With the 30 September 2009 deadline breached for Kenya’s squabbling politicians to set up a local tribunal to try ‘those who bear the greatest responsibility for the violence which claimed more than 1,500 lives’ following the December 2007 elections, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was back in Kenya to ensure that the deadline he had established remained a priority for the country. Annan had arrived in February 2008 to mediate between leaders of the ruling Party of National Union (PNU) and the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) over who should rule Kenya and on what terms of engagement. In the context of a blazing countrywide conflict that caused violent deaths of over 1,300 people and uprooted over 650,000 from homes and means of livelihoods, the challenge of achieving peace and acceptable governance was enormous.

The diplomatic team consisting of Kofi Annan, Gracia Machel (wife of slain Mozambican leader Samora Machel and now wife of Nelson Mandela) and former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa had put forth four laws to guide the road to Kenya’s salvation. These consisted of: Urgent land reform (to remove a major economic source of inter-ethnic conflict); vigorous fights against corruption by indicting corrupt officials; achieving drastic electoral reform and ending a culture of impunity in Kenya’s electoral politics through not punishing wielders of violence. Following relentless protests by civil society groups and parliament’s refusal to endorse his reappointment by President Mwai Kibaki as Kenya’s anti-corruption boss, Aaron Ringera voluntarily resigned, thereby opening the way for the creation of an agency that would not only investigate corruption but which would also have powers to prosecute offenders. In a swift move, a meeting between Kofi Annan, President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga resulted in an announcement that major offenders would stand for trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Two issues must be noted with this turn of events. The troika of Kibaki, Annan and Odinga met after their staff aides had been sent out of the room. Pressures from intransigent lobbyists were thereby eliminated and the leaders could talk without fear of being quoted for political capital. The lesson here is that too often the media, civil society and the general public focus only on political figureheads and shield powerful officials or ‘special assistants’ from the heat of visible public accountability. In Kenya’s history the notorious trio of Mbiyu Koinange, Bruce Mackenzie and Charles Njonjo were blamed by Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Joe Garba for the collapse of the East African Community (EAC). By 1976 the trio had succeeded in keeping President Jomo Kenyatta, who was by this time crippled by old age, usefully uninformed about their actions and real events in the rush to break up the EAC. In the current crisis there are pressures from top security officials and politicians with loyalties to the PNU and the ODM who have good reason to be afraid of losing the cover of protests and support by their local communities once they are carried away to The Hague. The media, civil society, academia and the general public must vigorously take accountability to the doorsteps of ‘advisers’, aides and lobbyists.

The second issue is to review what is to be gained from the departure of Aaron Ringera. As a parting gift he revealed that his commission had ‘recommended the prosecution of’ as many as 65 chief executives of public institutions, 11 permanent secretaries, four members of parliament and eight government ministers. That is a commendable record. He however lacked the legal mandate to act against them. This is information that Ringera should have given the public as soon as clamour against the seeming invincibility of corrupt officials began to build up and poison the country’s political culture. That he did not do so shielded Kibaki, Raila and parliament from the need to amend the mandate of the commission to include prosecution. Corrupt officials benefited from that lack of action.

It also served as a diversion of attention away from the more deadly issue of a mindset which says that Kenya’s presidency will never leave the hands of the Kikuyu or the House of Mumbi. In the run up to the 2007 parliamentary and presidential elections, several taxi drivers told me in Nairobi that for the next one thousand years Raila would never rule Kenya. Similar sentiments had fuelled the most horrendous crimes of apartheid in South Africa between 1948 and 1994, white settler dictatorships in Algeria and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), black settler rule in Liberia and Sierra Leone and the genocide that traumatised Rwanda and Burundi. Islamists in Somalia wear the same attitudinal garments of political death. Similar attitudes by Tutsi or Banyamulenge groups in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were reported to have contributed to the over four million deaths (since 1998) that echo the reign of terror of King Leopold II of Belgium in the unfortunate land. With the end of the Cold War, merchants of conflict in Africa have only been too glad to ignite flames out of this attitude and to gain fortunes from it by selling arms and ammunition to combatants. In Sierra Leone, Liberia and the DRC international and local mafias have had rich harvests of gold, diamonds, tantalite, timber and other natural resources. The media, intellectuals, politicians and civil society groups in Kenya must accordingly force this matter onto the agenda of political discourse. The African Union’s pre-emptive diplomacy must be urgently set in motion.

As the ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo looms in Kenya, there is also talk of some politicians and security officials giving out arms to internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kenya. With a huge mass of over 650,000 victims, the post-election violence became a potential recruiting point of those who saw armed revenge as an option. European and American entrepreneurs in the political economy of violence in Africa can be assumed to be eyeing Kenya with much appetite. Civil society groups in Kenya must, with utmost urgency, bring this matter into public discourse across Kenya as well as eastern and central African regions.

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, L. Muthoni Wanyeki, Irungu Houghton and Brian Kagoro were a most active quartet in the diplomatic drama that not only yielded intervention by the African Union team led by Kofi Annan, but also shaped their perception of Kenya’s electoral history since 1988 that had formed the backdrop to the violence. Their most important impact was to drum up focus on the legacy of Kenya’s politicians directing periodic macabre orchestras of ‘hacking down husbands with machetes, rungus, poisonous arrows, spears and bullets’ and arson in the elections of 1988, 1992, 1996 and 2002. The politicians had also begun to assume that they would return to ‘business as usual’ in their politics without anybody calling them to account for their responsibility for violence. Tajudeen would today call for active intervention from all over Africa in mending Kenya’s affairs instead of returning to a slumber until the next television pictures of rivers of blood and flames that wreck lives and homes in that country.

This is a time of dread for those nurtured in impunity in Kenya’s politics. It remains one of dread for those who lost their land and means of employment since the British colonial invasion and administration robbed them of their ancestral lands. Kofi Annan’s reform vision must bring that dread to those who inherited ownership of vast tracts of lands combined with a tradition of using political power to deny millions of people access to land and employment. His success would be a new dimension in pan-African nation-building and the invention of good economic and political governance. It would be a most appealing confluence between the political dreams of Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, two young African intellectuals who met in Manchester in 1945 to reinvent Africa.

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* Okello Oculi is the executive director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
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