With the death count now well into the hundreds, and the number of Internally Displaced People from the Rift Valley alone placed at 70,000 by the Kenyan Red Cross, decision-makers at aid agencies must be wondering whether they’re hallucinating. As Richard Dowden quotes a Kenyan friend: “But these things don’t happen in Kenya!”.
As if to prove the point about Black Swans, Kenya has erupted just as the eyes of the world were focused exclusively on Pakistan. A scan of media reporting before polling took place shows that the prevailing mood among opinion formers was upbeat: few saw this coming. The Times‘s take on 27 December, for instance, was cheerful:
For many observers, the very fact that the race is so close run is a sign of how far Kenya has come in 15 years of multiparty democracy. An incumbent has never before faced a credible challenge.
Even on the day of the election itself, when rumblings from Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement were becoming audible, the picture seemed to be broadly positive. Here’s the IHT:
So far the election period has been relatively peaceful, with a few scattered bursts of violence but no widespread turbulence. Foreign election observers, including the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, have praised the process, saying it was free and fair, though at times a little chaotic.
“At times a little chaotic” neatly sums up the international community’s attitude to Kenya until now. ‘True, it’s endemically corrupt’, went the standard line, ‘but it’s stable: in spite of everything the state more or less works’. Often, Kenya was invoked in the same breath as Tanzania or Zambia, as an example of a ‘ruminant’ rather than a ‘vampire’ state. Rather than being of the purely blood-sucking variety, the argument went, the corruption in Kenya was of the sort that gave something back – producing fertile ‘manure’ in the form of infrastructure projects and so on.
But as Richard Dowden – one of the few commentators who can claim to have provided ample warning of risks in Kenya – noted yesterday, “Kenya has been a catastrophe waiting to happen”.
Kenyan politics are more than a lucrative game of musical chairs for the elite. They are the most vicious and tribalised on the continent. Politicians often address their own people in coded language. “It is our turn to eat!” is a phrase they often use. It means that it is the turn of our ethnic group to rule — and loot as much as we can.
The issue of spoils politics, and donors’ attitude to it, is at the very heart of the conundrum that Kenya now poses to the international community. It’s been a while since President Mwai Kibaki has been a ‘donor darling’, but there’s no doubt that that’s exactly what he was after his election victory in 2002. His subsequent relapse into clientelism and patronage politics is entirely consistent with the ‘passionate-love-affair-followed-by-fall-from-grace’ archetype that aid agencies seem unable to resist – whether with Museveni in Uganda, Meles in Ethiopia, or (dare one recall), one Robert Mugabe.
When the dust has settled and the wash-ups and lessons-learned exercises get underway in earnest, there will be two central questions for donors. One: what’s the role of aid in fragile states? Is it actually helpful to spray vast volumes of cash into directly into governance systems fundamentally based on patronage, in the form of budget support? And two: what is donors’ theory of influence in such states? If they can recognise that the problem is not to do with individuals like Kibaki or Odinga, but is instead systemic, then what can donors do to change that system – or at least avoid propping it up? For what it’s worth, here’s an attempt to answer those questions that I made back in May last year.
Happy new year.
