Oh, That This Should Happen In Kenya!

The AuthorThere was a time, two decades or so ago, when Kenya was so stable that most of the Western foreign correspondents who covered Africa were based there.

From their comfortable apartments in the suburbs of Nairobi, they would dash off to ‘the Congo’, or Burundi, or any other country that offered an ‘Africa-is-burning’ scenario, and file horror stories that made you ashamed to be called an African.

As newspapers in the US, London and Paris, began to cut down on expenses incurred covering Africa, the correspondents’ forays into conflict areas became less and less frequent, and some of their stories began to get written on the basis of rumours heard in the bar of the Nairobi Hilton hotel and other watering holes.

ACCOUNT

So much so that a talkative Ghanaian friend of mine (who shall remain nameless!) usually began his rumour-mongering stunts by saying, 'Hey! Have you heard the latest Hilton?’ With that, he would give you an ‘eye-witness’ account of the latest high society infidelity, or ‘kalabule deal’, without batting an eyelid.

Well, I do know the ‘Nairobi Hilton’. I was having a drink in the bar there one day, in the company of some newly-made friends from Nairobi University, when we were joined by two ladies. The guys welcomed them nicely so I assumed that they knew them and I included them whenever I ordered drinks. We talked and laughed, as if we were all old friends.

Then, without warning, one of the ladies put her arms around your truly and kissed him full on the lips. This was a severe shock, for in yours truly’s part of the world, women used not to pick men up but left it to the men! (Well, all right — maybe except at the Lido nightclub!)

I was still trying to recover from the shock when more trouble showed its head. The other woman then began to rain insults at the one who had kissed me: 'You old bag (she said) why don’t you leave us young ones to have our chance? Haven’t you had enough men?' You know where this is going, don’t you?

Well, I wasn’t about to find out. I got up and as fast as my legs could carry me, I raced to the lift and into my room. Without bidding my friends goodbye! I am sure they still consider me as ‘a man who is afraid of women.’ But talk about ‘culture shock’!

Ok – what I wanted to tell you by that is that Kenya was — and still is— a very ‘liberal’ place with loads of attractions for those who are inclined to enjoy such things. You take a taxi from Nairobi and drive for 30 minutes or so and you come to a game park where you can see good old ‘simba’ (lion) strolling about in his natural environment, as if Adam and Eve had never quarrelled with their maker about fruit-plucking rights. And if you’re a meat-eater, there’s hardly a place to beat Nairobi restaurants in the variety of meat served and the different styles of cooking it. One restaurant unashamedly calls itself the ‘Carnivore!’ They roast the meat and pass it round on spits, and you let them cut as much as you like for you. Now, I know a few places in rural Ghana where, if you opened a restaurant with a policy like that, you’d go bust in five days dead. But Kenya can do it.

And now, the beautiful people of Kenya are at one another’s throats. The terrible pictures of dead bodies and burnt property that have been coming out of there in the past week, make one wonder whether democracy is worth such carnage.

The trouble, however, is that dictatorship and military rule, the alternatives to democracy, also bring carnage in their wake, while offering none of the advantages that are enjoyed in a democracy. So the question should not be whether democracy is worth it but how democracy can be achieved without the election rigging that often threaten to bring national disintegration.

In the Kenya case, the rigging of the election was quite blatant. Before the election, the opposition had been calling for an Act of Parliament implementing an ‘Inter-Party Parliamentary Group’ recommendation that members of the Electoral Commission should be appointed after cross-party consultations.

This did not happen. Yet the Commission‘s chairman, Mr Samuel Kivuitu, had himself warned publicly that 'When people are appointed [to the Commission] without statutory guidelines, we can have thieves and people without integrity at the Commission'.

In spite of such statements, however, Kivuitu behaved on election night like a party hack anxious to declare Mwai Kibaki the winner and have him sworn in as President within an hour. In order that people who want to cling to power should not be able to rig elections, it is necessary to insulate the election process totally from local political influences. For again and again, we see nations brought to the brink of destruction by disputed elections. In Africa, the most spectacular case has been that of the Ivory Coast, where General Robert Guei, declared himself winner of an election in 2000 and thereby plunged the country into a civil war from which it is still recovering.

Of course, it isn’t only African countries that suffer from what might be called ‘terminal electionitis’. Many of the new countries forged out of the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, also suffer from rigged elections. Even the ‘bastion of democracy’, the United States can find its political foundations rocked by bitter disputes over ‘pregnant chads’. Isn’t it time to hand elections likely to result in disputes over to a specially-created squad of the United Nations?

It is true that the UN has many failures. But never have I heard it said that a UN-supervised election was rigged. In 1956, for instance, the UN held a plebiscite to determine the future of the UN Trusteeship over what was then called ‘Trans-Volta Togoland’, a strip of land wedged lay between soon-to-be-independent Ghana and the French colony of Togo.

There were very strong feelings over whether the people whose homeland had been divided by colonialism should be reunited or allowed to stay where they were. The majority of the people opted to join Ghana into independence. This aroused ethnic antagonisms, but because the UN plebiscite had been squeaky-clean, the majority decision was respected. The UN has also successfully supervised, or been involved, in elections in such countries as East Timor, Cambodia, Namibia, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Haiti.

The UN therefore has the experience. What is lacking is a collective recognition by UN members that elections are a lethal threat to lives in many countries, and that elections should therefore be viewed with the same seriousness as threats to international peace. A UN elections squad, if established, would be put into operation when a party or parties to an election that was likely to bring about a disputed result, applied to the Security Council for assistance to run the election. Getting the Security Council to agree would not be easy, for a party bent on rigging an election would not welcome UN ‘interference’ in its affairs. It would try and find a permanent member to veto the proposal.

PRESSURE

But once the Council had agreed that without UN involvement, many people would be killed in the country, the Council should exert all the pressure it can to invite the UN in. For instance, all UN members could refuse it aid if it defied the Security Council. The World Bank and the IMF would also be asked to do the same. (By the way, these two financial institutions could be asked to contribute to the UN ‘elections fund’ — after all, they’ve been concerning themselves much with ‘good governance’ of late.)

Such a system would, of course, undercut the sovereignty of the country concerned. But if it were possible to ask the people who have lost their lives in Kenya or the Ivory Coast whether they would much rather be alive in a country with diminished sovereignty than be dead in one with its sovereignty intact, their answer would be obvious.

Since the dead cannot talk, it is mandatory for UN members to speak — and act — on their behalf.