quiet right now. Maimuna says in the poor neighborhood of Kisauni, supplies of food, phone credit and paraffin are running lower than ever.

In Kisumu, Judy says the city center is relatively quiet. She says the prices for all essentials has at least doubled.

More updates in a few hours.

In the meantime, I am looking for a more contact who can give us updates from Northeastern and Central. If you know anyone, please e-mail me names and phone numbers.

A moment for personal perspective

2008-01-04T03:08:00.000-08:00

We were sitting around the big kitchen table of my friend's compound in Karen this morning, drinking coffee, listening to the radio, debating the news.

The Kiss FM morning host was becoming increasingly irrate about the situation in this country. Then, I heard Caroline Mutoko say, "Kenyans are killing Kenyans. There are fires in Nairobi, but houses in Karen are still standing."

True that.

Some of my friends are going a little stir crazy from being unable to get to their businesses, their farms, their homes. But we are safe and, if anything, over-fed in Karen.

I am infinitely greatful to my friends who have fed me, transported me, housed me and given me (essential) internet service over the past week. I know that we have priviledges that the vast majority of people in this country don't have on a good day, let alone in the midst of this growing domestic conflict.

I've been watching each of us respond to the situation here. People are gracious, tired, patient, joking, angry, frustrated and - more than anything - surprised by how this country that we all love has changed over the past week.

It struck me that the wardrobe choices we each made yesterday spoke volumes about how each of us were responding.

Ron wore his usual metrosexual European male attire, but threw on a work shirt before we left for Karen. He says people often mistake the Preesman logo for "Press Man." He thought it might help us get through barricades if we ran into any trouble.

I wore my Journalists for Human Rights shirt for similar reasons, though I'm not sure what credibility a t-shirt would give me in a country where most people are wearing second hand clothes.

Michiel stuck with his tongue-in-cheek cartoon violence wardrobe. But I couldn't help but wonder if the martyred angel he wore was a specific choice. "I am innocent. This conflict has nothing to do with me. Please leave me alone."

Wardrobes aside, our white skin and priviledge have so far kept us out of the way of any real danger. We have talked a little bit about how we will evacuate if need be. But all of us want to stay. Although we may disagree about how the government should respond to the conflict, what the international community should do, we are all committed to staying.

The flower guys will manage farms remotely. The web developer will keep working until there is no web access. The moms will keep taking care of their kids. And I will be here, frustrated by not being in the field, but blogging to the best of my ability.

Stay tuned.

Peace,

Sara

Evening updates from around Kenya

2008-01-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

There seems to be some movement among the political leadership today. Raila met with Desmond Tutu earlier today. He postponed the rally until next Tuesday.

People across the country are calling for a re-tally of the votes. A pollster contact says the ballots have not been secured over the past week, which casts a great shadow of doubt over their validity.

But amid the regional rioting, some radio stations and media are pouring out appeals for peace and calm. People are donating food and clothes and other essentials for people who have been displaced, or who have no access to money.

Here's what I'm hearing from around the country.

Judy in Kisumu says although the riots in town have calmed down, people are still not safe. She says there are widespread reports of women and children being raped in their homes. There is no transport in or out of the area because of informal roadblocks. Judy says if people are stopped in their cars, they are asked for their identification cards. If they are from an opposing group, they are beaten and their cars burned. As elsewhere around the country, food and phone credit are scarce.

In Kibera, Edwin says the rioting is slowly calming, though the atmosphere is still tense. He says two churches and three schools have been burned. Emergency crews can't get into the slum because of burning cars. He says food prices in the slum have skyrocketed. A two kilogram bag of maize meal is going for 120 shillings, up from about 50 shillings a few days ago.

Maimuma in Kisuani, a slum outside Nairobi, says there was some rioting there earlier today but the situation is generally calm. She says a couple of people were reportedly shot in a neighboring community this morning. Again, people are struggling for food.

And in Eldoret, Amos says people are still streaming into the heart of town.

I will be off-line for the next 15 hours, or so. If you want more news, check out the bloggers in the last post, or the BBC.

Midday updates from around Kenya

2008-01-03T06:49:00.000-08:00

Some friends around the country are sending in updates to 8 Months.

With some sensitivity to the tribal lines that are currently dividing the country, here are some reports of the situation right now...

Most importantly, the opposition has apparently postponed their rally until next Tuesday. Local radio is reporting that Raila has agreed to meet with Kibaki later today.

Amos in Eldoret says, although downtown was quiet this morning, there are now truckloads of young men moving into the city center. Earlier this morning, groups of people who had been sheltering at the police station were being loaded onto police and army trucks. Amos says not all of those people have yet left town. He says the General Service Unit and the police seem to be doing little to stop the convoys of young men from going into town.

In Kibera, Felix says the slums are on fire. He was almost in tears on the phone, saying he had never expected to see that kind of violence in Kenya. He says the General Service Unit seemed not to be acting to stop any of the opposition supporters from looting, burning and beating people.

Friends of friends report that Kisumu, Kakamega and other communities in Nyanza are in the worst state. George says the outskirts of Kisumu are still quiet, though the tension is high and people are without food or credit for their phones. National radio reports that people are rioting, trying to get into downtown Kisumu.

In coast province, Paul says that people are demonstrating on the roads, in protest of the denied rally in Nairobi. This morning, downtown Mombasa was quiet. There were many closed shops and long queues where shops were open. He says markets owned by members of Kibaki's tribe have been looted and torn down in the slums neighboring his home. Apparently, members of the large East Indian community on the coast are evacuating to Nairobi and Tanzania.

The press reports from elsewhere in Nairobi are of skirmishes across the city between police and protesters, as people try to find their way around the security perimeter. Petrol stations in Kilimani, on Thika Road and other parts of town are on fire.

For more blog news and commentary, check out:

http://whiteafrican.com/?p=841

Peace-loving, peace-building

2008-01-03T03:02:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning, to my cell phone chiming as it received text messages from the Kenyan government about laws against hate speach. Other messages told people that it is illegal to assemble in downtown Nairobi today.

After thinking hard about the challenges of reporting from the chaos in downtown Nairobi, without a car or a big media house at my back, I decided to come out to the outskirts of town with some friends.

On our early-morning drive, groups of young men were already blowing whistles and carrying flags into town. Trucks full of the army's Genereal Service Unit were also heading into town, likely going to stop people from attending an opposition rally planned for Uhuru Park today.

Local radio and the BBC report that there are skirmishes breaking out as people try to get together to rally.

Talking with Edwin and Patrick yesterday (see yesterday's blog post), I asked both men what needs to happen for peace in Kenya.

Edwin said the government should let the people rally today. There is a human right to free assembly...

Patrick said the church leaders and the politicians need to come together to call for peace. But yesterday, opposition leader Raila Odinga refused to meet with the leaders of other political parties.

Today, some people are starting to suggest that Kenya holds another election three months from now. After four and a half months here, I am not qualified to guess how effective that might be, whether it would calm or merely postpone the violence.

After four and a half months here, I will say that I believe in Kenyans. I believe that most people here just want a little development, a little prosperity and a little peace. I believe that most people are willing to work hard and help their neighbors, whatever their tribe.

But it is Kenyans who are truly qualified to comment on their nation. So, here are what a few Kenyans had to say today about how to restore peace.

Please note, because of the situation here right now, I am choosing not to use people's last names, photos or tribal affiliations.

Mathias

"It is just up to the main political leaders, Raila, Kibaki and Kalonzo to come together and sit and figure out what to do. It is the only way."

Steven

"Kibaki is the only one who can stop this. He is our President. He has the power. He must tell people to be calm. I don't think he will accept [another election in three months], but if he really loves us, if he really loves Kenya, maybe that is the best thing to do."

Katherine

"What really needs to happen, Kibaki needs to make Raila the Vice President. The leaders need to show that different tribes can work together to guide Kenya."

Nthenge

"People just need to stay cool, to stay calm. They should not rally today. The man from South Africa [Desmond Tutu] is here now, they should wait for word from him before holding rallies."

Angela

"I think Mr. Raila should give it up and stop inciting his people to go out and cause the violence. He should seek redress from the courts. That's the constiutional thing to do. We are goerned by laws and its really stupid for him to let his people go out and do that and just watch from his home. Kenyans have spoken."

Emmy

"I think they need to do what is right by the people. It's nt about individuals. Unfortunately, the government that is in now keeps on thinking it's about individuals. They need to do what is right by the people. It is so rigged. When the people voted, they should respect what the people asked for, if it is true democracy. And who are the losers here? The women and the children and the little boys and the poor person. It never changes for the poor person and I find that disugusting. We have no Uhuru, no independence here in Kenya."

Dave

"Kibaki needs to step down. This won't calm down until Kibaki steps down. They should hold another election, soon. And they need to change the system. There shouldn't be a presidential race here. Why is there still this cult of personality? The leader of the biggest party should be President."

Haiko

"It's just taking a few weeks and everything will be fine. That's how it is. [The chaos] is just in the slums. Do you see normal people doing it? Normal people want to work. Everybody who has a job, wants to work, they want to go to work. The people who have nothing, have nothing to lose. They are the ones who are doing it."

Kenya in conflict

2008-01-02T16:13:00.000-08:00

Two people who have been very personally affected by the violence that is flaring up in parts of the country took time to talk with me today.

Patrick is a Kikuyu businessman from Eldoret, where at least 15 people were burned to death as they were seeking refuge in a church. He, his wife, his six children and a few other members of his immediate family fled Eldoret earlier today.

Here's what he had to say about the situation in Eldoret and in Kenya as a whole...

What was the situation when you left?

The situation in Eldoret is pathetic. It is systematic annihalation of tribe, in my opinion. It actually took God to make it to the airport. Along the way, we were attacked by the Kalenkin warriors but through God�s grace and because we had requested a police escort, we barely made it through. But in the convoy that we were in, we almost lost one car. But through God�s grace, we made it to the airport. It�s been hell. I can say that.

When did you know you had to leave?

Actually, we knew that we would have wanted to have stayed because we were born and bred in Eldoret. My parents moved into Eldoret way back in 1940. So we don�t know anywhere else as home, apart from that place.

But when we realized that this had moved from the ODM, PNU conflict to something much deeper, and that the presidential elections had been used as an excuse for something else to be implemented, [for] the Kalenjins to get rid of the Kikuyus, that�s when we realized that we had to move out. That was the day before yesterday.

How did you leave?

We had to request our friends in Nairobi to come to our aid by chartering a plane because we could not access money and we didn�t have the kind of money that is needed to charter a plane. Our friends here in Nairobi came together and raised the money.

"It's whoever gets out, gets out."

Who have you left behind?

Our family is quite large. What I managed to do is to get my immediate family, my wife and my children but I have left my cousins, I have left my brothers. I am trying to communicated with my brothers to see if they can join us. But the situation is so bad that we can not say that we have to move as the whole clan. We are several hundred. We have lost several members in the conflict.

We have another small batch of relatives at the airport. They might make it today or tomorrow. We don�t know. We are still working on getting the ones who are in town because you can not get to the airport without escort. It�s an enormous challenge that we don�t� know how far we can go because the resources needed to charter this plane are enormous. It costs between 170,000 to 320,000 Kenya shillings to charter a 19-seater.

I told you that my family is expansive. I lost two of my relatives in an area, very young boys. But what was even more disheartening, was my grandmother. She has a farm in Burnt Forest. When the clashes began, they left their homes and they went to a school, the whole village. The school was surrounded by the warriors. Any second, they could have attacked the school and finished them. We cried to the police and the police did send some policemen. The warriors still insisted that they wanted to kill these people. The police brokered a deal. [The people had to walk 20 KM to the nearest town, without getting anything from their homes.] Those villagers are trapped in a small town. We can�t get them food and we can�t get them to Eldoret town. They can�t come out.

"We really fear that there might be a massacre in Eldoret in the next few days."

Patrick's wife Ruth chimes in...

There is great fear in Eldoret town because people are being pushed into one central place, at the police station and at the church. What we have seen is that they are coming now and burning the churches at the outskirts. So far, we know that three churches have been burned and they have blocked all the exits out of town such that you can not get out of Eldoret town. So there is that great fear: why are we being pushed to the center for town? What is the intention?

What we have seen in the outskirts, the violence is so much. There is no precedent for it. In 1992, in 1997, it was not this fierce [during past land clashes]. So there is that great fear among the Kikuyu community in Eldoret. Why are we being put in one central place and we can not get out? So we really fear that there might be a massacre in Eldoret in the next few days.

You are holding quite a picture on the cover of that paper�? [As we were talking, Patrick was holding a copy of today's paper in his hand. On the cover was a photo of a woman wailing outside the burnt shell of the church in Eldoret where a group of sheltering Kikuyus were killed.]

This is a very sad moment. When I made it to Nairobi and I was able to get this paper. One of my families live next to this church that was burned. Over 70 children and women were killed in this church [Media and official reports of the numbers vary widely]. It�s barely a kilometer from where some of my relatives live. It means that some of my relatives, I don�t know, maybe some were caught up in there. But so far we believe they are not caught up there.

This is a very good example of what we are talking about. We know that historically, people have warred. They have always tribe versus tribe, for many reasons, some petty, some reasonable. But we know that the house of God is a place that, across the world, people respect. According to the African culture, children and women are not killed. We also know that the Kalenjin warriors, according to their culture, because we have lived with them, they don�t kill women or children.

So when it comes to a point whereby they go to a house of God where children and women are taking refuge and they kill them there, this is taking the conflict to another level that we believe is not the presidential race.

How surprised are you by what�s happened?

I am shocked. I know the Kalenjin, they are warlike. We know, we live with them, that they have those regiments, they have warriors. But we know that they are also very peace-loving people, we know that we have inter-married with them. This is why it is very shocking that it has gone to this level.

When there was this conflict that the presidential race was unfair, rigging had taken place, we definitely expected some outcry. We definitely expected some people marching. It�s not the first time. In Kenya�s we�ve had land clashed, 1992, 1997. It�s not like it�s something that is new to us. But the level that this has been taking�

Believe me, the death count that you are reading in the newspaper, actually it is over ten times this. The attack has been undertaken all around Eldoret. All around. All the farms, all the villages. If one time, it would be possible to have a death count, we are not talking of hundreds, we are talking of thousands.

What long-term effect do you think this conflict might have in Eldoret and in the country as a whole?

We know what has happened in other countries. We know what has happened in Bosnia, what has happened in Rwanda. Let�s not lie to ourselves that maybe there will not be retaliation.

In Rwanda, when the Hutus killed the Tutsis, it was fun until the tables turned and the Tutsis started killing the Hutus. We all know how many millions have died there. The reality is that, definitely, even if it is not me, there are people who are pained. You never know, it might take ten years, and an opportunity will occur for them to revenge. You never know, anything will trigger it.

Right now, the Kikuyus might be killed and everybody is excited and it�s fine and it cools down. And even Kibaki can say he has given up the seat and it is fine, it cools down. But an opportunity one time will present itself and this will not be forgotten.

What needs to happen to build peace?

We are peace-loving country and God-fearing. It is said that over 80 percent of Kenyans are Christians. Even one of the things that came up in the campaign period was the issue of whether the leaders were Christians. Raila said he is a staunch Christian. President Kibaki said he is a staunch Catholic Christian. But I am asking, where are these pastors? Where are these pastors in Eldoret, Kalenjin pastors? Where is this Christianity?

I am shocked that pastors that had been preaching for us to be god-fearing, they are not coming out to condemn this. They are quiet as the work is being done. And when maybe everybody is down, they will come to bury us and say a very good prayer.

Because in my opinion, there is an opportunity for the church to rise above politics and take its position. How come this Christianity is not playing a role here? Why can�t I hear a Kalenjin bishop or a Kalenjin father or a Kalenjin pastor or a Kalenjin Imam, for that matter, coming out and saying"No, our religion forbids killing women and children." If it�s men, it�s another issue. You can claim they are combatants. And in any war, combatants die. But I don�t believe Christianity or Islam would agree for children and women to be killed in the house of God.

So peace-building, the church has to begin. Right now we don�t trust the political leadership. I want to confess and say, I have not seen Kibaki coming out to speak strongly about it. I want to tell you, I think Raila has said he is not concerned unless Kibaki resigns. The person who is the leader in our area, he is just quiet.

So before the politicians can even sit, I would like to see the church coming out and putting their feet down. That is the first thing.

The second thing, as we are speaking, you might get a report that the war has cooled down. But we have thousands of people camped at the police station and church compounds and they are starving to death. So as much as they were not pierced by the arrows at their farms, they are dying slowly.

If nothing is done for that, you will be lying to people, saying that there is peace.

When there are two warring parties, it always takes a third party to come in and give reason. What we are observing is the international community being silent. We know that the international community is knowing what is happening. They are taking it lightly. We know the same mistake was done in Rwanda, whereby the Rwandese started killing eachother, they cried out to the international community. The international community ignored them until up to a million Rwandans were dead.

The same story is being repeated in Eldoret. This is genocide being done in Eldoret.

________

Edwin is an 18-year-old Luo man living with his mother and two sisters in Kibera. They live in one of the poorest and oldest neighborhoods in the 700-thousand person slum.

What has been happening for the past couple of days?

After the elections, that place was very, very much disrupted, places burned, looted. Olympic shopping center, it is all down. Burned and everything taken. They started entering the estates now. No people are living there now.

Where is everybody staying?

They are starting to look at where they can get peace. Down in the slums, all people are forced out or else your house is burned. They just tell you, �You are the ones who voted Kibaki in, you are now enjoying. So, instead of enjoying and we are crying, you also, you will cry.� So they burn your house.

Yesterday things were calm, but shops were still closed. One supermarket is open but [they are only allowing two people in at a time]. Yesterday, we went to look if we could get something to eat there. But all the vegetables were finished and we were only allowed to take two packets of flour, at most. Sugar, you are only allowed to take one packet, two kilograms.

Where are you staying right now?

We are just staying down there, at the slums, Soweto. But when people are out, we have to be out. No matter the cold or whatever because that is the only way to secure your home and your properties. You have to light fire outside your house and sit out.

How are you getting by?

The last two days, after elections, we had to live with just water because there was no food. We weren�t prepared for the chaos. Yesterday we managed to get two packets of flour and people were selling vegetables. And yet, it was expensive. It brings a lot of problems.

What do you think the next few days will bring?

It�s good when people are left to go on with that rally and sort everything out. If the government stops it, it will be much more [chaos] than this. People were just quiet because of what the opposition leader said, people should be calm because they will meet on Thursday. But again yesterday the government spokesman said that they won�t be allowed in Uhuru Park. That will bring chaos here, if they are not allowed, the anger will continue. People might live like refugees in their own countries.

What have you heard about rapes and violence in Kibera?

Rapes are many because some people are taking advantage of opportunities that now people are scattered. In our area, two girls were raped. One was in a critical condition and had to be rushed to the hospital.

Some Kikuyus are being thrown out of their houses down there. People are grabbing those houses. In the process of grabbing the houses, people find themselves fighting for that also. It is one house and almost ten people want to grab that house, so they fight themselves again.

That rape case, it�s hard. Because at night, people are out, you don�t know what is going on. Lights were off. We were in blackout. It�s dark. In the morning, you find somebody was killed, two girls were raped, Even mothers, even old grandmothers, just raped.

How surprised are you by what is going on?

I�ve never seen or experienced such kind of thing. I�ve seen elections, but this one is terrible.

How much is this about politics and how much is this about tribalism?p>

Politics, this one, it is tribal. People expected that there will be a change and people wanted really a change. Considering what the president said last term... it�s a five-year term and nothing was achieved except free primary education. So as we talk politically, this thing is politically oriented. People wanted a change this time yet they didn�t get it.

When we talk about tribes� I don�t think so. In Eldoret, there�s another tribe. In Nyanza, there�s another. In Coast, there is another tribe. You find all places, people are fighting. So you can�t say that this tribe doesn�t like this tribe or whatever.

But down here in Kibera, Kikuyus don�t have a chance, truly speaking. Kikuyus are just thrown out, their things grabbed. Whether they have kids, they don�t care, they just throw you out.

You are a young man, you are probably going to be living in Kenya for the rest of your life. What concern do you have that people�s behaviour now might hurt the future of the country and your future with it?

How people are behaving and how I have seen things down there, it will take about three months now if people want to be back to normal. To build up that estate again, it will take people at least a year. Everything is destroyed.

But in the future, this thing is going to effect Kenya. Children are going to be left orphans, fatherless because of how people are fighting.

This thing, also, politically, is going to effect Kenya. Now politicians, instead of coming up with something that will help, they are trying to build on their own interest. They don�t want to see that Kenyans�s lives are at stake.

Who needs to make peace?

I would like the government, if they know that they won it fairly, they should prove it, re-tally the election. Even dialog will not help, because people wanted a change. Dialog between the President and the Opposition Leader won�t help. It�s not their Kenya. Kenya is not two people, the Opposition Leader and the President. They should re-tally. And if everything is OK, and people see that this is a fair election, not a rigged election, the situation will calm down.

Bread and Roses volume two

2007-12-23T16:51:00.000-08:00

Bread and Roses is an ongoing oral history project that asks women two questions. What is one thing (other than cash) that would improve their quality of life? And, all practical needs aside, what is one thing that you dream of?

Here are the answers of three women I met in Kibera this week.

Hamza Ahmed, 65, shopkeeper, Kibera

What is one thing that would improve your quality of life?

To me, it�s knowledge. Because if I get knowledge, I will expand my business. Because now I am running my small kiosk and I don�t have knowledge of running [a business]. Somebody will give me 1 million and I don�t know how to use it. But if I get knowledge of using that money, I think I�ll improve.

All practical needs aside, what is one thing that you dream of?

I would like to see my children, my grandson and daughter to get higher education. At least, to be themselves, to keep themselves, not to come to me always to ask for something. And to move maybe from where we started. Now we are in slums. Maybe I will get a better place, because I am getting old. I would like to get a better place so that my life can continue.

I would like to travel outside Kenya, so that I meet other women and learn from other women: what they are doing, whether they are different from us. Then when I come back, I talk to women and I tell them how the women on the other side are. Because when you sit here, you think that women there are living in heavens. But you go there: India, South Africa, Sierra Leone, you go and see how women suffer there. Because here you see that we are the only sufferers. Let�s go there and see, and learn from them.

Zakia Yusuf, 42, unemployed, Kibera

What is one thing that would improve your quality of life?

I think, if we get something which you can do on your own. If you get support and keep on doing your own things with your own hands, you will keep on going on with your life. If I get a proper capital, get a very good place and keep on doing my own job, it will improve my life.

All practical needs aside, what is one thing that you dream of?

I think I'll move from here, get a better house. Keep my kids very good, to get a very good education. SO that even if I leave the world. the children will get a better education and be able to live their life.

Mary Kemunto, 24, business lady, Kibera

What is one thing that would improve your quality of life?

I�ll improve my business, because I like business in my life. I know it�s an earning, daily. I love to get my bread from there every day. In our country here, jobs are so minimal. I would just improve my business to become huge. I would employ two or three people, you see, I would be helping someone.

All practical needs aside, what is one thing that you dream of?

I would like to take care of those small babies or those children who don�t have both parents. I can�t say I will work for the poor people, no. I�ll only work for those people, maybe their parents are disabled, or they don�t have both parents. I would like to do that in my life.

"Sara is not as interesting as she thinks she is."

2007-12-06T21:49:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to be writing about the near-death of my computer keeping me from working and cutting me off from my community. But a brilliant technician had returned my Toshiba (minus one GB of faulty memory) and I was back to doing what I do many evenings in Nairobi: e-mailing, chatting, researching, writing, reading, Facebooking.

I've moved around enough that my community is spread across the globe. I have close friends in London, Waterville, Vancouver, Ubud, Washington. The internet, and lately Facebook in particular, helps us stay in touch despite different time zones and limited finances.

Facebook has also widened my circle friends. It has made it possible for me to build fruitful friendships with people I knew in elementary school, in high school, in university. I can get to know people I've only met once, people who would otherwise get lost in life's unforgiving onward shuffle.

When I first started with Facebook, I was fascinated with how people construct their personas on-line. A friend says he finds Facebook interesting because it shows how people see themselves. I think it says more about how they want the world to see them. Maybe there is no difference.

Either way, there are countless psychology doctoral theses just begging to be written about it.

Of my 113 (and counting) Facebook friends, there are only a few I pay much attention to. I like to see the latest link that Ian has posted. Elena and I superpoke one another every few days. Charlie writes great status updates. Duncan is letting me beat him at Scrabulous. Alix writes beautiful poems on my wall.

Over the past year, I've gotten deeper and deeper into the site. About half of my daily messages now come through Facebook, not through traditional e-mail (I never thought I'd call e-mail traditional). Lately, a friend and I have been working on a top-secret project to build a Facebook application of our own.

It's so much part of my days now that I sometimes find myself thinking in Facebook status updates when I'm living my off-line life.

"Sara is gasping at the green of the trees."

"Sara is sssshhhhhhhhh�."

"Sara is learning how to beat up big men, Thai boxing style."

"Sara is not as interesting as she thinks she is."

Some of these Facebook friendships are multi-media. They are built and maintained through voice-over-IP services, e-mail, instant messaging, video chats. I occasionally make expensive long-distance phone calls. And, yes, sometimes I even have coffee or go for a walk with a friend.

Now that's traditional.

But as the internet�s roll in my social life grows steadily, it is easy to forget the fundamental truth of on-line communities: they are built out of personas. It is a forum where people reinforce the ideas they have about themselves, or the ideas they would like other people to have about them.

In some ways, Facebook is a never-ending school reunion.

And it was a reunion-esque entanglement that distracted me, as I was trying to write a blog posting about my computer dying.

I was messaging with an old friend, one from the haven't-seen-you-in-20-years-but-lately-talking-to-you-every-week category. When we first reunited, I was entertained by the outrageous persona on his Facebook profile. I was intrigued by how part of that persona was subtly poking fun at itself, and everyone else's persona as well.

We were idly chatting about the relative merits of Virginia Woolf, Tom Robbins, James Joyce and pornography, when the conversation veered to 20 year old personal history.

About a month ago, I had a similar conversation with another old friend. We talked about how we had hurt one another's feelings. It was an odd, texted way of making up for things that happened decades ago. It cleared the way for a new, adult friendship.

As I was talking with this persona-poking pal of mine, I started to wonder how much of his interactions with me were a subconscious attempt to settle old business. I started questioning how much of the interaction on Facebook is just people trying to prove something, trying to get revenge, trying to heal some old hurt.

When I asked the persona-poker if that was what was going on, he said, "No. I don't feel bad about it. I haven't in almost 20 years... it was part of the growing process."

I believed him but somehow that moment of doubt constellated all of my distrust of communities, on-line and elsewhere. For an instant, I considered converting to introversion.

When we were through chatting, the first thing I did was change my Facebook status.

"Sara is deeply disenchanted with Facebook and just about everything else right now."

The next thing I did was message Ian, "Can I rant to you for a second about Facebook?"

"Sure," he wrote back. "But don't be too mean. Facebook and I are tight."

I told him that I was tired of the high school reunion aspect of social networking.

"I think half of Facebook is about people trying to win some game that no one else is playing," I wrote. "Some game that everyone else left back in high school hallways."

We wrote back and forth about reunions, in real life and in cyberspace. Ian made jokes about personalities, superegos and superpowers.

I said one of the things I like about Facebook is that I can change it whenever I like, to keep up with my fluid self-concept. But I was frustrated by how some people were using it only to reinforce their fixed ideas about themselves and the world.

"I think that it's important to let ones idea of self evolve over time� into some kind of structure that's resilient, but is constantly moving and changing," he wrote. "Everyone's is, but some people hang on to some ideas without ever knowing why their knuckles are so white"

As we were chatting, I got a text message on my mobile phone. In Spain, Felix had read my status update.

"U ok if you want ill give u a call."

I sent him an e-mail that I was fine, just disillusioned.

He wrote back: "Facebook is interesting as it tends to show how people see themselves. Or what is important to them. Or even how comfortable they are about themselves."

As I read the Bobby Kennedy quote Felix had attached at the bottom of his message, another e-mail landed in my in-box.

From Ottawa, Andrew asked: "Who's bullying you on Facebook?"

I uploaded my gripes about communities, that sometimes they only seem to be people polishing their personas by rubbing up aginst other personas.

He wrote back: "That sounds like it would fit in quite nicely with my 'solipsism of modern society' rant. The sad truth of the matter is that North America has actually *become* a state of ego."

He wrote about people reinforcing their identities through careers, kids, and conspicuous consumption. Andrew, like Ian and Felix, reminded me not to take the whole thing so seriously.

I did manage to laugh a few times, not at the jokes but at the fact that, in the midst of a community confidence crisis, individuals in that community came through.

I felt a little better, and also ready to write. Not about how a dying computer threatens my access to my community, but about the risks in believing in human communities at all.

Communities are communities however they manifest. Town halls, kitchen parties, phone lines, chat rooms and electrical pulses beamed through space are all social networking sites. Communities are mental constructs. They are made up of, and only exist in, the sticky mess of human minds. The only tangible aspect of communities are the real-world actions they motivate us to take.

When I post this self-indulgent ramble, which is just another projection of my self-concept as a person with a mutable self-concept, it will go up on Facebook too. Maybe Ian will read it. Maybe Felix and Andrew will. After all, we love to read about ourselves.

If my persona-poking friend reads it, I hope he will forgive me for writing about momentarily questioning his intentions.

As for everyone else, I don't count on being any more interesting to them than they are to me. Because in my 113-person (and counting) community, there are a lot of interesting personalities, but only a few friends.

Pitfalls and potential in Kenya's slums

2007-11-28T22:24:00.000-08:00

Kennedy Nyangau is standing in a small restaurant kiosk, looking up at new apartment buildings under construction on a hilltop overlooking Kibera.

�When they try to move people into those houses, there will be riots,� he says.

The new apartments overlook the oldest part of Kibera, the largest slum in East Africa. Here most of the houses are built of mud and wattle. There is no sewer system and limited access to clean water. The only roadways are footpaths paved with years of accumulated trash and red Kenyan soil.

Nyangau lives in a Kiberan village called Olympic. His family�s unserviced 10 foot square house is just a short walk away from the new construction. Within the next year, the Kenyan government hopes to move 600 households into the new apartments. The three-bedroom flats will have water, electrical and sewer service. But Nyangau, his wife and his three children will not move to one of the homes. They are promised to residents of a neighboring village in Kibera, called Soweto East.

�Only well-off people will be able to afford to live there,� Nyangau says. �At the end of the day, some people will be forced to start another slum elsewhere.�

As planned, 600 families from Soweto East will move into the apartments temporarily, while their current homes are razed to make way for more apartments. The same 600 families will then move into the new flats back in Soweto East and their monthly payments will go toward eventual ownership of the homes.

But Nyangau says he does not think the multiple moves in these villages on the east side of Kibera will go according to plan.

�[Rent] will be much more expensive for them now,� Nyangau says. �The rent will be much more than what they are paying [between seven and ten dollars a month]. Ninety percent of them won�t be able to pay.�

This housing project is one small part of the Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme, a multi-million dollar plan to improve the lives of the estimated 5.3 million Kenyans who live without adequate shelter. Estimates of the growing Kibera population range from 500 thousand to one million people.

In a government building only a few kilometers from Kibera, the coordinator of the Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme is sitting at her desk, fielding a flurry of telephone calls. Leah Muraguri says Kibera is unlike other slum settlements in Kenya, or in Africa for that matter. The slum has been in place for almost 100 years. It is densely populated and sits in the heart of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

Muraguri says the only thing that Kibera has in common with the other settlements where the program is operating, is the complexity of the interlocking challenges facing any upgrading effort.

With so many private, business, public and non-governmental stakeholders in the slum, Muraguri says there is no way to bring improvements without meeting some resistance. She says the program is committed to not displacing people who live in Kenyan slums. But the question remains as to how they can ensure adequate housing for one million people on a 600 acre site. Muraguri says her agency intends to carefully execute development plans specifically designed for each settlement.

Despite the concerns of Nyangau and some other Kibera residents, Leah Muraguri says she is optimistic about the housing project in Olympic.

�Affordability has been an excuse for many years for not improving the slums,� she says. �The fact is, the cost of a house is inhibitive for almost all of us. We go through loans. And this is a low income person who doesn�t have [access to] a loan. Surely people will not afford, but should that forever be an excuse that these people should never live in good houses?�

Muraguri says as part of the Kibera project, the government will subsidize the rent of people who are moved into the temporary housing. When they move into the permanent apartments back in Soweto East, she says the government will encourage people to join housing cooperatives, so that their small monthly payments will eventually add up to home ownership.

Real ownership is central to improving the lives of people in slum settlements, says Daniel Vilnersson. He works for UN-HABITAT, one of the non-governmental partners to the national slum improvement program.

He estimates that 90 percent of Kiberans rent their homes from middle class Kenyans who have built the structures on public land, without the government's permission.

�You don�t do any maintenance on your house because you are renting it,� Vilnersson says. �I think [a sense of ownership] will go beyond taking care of your house. It will also involve taking care of the drains, taking care of the garbage. We wouldn�t want to have people live in such small places forever, but as the situation is now, it might be better if they have a lease for the land so that they are not squatting and also own the structure.�

Vilnersson says, in the case of Kibera, the onus of handing over ownership lies with the government. The vast majority of Kibera is built on publicly owned land. In an ever-growing city of approximately three million people, Vilnersson says, the 600 acres of Kibera are very valuable.

Back at the Ministy of Housing office, Leah Muraguri says she wants to get rid of the idea that the program should give people free housing. She says the government and civil society can plan, suggest and develop some infrastructure, but they need the cooperation of people living in slum settlements to really affect change in the communities.

Working to own their own homes will help people building equity, Muragari says. It will also improve their self-esteem.

�What I�m so keen to see, is for people to accept that they need to improve themselves,� she says. �They can still afford, by mobilizing their own income, to pay off the cost [of the house.] Once security of tenure is assured, people can actually mobilize finances.�

Muraguri says the Soweto East housing project is unique in the slum upgrading program. The government is not building housing in most of the five settlements where it is operating. She says elsewhere the agency is focusing on development of social infrastructure such as schools, resources centers and community centers. Most of the program sites also include training and business development projects, intended to help people earn more money.

Muraguri says putting in hard infrastructure such as roads, lights, electrical lines and sanitation, will make it possible for more businesses to invest in the communities. That will mean more jobs and higher incomes for people who live in the area.

�Slum settlements have a very, very high potential to support the [national] economy,� she says. �Within the slum settlements there is a lot of informal industry. There are a lot of products that come from there.�

It is in the interest of economic development, as well as housing security, that the government of Kenya is aiming to upgrade the slums.

Spurred in part by the Millenium Development Goal of improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers worldwide by 2020, the Kenyan government is hoping to spend approximately 12 billion dollars on the program over the next 15 years. Some of that money will come from the national budget. More, Muragari says, will come from non-state partners, including the private sector, and national and international civil society.

Muraguri says there are already countless non-governmental organizations at work in Kibera. The program aims to track and harmonize those efforts.

�If one is doing water and sanitation, you find many donors understand water is a basic [need],� she says. �They will put monies there. And then another NGO will do the same. In Kibera we call them spaghetti pipes: so many pipes from several donors. As a government, we want to remove all those pipes and put in one main.�

She says the programme is trying to build NGO�s confidence in the government�s capacity to plan and coordinate upgrades. When civil society projects are implemented as part of a larger plan, Muragari says, they will have a more lasting impact.

�Kibera is a very special area, since it�s so big and everybody knows about it, everybody wants to go in there and do projects,� says Daniel Vilnersson of UN-HABITAT.

In Kibera, Vilnersson and his colleagues are focusing on two infrastructural projects, while they wait to see how the government�s plan evolves. They are building shower and toilet boxes in Soweto East and they are building part of a road into Olympic.

�We�re providing the basic services to make the situation better for the people living there now,� he says. �Spending too much money, when we know the government has a plan for it, would not make sense.�

UN-HABITAT�s role is to give the government technical advice and to help coordinate other non-governmental organisations. At other slum upgrading sites, the UN agency is conducting pilot projects in education, low-cost housing and transportation. Other HABITAT staff members say the Kenyan government is one of the few African administrations that has such a comprehensive and active plan to address slum settlements.

Vilnersson and his colleagues, however, are careful to make it clear that while UN-HABITAT is involved in some housing pilot projects in slums elsewhere in Kenya, it is not part of the Olympic housing project. He says building permanent housing for people in Kibera is outside the agency�s mandate.

�Housing is huge. There are so many people in such a small area, that we would have to build highrises on most of the land available just to house the people who are there now,� Vilnersson says.

Based on his experience working in the settlement, Vilnersson says he understands Kennedy Nyangau�s concerns that moving people from their homes in Soweto to the temporary apartments in Olympic might stir up unrest in Kibera.

�The problem is that there are only 600 flats and 70 thousand people in Soweto East,� he says. �It will take an enormous time for even that village to be upgraded and when people realize that, of course, something might happen. I don�t think it�s unavoidable. It�s just a matter of informing the community in advance about what is going to happen.�

But standing just outside the gates of the new apartment complex, Nyangau says he and his neighbors are losing faith that the slum upgrading program will have any positive benefit for them.

�We are doubting,� he says. �How can you choose some people to move in there and some people to stay where they are?�

A Ugandan photo miscellany

2007-11-27T04:05:00.000-08:00

For photos from Kampala and Jinja, at the source of the Nile, go here.

The Some People's Space

2007-11-26T02:24:00.000-08:00

Pauline Kimani was standing outside the gates of the People�s Space at the Commonwealth People�s Forum, waiting for the guards to let her in. She�d been waiting for five hours.

Other Ugandans and international visitors were coming and going through the gate and security screening, on their way to listen to the local band performing on stage.

�At the moment, it�s a People�s Space with a clause at the end: �Out of Bounds for Homosexuals,�� Kimani said.

Kimani is a member of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Kenya. She was at the People�s Space with members of Freedom and Roam Uganda, a gay rights organization. The group was invited to make a presentation at the public venue, which was part of the civil society forum that preceded the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kampala.

Members of the organization were escorted out of Centenary Park venue shortly after they arrived on Friday, when people started calling for police to arrest them. Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda, punishable by as much as a life sentence in prison.

�A man with a State House security badge came up and asked to talk with us for two minutes,� Kimani said. �Once we got outside the gates, he said we had ten minutes to leave the area.�

Kimani said when she and the others did not leave, security guards started hitting them with sticks.

�After about five minutes, there were loads of police surrounding us. They said they had orders from above to make us go away.�

On Thursday, members of the group were part of a discussion about homosexual rights followed a film screening about homosexuality and discrimination. Alice Smits coordinated the film festival at the People�s Space.

�Yesterday the debate was heated, but there were no fights. It was really good,� Smits said. �It was the first time a real debate about homosexuality happened in Uganda.�

A demonstration against equal rights and protections for homosexuals was held on Thursday, at conference site far from the People�s Space. On the same day, the Uganda Joint Christian Council, released an open letter to the people of the Commonwealth, which listed �sexual disorientation� as a challenge to the human development of Commonwealth Nations.

�In many African societies [homosexuality] is considered a threat to humanity, African family values and a sin against God,� the letter said. �We as religious leaders in Uganda have objected to the possible focus on promoting the rights of the minorities and ignoring the rights of the majority as something that is unacceptable.�

Homosexuality is illegal in most of the Commonwealth�s 53 member states. Despite that, it was one of myriad social, environmental and economic issues that were slated for discussion at the People�s Space.

�The People�s Forum is designed to enable the diversity of the Commonwealth in all its forms to come together for exchange, debate, discussion,� said Vijay Krishnarayan, Deputy Director of the Commonwealth Foundation.

The Commonwealth Foundation and the British Council hosted the People�s Space. Krishnarayan said the venue was intended to make the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting more permeable to the public.

Previous meetings have been criticized for being exclusive, closed door affairs. The People�s Space was free and open to the public. It included music and theatre performances from around East Africa, as well as workshops on various cultural, political and environmental issues. Member of Freedom and Roam Uganda were invited to speak at Speakers Corner, a venue for discussing hot topics.

Anti-gay rights activists were invited to Speakers Corner at a different time. Kimani said it was members of that group who called for guards to arrest her and her colleagues. She said well-known preacher, Martin Ssempa, greeted the group shortly after they arrived at the site.

�The [anti-homosexual rights] demonstration on Thursday was led by Pastor Ssempa,� she said. �When we met him today, it was like we were just having a conversation until other people surrounded us and started shouting for soldiers to arrest us.�

Kimani said the police stopped harassing them when Smits and other conference delegates intervened. Smits and the others were kept off the People�s Space site for the rest of the afternoon. Smits was allowed back into the venue around six p.m., but she said other people who were seen talking to the homosexual rights activists were also banned from the site.

�Friends of mine are out there who aren�t even homosexual,� she said. �Ugandans are being kept out just because they know me.�

Human rights activists called the Commonwealth Foundation staff at three p.m. on Friday to tell them that Kimani, Smits and others were locked out. Vijay Krishnaryan said there was nothing he or the foundation could have done to force the Ugandan police to allow the homosexual rights group onto the site.

�Because this is Uganda and we respect the right of the government to regulate and govern the space,� Krishnarayan said. �For me the space was conceptualized as somewhere that people could be free to express themselves, but freedom doesn�t happen in a vacuum.�

He said the Commonwealth Foundation and the British Council worked with the Uganda government to host the People�s Space. Despite the confrontation over sexual orientation, Krishnarayan said he is happy with the overall outcome of the space and the Commonwealth People�s Forum.

�We are very pleased that it�s thrown up all sorts of new challenges for the Commonwealth.�

Standing outside the gates of the People�s Space on Friday night, Pauline Kimani was not quite as optimistic. She said, while Thursday�s open discussion about homosexuality was a big step forward for socially conservative Uganda, she was frustrated with the treatment on Friday.

Leaning against the eight foot high perimeter fence of the People�s Space, Kimani said, �It�s not the People�s Space. It�s the Some People�s Space.�

�African doesn�t need aid. Africa needs its wealth back.�

2007-11-22T02:36:00.000-08:00

I am in Kampala this week, covering the People's Forum of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Amid the frenzy of deadlines and staff management and on-the-fly philosophical debates, I had a chance to sit down and interview Sony Kapoor. He's an activist on international debt cancellation and stemming capital flight. You can read the full interview here.

Tell me a little bit about your background...

I got into this whole thing with taxing the financial system, trying to leverage my knowledge of the financial system but from a development perspective.

I worked quite closely on this project called Innovative Source of Financing. France and Brazil and Chile and a number of other countries got together trying to say that this traditional aid business is not working and there is a need to transfer some of the wins of globalization to those who have been left behind. They had this commission working on making feasible proposals for taxes on global public �bads� such as pollution, the arms trade and financial volatility.

As a part of that I helped develop a feasible proposal of taxing financial transactions, taxing currency transactions and taxing airline ticket transactions. Of all of these, the airline ticket levy is now a reality. It was launched last year and is being used to finance HIV/AIDS treatment. The process continues; we are hoping more will come through.

Was it easier to engender political will to tax airline tickets than to tax the arms trade?

I think in terms of political will, taxing the arms trade would be a far better target. The impact [impact of the arms trade] is far worse. But there are certain logistical problems with that. First, by taxing the arms trade and using the benefits for development, would you not, in some way, be legitimizing it?

The second is, a lot of the arms trade, especially the part that is most harmful - small arms, unauthorized dealers in Africa - you don�t know where they are. It becomes really tricky to tax them. With airline tickets, the administrative mechanism is in place. The levy is just one to two euros or dollars per ticket. It was an easier target.

With taxes on currency trade, we are still battling the big banks, who have all the lobbying power.

It was 2003 that I was lecturing about this when someone from the Jubilee Global Debt Cancellation Network asked me to help them. Bilateral debt had been cancelled whereas IMF and World Bank debt had not. The IMF and the World Bank had stalled progress by saying that they did not have the resources, they could not afford to pay for the cancellation of debt or they would go bankrupt. I used my financial knowledge to prove conclusively that both the IMF and the World Bank had more than enough money to pay for the debt cancellation program. That helped break the logjam.

So I was, in a backroom-dealing kind of way, helping coordinate a large part of what went into the 2005 debt cancellation deal. It was OK. It was some progress. It was far from satisfactory but, hey, there is some more money on the ground.

And then I helped launch something called the Tax Justice Network because I was looking at this overall phenomenon of financial flows to and from developing countries. You look at World Bank, IMF figures and things look rosy. The aspect that is stressed is the aid going in, the investment going in. What is not stressed is the money that is going out in the form of debt repayment and profits from existing investments.

Even if you look at the official data presented by the World Bank and the IMF, there is more money going out of developing countries [than coming in]. Developing countries are having to accumulate reserves as an insurance against the kind of financial crisis that happened in 1997, 1998. It�s very expensive buying this insurance. The money is invested in US Treasury Bonds, which ends in the absurd position that Uganda and Brazil and India and China are lending money to the United States, the richest government in the world, at an interest rate that is [above] market rates.

The worst part is that the biggest channel of outflow, capital flight, leaks out of countries under the table. It doesn�t get captured by any data, so you don�t talk about it.

What is capital flight?

The way I refer to it is money that illicitly flows out of a country. It could be money that was mobilized illegally or that was transferred out in a way that broke the law, money that was not declared to the tax authority. It is money that leaves the country more or less permanently.

If you have an active reason to hide a transaction and money leaves the country, then it is considered capital flight.

We talk about African corruption but there is a supply side and a demand side. It�s a moot point whether Suharto is guilty [of gross embezzlement]. How about the Swiss banker who visited Asia in pinstripe respectability and said, �Sir, we will keep your money safe. And nobody will know about it and we will invest and we will return five percent every year for you.�

I am well-educated, I am well traveled, but still when I hear the word �corruption� the image that comes into my head (and probably yours and everybody else�s) is someone who is yellow or brown asking for a bribe. What almost never comes to mind is these guys sitting in their posh offices in Swiss banks, in the UK, in tax havens, in New York. They are calling themselves wealth managers. They can help you �responsibly� manage your money, help you avoid taxes, take dirty money� The discussion is completely unbalanced.

Do you think more transparency is possible or will corruption and capital flight just go further underground?

There will always be some people who will have a reason to hide their stuff and will go to any length [to do so]. For the most part, having bank secrecy � these convoluted laws where you have shell companies and jurisdictions where the legal system is extensively designed for secrecy - it just makes the rewards so high and the potential risks so low that the extent of this flow is far higher than it would be in the absence of [financial transparency] legislation.

In a way the legal system in these countries has been hijacked.

There is a narrow view of corruption that it is something illegal, or public sector related. But it is really someone in a position of power being able to abuse their authority. That includes [political leaders] who have put into place a legal system which was written by KPMG to facilitate capital flight and tax evasion.

Does such a thing happen?

Yes it does. All the time.

The total estimates are that about 500 billion dollars leaves developing countries every year in capital flight, under the table. That is ten times the amount of aid going in.

It sounds like you have more of a concern about capital flight than about conditions on international loans or aid?

I am equally concerned about both. They are very strongly interrelated.

South Africa between 1994 and 2003 was losing 9.2 percent of its GDP every year as capital flight. It�s been getting half a percent of GDP as aid. Of every ten or 20 dollars you lose, maybe one dollar comes back as so-called charity. It has strings attached, which then restricts your policy space and makes you open your markets and reduced trade barriers, which has further implications�

Import tariffs in less developed countries are an important source of tax revenue because they are easy to administer. As part of aid conditions, Kenya among other countries was forced to reduce these tariffs to a very large degree. The domestic industry was subjected to international competition that it wasn't prepared for.

The Kenyan government suddenly lost 30 to 40 percent of their tax revenue. And that made them further dependent on aid and more susceptible to these aid conditions. All this whilst Kenya was losing five percent of its GDP to capital flight.

Every country that is rich, grew rich behind barriers. That includes China, Korea, India, and especially the United Kingdom and the United States. These were the two most protectionist countries in history. They seem to have forgotten that.

What role does the media have to play in terms of updating, reframing the aid dialog?

I think the media has a critical role to play. Whenever you talk about financing development, it�s �debt, aid, trade.� [But that is] such a small part of the equation that [the media coverage] sends this bad picture. It paints a very unflattering picture of recipient countries. [Debt and aid relationships] also indebt self-confidence. That�s part of the problem in Africa. If I were African, my confidence would be seriously dented [from the widespread perception that Africa can�t provide for itself].

The first thing that the media needs to do is put this capital flight issue at the top of the agenda so that people actually know what is going on. Most people don�t know about capital flight. The media need to put out there that there is between 500 billion to one trillion dollars in stolen wealth lying abroad.

African doesn�t need aid. Africa needs its wealth back.

It also needs domestic resource mobilization. Development is an internal process.

If you are a country that is resource-rich, you have enough resources. Norway managed to keep 90 percent of its oil revenues and grow rich. Africa is keeping 30 percent, at most. The rest is going abroad. So you need domestic resource mobilization and domestic resource retention.

Aid is the third thing you need, in the case of states that do not have a wealth of resources. I see a role for aid as a mechanism for global redistribution. At national levels, we have progressive tax systems. That�s how Canada and Norway and Sweden are redistributing national wealth. This is the role of a modern welfare state.

I strongly recognized the need for an international redistributive mechanism and these innovative source of financing, such as taxing those who have benefitted from globalization, such as the airline industry, the financial industry, shipping etcetera and redistributing that toward those who have been left behind or those who losing� that would be a good starting point for a new vision for the future. I see that as playing, at most a supportive role. Everything else has to come from within.

What needs to happen in order for your average Jane and Joe to support a paradigm shift?

At the domestic level, if you are rich and powerful, you don�t pay your fair share of tax. This happens in rich and poor countries. I�m a liberal at heart but still I see a very strong role for government, especially in poor countries. There is a minimum level of service that they need to provide: health and education and infrastructure. And that money has to come from tax revenue. There is natural resource wealth. Using the Norwegian example, 90 percent of the money from oil went to the government.

That needs to be supplemented with scrapping these tax holidays for attracting investment. They are counter-productive. You can have export promotion zones, but you need to supply them with a high level of skilled workers or something that is going to outlast the investment. The investor comes in, they enjoy the ten year tax holiday, and then they move on to Uganda, to Tanzania. In some cases [the EPZs are a form of] negative taxation. Not only is the government providing a tax holiday, it's building a road. It�s supplying electricity at discounted prices.

There is a clear need for everybody to have a more critical view of everything from aid to tax evasion.

Most people don�t like this concept of aid. People recognize Africa is rich. Given a little more information, a little more transparency and openness... I think there is a massive latent civil society outrage to be tapped into, to keep Africa�s wealth in Africa. On the debt issues, there is this whole new campaign on illegitimate debt. So, I am optimistic.

At an international level, there is some progress happening. I�ve just convinced the Norwegian government to start an international task force against capital flight. This is the first time that we are trying to put capital flight at the top of the development agenda, to look at who is actually financing who.

What you need to address this issue, are initiatives at the local and at the national level, and action at the international level.

I think there could be a good cross-constituency support.

There is hope.

Kenyan Opinion Polling 101

2007-11-15T22:49:00.000-08:00

As Kenya ramps up for the national election in December, polling companies have released a slew of survey results about parties, candidates and nominees. That's got me thinking about the roll of opinion polling in established and emerging democracies. Last week I got a chance to sit down and talk with a pollster and political analyst who has a lot of experience in Kenya.

Tom Wolf came to Kenya as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1967 and has since spend 30 years in the East Africa. He did research in comparative politics in Coast Province, was a lecturer at Nairobi University and was Democracy/Governance Advisor for USAID/Kenya. As an independent consultant, he has been designing, conducting and analyzing survery research for Steadman Group, the Kenya affiliate of Gallup International.

You can read the entire transcript of the conversation here, complete with examples, mathematical problems and two bonus questions about early political polling in the U.S.

Q: What is the utility of opinion polling before an election, particularly for the Kenyan electorate?

[long pause]

You have a lot of room on your tape recorder or whatever, right?

I�m hoping we�ll use all of it.

One of the reasons I�m hesitating, it�s such an important question. There are so many caveats one would have to make�

What�s the utility of polling to public, as you posed it? That depends how the media� how good a job they do in reporting, what the political response is.

But I think we can say, in general, we know now that more than half of adult Kenyans are aware of the polls, because we track that: a higher percentage in urban than in rural areas.

They may not know whether they are fantasy, fabricated or factual but there�s been a huge increase in the number of polls that have been conducted in the last couple of years and, I believe, also in their credibility.

I think [public opinion polling] is empowering to the public. I get congratulated by people wherever I go: cashiers in stores, security guards in buildings, taxi drivers.

Everybody loves them. Even, I might say, when people are not happy with the results because they show their preferred candidate, party or whatever [was not in the lead].

Kenyans definitely appreciate the fact that this is giving a kind of a voice to the public, more often than once every five years at an election. And that is almost intoxicatingly empowering to ordinary people.

The media love it because it fills up space in the papers. [Poll results] make good headlines.

Whatever complaints I might have, and others in the business have, about capacity problems in the media and deliberate political distortion and sometimes just exclusion�

Q: Exclusion? Really? Complete exclusion of poll results?

Putting them in funny places in the paper. Taking parts of our poll presentation which they would view as politically unfavorable and just not reporting some.

Q: What I�ve been wondering is� there must be research into how much early polling effects election outcomes. Does it sway voters?

As far as I know, we have no research in sub-Saharan Africa on this topic.

Q: What about elsewhere in the world?

A book on public opinion in America � I�m forgetting the author�s name right now � written more than a decade ago, the conclusion was: there�s no proof to show it makes any difference.

In the [European] continental political science literature there is, I think, a fairly strong basis for findings that there is more of an impact in systems with proportional representation. Unlike the Kenyan, British, American systems of winner-take-all-votes-for-losers-are-wasted, minor shifts in the percentage distribution will make an actual difference in parliamentary representation.

Proportional systems are more likely to have three or more viable parties with a face in parliament, unlike the U.S. system. Voters who can see that their party is not doing well enough in the polls to be, say, part of a coalition in the government, can switch to a party that is a little more viable and know that that vote won�t be lost. And also [they] can find something on the ideological spectrum that�s just a matter of degrees away from where their preferred party would be, rather than the black-or-white contrast in the American system, and to an extent the British system.

...in Germany last year� with Angela Merkel. The polls, one month before the election, were showing her winning by around ten percent. Polls were coming out by multiple firms every week. She almost lost! She won by less than one half of one percent. So those polls certainly didn�t create any bandwagon effect.

Q: Does polling have the potential to stoke the fire of conflict over difference, or to dampen it? Depending on how they are presented and how people are educated about them?

You know, those are assumptions that would have to be tested.

Q: Spoken like a true sociologist!!

Well, my mother was a sociologist. I�m a political scientist�

The one example I always like to give, I got from a gentleman who works for Radio France International.

He told me about the wonderfully sobering example of Congo Brazzaville, where in 1995 there was an election coming. President Lissouba had a secret poll done, which showed he was going to lose. He brought in the military to overthrow his own government, and that led to a three year civil war, in which hundreds of thousands of people died.

Now if he hadn�t had that poll done and they�d had the elections, would he have just nullified the results and would there have been even more civil war? Would he have been so shocked by the results that he would have peacefully walked out of State House? I don�t know.

It would be very na� to think that you could take such an integral part of public discourse and the democratic process [such as opinion polling], from a society where the institutions upon which such a democracy is based have had a long and often torturous history of evolution but are basically grounded in the framework of that society, and parachute them into a completely different context without having a lot of things go wrong. Like multi-party democracy for that matter.

I�ll tell you one other thing, though. You can talk about the pros and cons of survey research or polling but, in a way, the starting point is, how methodologically sound are these surveys to begin with?

Q: Clearly you have confidence in the surveys you write?

I would not be associated with the Steadman Group if I had one shred of evidence that there was any rigging, manipulation, catering to clients or anything like that. I wouldn�t.

Q: The competition on the other hand�?

I have had some concerns with them at times. Beginning with what I consider an insufficient degree of transparency with regard to the sampling frames that they use. Even more so, the sloppiness with which some of them report their very own findings.

There are many aspects of the quality of these polls that have to be seriously considered before we can talk about whether they are good or bad for Kenya.

Q: With all the complexities and potential pitfalls, you are still choosing to do this particular work in Kenya right now. I�m assuming you wouldn�t do this work if you didn�t think it had a net benefit for Kenyans. What tips the balance for you?

There has been a very top-down political culture in this country going back to colonialism. The kind of concentration of power, abuse of power, autocratic control, intolerance of dissenters that we saw in the first 30 years of Kenyan independence: it�s not a surprise to a student of comparative politics. If I thought that the contribution that this kind of works makes to opening up Kenyan society - particularly the lower levels of it through the voice of the people - if I thought that would lead to national disintegration, I think I�d be able to restrain myself and do something else.

But I really do think that it is useful to those in government. It is useful to those who would like to be in government. It is useful to prospective voters and non-voters, to be able to express their views on public issues more often than once every five years.

I don�t think that leaders should be slaves to opinion polls. A great leader sometimes has to make very unpopular decisions. I also know some leaders in many countries would do anything to wish these polls away. But what�s the alternative: for somebody to decide when you can do a poll and when you can�t? The alternative is so draconian...

Q: It sounds like there is also a real potential for polling to have a very constructive roll in development of a multiparty system here. Do you think that holds true?

Potentially, yes. But it could have another effect also.

In most places in Africa, where parties are perhaps only marginally distinct in terms of their policy face, and where the control of the state is so important, they could have a rather negative impact.

If one candidate or party is far more popular than the others, and this became known to the public through polls, they might just say, �If you can�t just beat them, join them. We might as well just have a one-party system.� Or, �If so many people think this is such a good President, let�s get rid of term limits and let him be a President for life.�

We really don�t know and it�s not unproblematic

Just because you�ve got the freedom to do polling - even if you have the technical capacity of doing accurate ones, starting with an accurate national census frame, even if you have the cooperation of the public in agreeing to be interviewed and then telling the truth - I think there is great need for humility.

Taking everything into account, it may be a bit difficult to praise this type of toy in all respects, but it�s much more difficult to say it shouldn�t be there

Bread and Roses volume one

2007-11-11T14:23:00.000-08:00

So many of the people I have met here are driven and passionate. They are hard-working and focused. They are kind and generous.

And so many of them struggle to meet their basic needs, let alone achieve their dearest dreams.

In keeping with the African Woman and Child Feature Service's mandate to get more female voices into the media, I am asking women I meet two simple questions:

1) Name one thing, other than money, that would improve your quality of life.

2) All practical needs aside, what is one thing that you dream of?

I have been so impressed here by the potential for Kenyans to succeed with just a little help: better access to education, better communications infrastructure, better health services.

The bread of Bread and Roses is intended to communicate directly the practical needs of Kenyan women.

But so much of the news out of Africa is of desperation and need, I wanted to give people a chance to talk about their sweet dreams as well.

The roses of Bread and Roses is an attempt to communicate the hearts of some of the people I meet.

So, with a nod to women working in Massachusetts textile mills a century ago, here is the first installment of Bread and Roses.

Grace Wakio Kireti, 19, Mombasa, Student

Download grace_bnr.mp3

What is one thing that would improve your quality of life?

It�s sort of a challenging question, but� I believe that, if I�ll get to a point where I have the integrity to not compromise about the principles that I have in my life. To live a positive life, a true life before my God and my people, that�s one of the best things. I believe it will make me come to a point where it will satisfy my needs and my happiness in life.

What is one thing that you dream of?

I have so many dreams. I used to dream that, when I am given everything� money, what, and have all that� my dream is to come and help orphans. To come and bring up a charity home. That is one of my big dreams in life. I usually dream of having a good life. I read. I learn and I get a good job. Then I come and open up an orphanage for charity. I would love that because I love helping small kids that are orphans.

Racheal Pendo, 20, Mombasa, Student

Download racheal_bnr_final.mp3

What is one thing that would improve your quality of life?

I believe in faith. I believe that� I believe in prayers, that when I pray to God, I ask Him for something, He is capable of giving. That�s how I work.

What is one thing that you dream of?

Since I�m an orphan, I would like to be with my fellow orphans. The thing about orphans� other people are not capable of affording anything. Let�s say these poor families. I would like to help them. I would like to make, not like an orphanage, but to stay together with those people who are needy.

To make a family of orphans? Yeah.

About Bread and Roses

The Bread and Roses name comes from an old labour movement slogan, with the message that people ought to be able to meet their basic needs and realize loftier dreams. The women in a labor march in 1912 were asking for wages that would make it possible for them to buy not just bread (physical nourishment) but also roses (nourishment for their spirits).

Here in Kenya, this project should really be called Fruit and Cars.

Bread is an expensive luxury food here. Poor people eat fruit. Roses are cheap, since flowers are a major export item. Roadside vendors charge little for cut flowers that can't be exported because they are too close to budding.

But Bread and Roses sounds better than Fruit and Cars.

An Invitation

So far, this project has got me thinking a lot about interview technique, inter-cultural communication and my own learned social mores. But ramblings on those topics can wait for a future posting.

For now, whether you are male or female, please post your own answers to the two questions. If you want to include your hometown and your age, that would be great.

Thanks, S