The Kenyan Tragedy and the Future of Democracy in Africa

If, outside the atypical case of South Africa, any country in Africa was viewed as an island of stability with a real shot at breaking free of the “development traps” which have ensnared the most of the continent, it was Kenya. Its capital, Nairobi, is a cosmopolitan metropolis which plays host to numerous international governmental, non-governmental, and commercial organizations. Its natural wonders and reasonably well-developed tourism infrastructure attracts nearly one million Europeans, Americans, and Asians each year, bringing billions into the local economy which, unlike that of many African countries, is relatively diversified. Its foreign policy has anchored it firmly in the West, with extensive cooperation with United States-led and other security initiatives as well as over one thousand Kenyan troops seconded to no fewer than nine United Nations peacekeeping operations. And, for more than a decade now, Kenyans have boasted of a vibrant civic culture characterized by multiparty politics and an irrepressible (albeit more than occasionally over-the-top) press.

Then came the December 27 elections which were marred by widely observed irregularities and officially returned the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, with 4.58 million votes to opposition leader Raila Odinga's 4.35 million (a third candidate, Kalonzo Musyoka, received 880,000 votes). While Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU) overwhelmingly lost control parliament to Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and other opposition groups, it was the presidential race which mattered most to voters, many of whom took to the streets to continue their battle following the announcement of the incumbent's victory and his rather hasty swearing-in to another term. The ensuing mayhem, which included episodes of apocalyptic violence like the 35 people burned alive as they took refuge in a church in the western town of Eldoret, has left hundreds dead and Kenya's international reputation in tatters. Moreover, while one should not exaggerate the risks of civil war, the weaknesses of the East African state have been more than underscored – and outside forces, including, no doubt, al-Qaeda-linked Islamist extremist elements that have hitherto found shelter in the ungoverned spaces of neighboring Somalia, have undoubtedly taken notice, recalling how the terror group's East African branch had previously operated in Kenya to launch a deadly attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in 1998 as well as simultaneous assaults on an Israeli-owned hotel and an Israeli commercial airliner in Mombasa in 2002

Having just returned from the region on Sunday, I can attest that the fall-out from this tragedy has yet to be fully assessed. Certainly the riots had a ripple effect throughout the subregion, causing fuel shortages as far away as Rwanda as the port of Mombasa was closed for nearly a week and stranding travelers across the eastern half of the African continent while police battled rioters in Nairobi whose Jomo Kenyatta Airport is the major hub. Moreover, there are implications in the current crisis for the war of ideas for the future of Africa and the developing world at large. The Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper, the People's Daily, published last Monday a commentary by Li Xinfeng in which the former Africa correspondent argued that the violence in Kenya was proof that “Western-style democratic theory simply isn't suited to African conditions, but rather carries with it the root of disaster.” Li who argued that democratic political processes were among the “monstrous crimes” imposed by colonialism, counseled Africans to pursue “stability and development” first, advice consonant with China's strategic pursuit of ties with various regimes across the continent (which I have previously reported in this column), to say nothing of its cozy relations with and arming of authoritarian leaders there.

Almost exactly one year ago, in a column referring to the collapsed Somali state, I observed that in Sub-Saharan Africa “the most formidable obstacle to stability, the rule of law, development, democracy, and the other goods we in the West take for granted has been neither poverty nor any other material factor.” Rather,

    It has been the questionable legitimacy of the state itself, legitimacy being understood not as a normative judgment about juridical right or moral virtue but in the social and political sense of whether or not the structures of a given polity have evolved endogenously within a society and its institutions can claim some historical continuity. While Africa has a rich social, cultural, and political history, modern African states are not rooted in this past. The present-day borders and national compositions of African states are colonial legacies, emerging directly from the often arbitrary ways that the great powers delineated their respective spheres of influence during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

    The survival of these artifices has not been contingent so much on internal legitimacy – by and large, non-existent – but due to international recognition. Without any organic ties such as shared language, culture, and history binding them to a historic nation-state, many post-independence rulers used the “sovereignty” awarded them by that legal recognition to pillage national resources with their cronies and resorted to massive human rights abuses to prevent protests from those excluded from the spoils.

And the ethnic dimension of political competition has certainly played itself out in the Kenyan poll and its aftermath. President Kibaki was backed by his Kikuyu tribesmen, members of Kenya's largest ethnic group (approximately 22 percent of the population), while ODM leader Odinga's base was among his fellow Luo (13 percent). As violence swept the country, it was characterized by a clear ethnic edge: often Luo and other tribesmen against Kikuyu or those like the Pokot who were seen by the former as aligned with the latter. To put this in context, Kibaki's original election in 2002, while broadly supported after nearly a quarter of century of Daniel arap Moi's increasingly authoritarian rule, was also viewed by many Kikuyu as their “natural” restoration to power: the country's first post-colonial leader, Jomo Kenyatta (prime minister 1963-1964, president 1964-1978), was a Kikuyu, while Moi hailed from the Kalenjin, Kenya's fourth largest ethnic group. Clearly the ODM's core supporters among the Luo believed strongly that it was now “their turn.”

However, while the artificial nature of most African states is a serious handicap and ethnic identities are real, if troubling, feature of the political landscape, neither factor need condemn the continent to a dismal future because it is congenitally unsuited for democracy, pace Beijing's Li. What will, however, continue to plague politics – and, ultimately, security which derives from it – in Africa is the rather limited sense of democracy as it has thus far been implemented across most of the continent.

Before 1990, all but a literal handful of the continent's states were ruled by an assortment of one-party and other autocratic regimes. Up to then, with the exception of the state presidents of the apartheid regime in South Africa and those at the helm of Liberia's various oligarchic governments, only one African leader, Aden Abdulle Osman of Somalia (in 1967), had ever peacefully relinquished his office following an electoral defeat and only three – Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal (in 1980), Ahmadou Ahidjo of Cameroon (in 1982), and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (in 1985) – had retired voluntarily (although Ahidjo, after apparently undergoing a change of heart, subsequently tried to shoot his way back into office). By the end of the same decade, however, virtually all sub-Saharan African states – even those that have collapsed or are on the verge of collapse – opened themselves to what political scientist Jean-Germain Gros has termed the “first phase of democratization,” the formal opening, however tentative, of the political system to competition. In 1991, for example, Kenya repealed the section of its constitution which made it a one-party state and, the following year, held the multiparty elections in its history as an independent nation.

However, as Gros points out, democratization requires a more difficult “second phase”: creating the conditions that will lead to the rule of law. The most important condition is assuring that while electors may shift the reins of power, the authority entrusted to those who emerge victorious through the newly-constructed ballot box ought not to be unfettered anymore than that wielded by those who previously acquired it with the gun barrel. Only within a framework of adequate checks and balances whereby the advantages of electoral victory are reasonably restrained (and the costs of losing are minimized) will political campaigns cease to take on the literal life-and-death edge which they have shown themselves to be in all-too-many African countries, most recently in Kenya. Instead, the winner-take-all nature of the continent's highly centralized polities increases the incentives for the uncompromising positions like that of the Kibaki government which, after co-opting third-place finisher Musyoka, is attempting to continue “business as usual” as well as the self-destructive call by losers like Kenya's ODM for three days of protests this week, despite the fact that previous rallies have degenerated into violence which wrought havoc to the protesters' own neighborhoods. In any case, neither government nor opposition have been especially receptive to the international mediation efforts which have brought everyone from the African Union chairperson, Ghanaian president John Kufuor, to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer to South Africa's Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Nairobi over the course of the last two weeks.

In short, the lesson of Kenya's post-election impasse is that democracy is more than merely counting head periodically. No less a figure than James Madison noted in the tenth paper of The Federalist, “such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Instead the democratic ideal that ought to be proposed to Kenya and other African countries should include not only by representation, whereby those governing are chosen by the people in periodic free, fair, and transparent elections, but also constitutionalism, which provides for a government based on the rule of law whose power is circumscribed to prevent the abuse of the fundamental rights and liberties of individuals by the majority or plurality of their fellow citizens. Only when the cost of being out of power is lowered below that of political violence to achieve it will African countries know the security and stability without which the prospects for their future – and America's national interests in an increasingly significant geopolitical space – will be quite bleak.

– J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.