BBI: Detoxifying Kenyan politics

In 2017, around the time of the repeat presidential election, I got a message from an old friend who had previously worked in Kenya and was living in retirement in the UK.

What worried him was a uniquely Kenyan election-related challenge.

He had a niece who had been in Kenya briefly as a child some 20 years earlier, and now having just graduated from college, wanted to come to Kenya on a safari, before taking up fulltime employment.

She had consulted her uncle and he had told her it might be best to wait until after the elections, before making the trip. For elections in Kenya were notoriously prone to outbreaks of violence, and she would not want to be caught up in any such tragic episode. So she had made her plans accordingly.

What he had not foreseen – what none of us had foreseen – was that the Supreme Court would nullify the August 8 presidential election and that a fresh election would be called for October 26.

And thus late October, which was to have been a tranquil post-election period, with any violent skirmishes long suppressed by the authorities, turned out to be the very time when Kenya seemed poised for total chaos, as opposition leader Raila Odinga refused to take part in the repeat poll.

When my British friend asked me whether his niece should cancel her trip or not, I was completely at a loss for words.

This is but a minor example of the kind of thing that had become routine in this country: That it was widely assumed that when a presidential election was at hand, all the tolerance and peaceful coexistence of the past four years would be flung out of the window; machetes would be unearthed from god-knows-where; and innocent Kenyans would be murdered by the very neighbours with whom just a few weeks earlier they had been on the friendliest of terms.

And if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, then no matter how innocent you were, your headless torso may be found in some gutter, but chances were that your head would never be found at all. Your loved ones would have to bury a headless corpse.

And in a particularly disturbing escalation thereafter, there was serious talk of secession for the first time since the 1960s, when the ethnic Somali community of Northern Kenya showed a definite preference for seceding to the Republic of Somalia rather than remaining as marginalized second-class citizens in Kenya.

With a well-defined map of what was to be cut out of Kenya to create the new “Democratic Republic of Kenya” gathering signatures at a fast clip online; and Raila having been “sworn in” in broad daylight at Uhuru Park as “The People’s President”, we were essentially faced with a no-win situation.

The direction events had taken could easily have led to a long-drawn civil war as had happened with various other secessionist movements. Or if there was indeed a peaceful parting of ways as happened between Ethiopia and Eritrea following a referendum in 1993, there was every chance that this would merely be a short-lived peace, and that a border war of some kind would erupt sooner or later.

I believe that it was with the objective of putting an end to such horrors that — against all odds — President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila decided to shake hands before the massed local media. They declared their joint resolve to put an end to the cycle of election-related violence, which had now evolved into an existential threat to the nation.

This, of course, is what gave birth to the Building Bridges Initiative.

And with the BBI report finally out, it now seems that we will have to spend a billion shillings or so on the creation of half a dozen new VIP posts - each entitled to massive convoys of Mercedes Benzes and palatial official residences.

In my view if this is what will comprehensively detoxify Kenyan politics and bring an end to these election-related nightmares, once and for all, then it will be worth every shilling.