Why the cost of losing elections is just too high
By JAINDI KISERO
The East African
Clearly, tribalism is at the core of the post-election conflict facing Kenya. Indeed, the ethnic factor is the main reason why a power sharing deal between the main protagonists, President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, is proving difficult to negotiate.
In Kenya, winning and losing elections is a high-stakes affair because it means exclusion of the losers from power and distribution of resources for five years.
Simply stated, losing an election in Kenya implies the sacking of permanent secretaries, parastatal heads, directors of state corporations and other public officials from the tribes that have lost.
On the other hand, winning elections also means preferential treatment of companies owned by the president's tribe in the award of government contracts and the major procurement deals floated by public corporations.
All the key ministries and critical government institutions - the Ministries of Finance, of Internal Security and Agriculture the Central Bank and the major parastatals providing critical utilities - such as electricity, ports, airports, roads etc - must be in the hands of the president's tribesmen.
Where some of these ministries and institutions are in the hands of other tribes, their permanent secretaries or boards are stuffed with the president's tribesmen such that, even though nominal power is in the hands of people from other tribes, it remains clear who wields effective power.
One of the reason members of the Kalenjin tribe of former president Daniel arap Moi voted so massively against Mwai Kibaki was the feeling that too many of their tribesmen were sacked when Kibaki took over in early 2003.
A nascent Kalenjin business class that had emerged during Moi's regime disappeared overnight, their links to sources of patronage having been suddenly cut off.
At the beginning of Kibaki's administration, there were four permanent secretaries from Odinga's Luo tribe in a government of 31 ministries. However, after Kibaki's government lost the referendum of 2005, most of them were sacked.
Currently, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Trade and Industry, David Nalo, is the only permanent secretary from Odinga's Luo community.
Thus, when viewed in ethnic terms, the stakes involved in losing elections in Kenya are just too high to contemplate. International mediators may force Odinga and Kibaki to share power, but the long-term political solution for Kenya will be how to reform the politics of the country by introducing constitutional changes that ensure that neither the majority nor the minority are threatened with permanent exclusion from power and resources for development.
Perhaps the most poignant lesson from the conflict in Kenya is that the country needs to build institutions and systems that will put the stakes of losing a democratic election low enough to enable the contesting parties to accept the outcome of the elections and dissuade losers from resorting to violence.
An Electoral Commission stuffed with the president's appointees, whose actions routinely elicit charges of bias and rigging, is hardly feasible in an environment of such high stakes.
A power-sharing deal between Kibaki and Odinga will also be difficult to achieve in a context where the "big man" still enjoys imperial powers.
The president of Kenya can dangle the carrot of state resources for development and give out largesse to those in the opposition willing to co operate with him while freezing resources in opposition strongholds.
There is a dire need to address the issue of ethnicity and tribalism in the country. The elite of the country is at a point where they must look squarely in the mirror of history and concede that political tribalism is a threat to the unity of the nation state.
At independence, the elite of the country assumed that tribalism was a temporary phenomenon that would soon melt way.
In the words of scholar Yusuf Bungura, "The popular expectation was that the citizens of the new nation states would break out of the boundaries of ethnicity, embrace a secular-nation state identity, develop a rational scientific view of development and treat individuals as autonomous entities".
It was assumed that inter-ethnic marriages, employment outside ethnic territories, urbanisation and interaction of students in ethnically integrated schools and colleges would kill off tribal identity.
Experience has proved these assumptions wrong. As the post-election conflict has shown, the fact that the citizen in Kenya is ready to kill and die to defend his ethnic interests is a wake up call to start treating ethnic ideology rather more seriously.
Ethnically divided Kenya must urgently go back to constitutional reform and introduce systems that entrench the politics of inclusion.