Virtually overnight, in 2007, Kenya changed from being a country that was reputed to hold peaceful, free, and fair elections to one which is now regarded as having genocidal tendencies emerge during presidential elections.
Admittedly we have by now held two elections following the most violent one of all (2007) and they were not marked by the kind of massacres that took place in 2008.
But none of us can be certain that the 2022 general election will not see a reversion to the 2008 massacres.
So here is the question: would the Building Bridges Initiative, if allowed to proceed to a referendum, really deliver on the promise of putting an end to such catastrophic presidential elections?
For this is what President Uhuru Kenyatta has emphasised over and over again, whenever he makes the case for the proposed constitutional changes contained in the “BBI Bill” which recently hit a brick wall, in the form of the High Court’s sensational ruling of May 14.
So, can presidential elections in Kenya really be a matter of life and death? Unfortunately, yes.
We have the late Daniel Moi, our last absolute authoritarian president to thank for this clarity. His rule provided ample proof that a president firmly in the saddle and holding tight to the reins of power, can easily reduce an entire tribal community from widely shared prosperity to extreme agrarian destitution and suicidal despair.
What makes this possible is that Kenya is still predominantly a nation of small-scale farmers. These farmers may have moved from the subsistence farming of the pre-Independence era to a preference for cash crops. But with about 72 per cent of Kenyans living in rural areas, there is no getting away from this basic reality – the “average Kenyan” is a small-scale farmer.
Additional to this, what we may call our tribal homelands in Kenya tend to coincide with the regions growing specific cash crops.
This is where the issue of life and death comes in: for it is a situation that makes state-sponsored economic sabotage of a specifically-targeted demographic, amazingly easy for a president determined to “teach a lesson” to those he feels are “joking with him”.
In this specific Kenyan context, “inclusion” is not just a matter of optics. It is fundamentally about having a strong regional leader close to the centre of power, who can effectively agitate to secure the economic interests, of his regional supporters.
Consider this example:
In the early decades of Independence, tea and coffee were the two most profitable cash crops grown on smallholder farms in Kenya. Why then did tea growers continue to flourish until fairly recently while coffee growers were on the steep slope to destitution as far back as the late 1980s?
Well, coffee is mostly grown in Central Kenya – where the local Kikuyu community, coincidentally, formed the hardcore of anti-Moi sentiment, almost from the moment he was sworn in as president in 1978.
So, although there was definitely a global oversupply of coffee by the late 1980s, which ended the “coffee boom”, various government interventions that might have made the situation faced by the coffee farmers less dire were deliberately withheld – to teach Central Kenya a lesson.
Such malign neglect could not however be applied to the Kenyan tea farmers, even though a lot of tea is grown in Central Kenya.
This is because tea is also grown massively in the Rift Valley, which was Moi’s political backyard and the ancestral home of his most devout regional supporters. (Indeed, Moi himself was the proud owner of a couple of vast tea estates near Kericho.)
Many other examples could be given of how by interfering with the production and sale of a single cash crop, an all-powerful Kenyan president determined to “teach a lesson” to a region that relentlessly opposes him, can engineer economic devastation, directly targeting a specific ethnic group.
So yes, presidential elections in Kenya, under the current dispensation, are indeed a matter of life and death. And yes, the BBI is one possible cure for this dangerous predicament.
