MUGA: Is Kenya politically stable?

When skimming through global news reports, you will sometimes come across a headline that is simply depressing.

For me, one such headline earlier this week was 'Australia swears in new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese while votes are still being counted'.

Any Kenyan old enough to have experienced the fury of the 2008 post-election violence would immediately understand why I found this depressing: it immediately makes the Kenyan reader realise just how far we are from the kind of political stability that Australia seems to have.

Here was a situation in which the serving Prime Minister had lost his parliamentary majority in a landslide victory for his opponents – and the leader of the main opposition party had immediately been sworn in without any fuss or hesitation.

In Kenya such an act – swearing in a winner before the votes had all been counted – would be simply unthinkable. Indeed, it would be criminally irresponsible of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. For back in the 2007 general election, it took much less than that to spark the worst inter-communal violence ever seen in our nation.

Just the mere suggestion that some late-arriving votes from some corners of President Mwai Kibaki’s strongholds, was all it took to set a match to our reputation for political stability. And who is to say – despite two relatively peaceful general elections since – that something of that kind might not happen again, if the IEBC was to declare a winner while yet votes were still being counted?

So, this question of whether we live in a stable democracy or not is one that must necessarily trouble the hearts of many. We know very well what political instability looks like. Now we have to try and figure out – well in advance – if we have put such troubling possibilities behind us.

However, one other headline to a news item earlier this week provided some consolation. It was about how the Republican party in the US intended to “steal the 2024 presidential election”.

Indeed, it was only the latest of such headlines. Virtually every month and sometimes every week, there will be a news headline in American media reporting this same thing, with sometimes the Republicans claiming the Democrats intend to steal the election, and at other times the Democrats accusing the Republicans of laying the groundwork for stealing the 2024 presidential election.

And this of course is what one of the leading presidential candidates, the Deputy President Dr William Ruto, and his key political allies have alleged every other week here in Kenya. They keep on insisting that there are those serving the “deep state” who are planning to “steal their votes” in order to secure victory for the other leading candidate, the former Prime Minister Raila Odinga.

Both claims – in Kenya as in the US – are rooted in events that were later to be seen as iconic moments. These were, in the US, the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in the hope of stopping the certification of Joe Biden’s victory following the 2020 presidential election. And in Kenya, the “swearing-in ceremony” of Raila Odinga, which had him declared “the people’s president” on January 30, 2018.

But we must also note that what these events had in common, apart from the high drama they presented, is that after the drama was over the disenchanted mobs went home. Indeed, we could say that we did better in Kenya, where the whole thing was peaceful, while in the US there was definitely some violence.

And there would have been even greater violence if those supporters of president trump who attacked the Capitol had managed to catch any of the supposed “traitors” they were looking for among the members of congress and the senators.

When a country, whether the US or Kenya, can weather such unprecedented political disruption, with no streets left flowing with blood, and then go back to normal the very next day, I think that country can be said to be politically stable.

And so, I am inclined to agree with the Cabinet Secretary for the Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government, Dr Fred Matiang'i, when he gives his repeated assurances that we have nothing to worry about; and that Kenya’s democracy is mature and stable.