A dozen machete-wielding thugs broke into Alice Auma’s Nairobi slum-shack on Thursday, with a message from her main rival in Kenya’s 27 December election. ‘They said, ”hold a rally, and we’ll rape you”,’ says Auma (38) who is standing to regain a civic seat for her small opposition party.
Days before the most important election in Kenya’s history, political violence – of the kind that brought President Daniel arap Moi victory in two previous polls, and left thousands dead – is ripping across the land.
Moi, one of Africa’s last ‘Big Men’ tyrants, is constitutionally barred from standing in the poll. But his legacy lives on in the eagerness of candidates from all parties to use violence as a campaign ploy.
‘I expected some intimidation with democracy,’ says Auma, who has five children, a popular, longtime resident of the Kibera slum. ‘But I never thought I’d be fearing for my life.’
Auma’s brutish opponent, a well-funded candidate for the main opposition party, the National Rainbow Coalition, is hosting rallies in Kibera every day. Money is changing hands and moonshine flowing freely, Auma claims. Meanwhile, she is pacing Kibera’s muddy alleys, greeting old friends, trailed by six ragged bodyguards.
Auma’s election campaign is all Kenya’s writ small. On Friday, western diplomats in Nairobi warned of an increase in violence. ‘We cannot have a campaign which is marred in the last days by violence,’ said US Ambassador Johnnie Carson.
Wary of giving Moi’s loyal security services an excuse to intervene, the diplomats said there had been no major incidents so far. But this was strictly relative to Kenya where political patronage has replaced the rule of law.
In February, 25 people were killed in another Nairobi slum in fighting between rival gangs loyal to two Ministers eyeing Moi’s Kanu party’s presidential nomination. In March, more than 100 people died in clashes along the Tana River, stirred by two local politicians seeking Kanu’s parliamentary nomination. In September, 16 people were killed in the northern town of Isiolo, after a local politician handed out submachine guns to a tribe loyal to his cause.
‘Political violence used to be ordered straight from State House,’ said Mikewa Ogada of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. ‘Now the government has lost control of its creation. Violence is for hire everywhere and there’s a big market. Everybody’s using thugs, opposition as well as Kanu. The country’s totally out of control.’
Moi clung on to power by stirring inter-tribal hatred, even as Kenya cemented its place among the world’s most corrupt countries, according to Transparency International, and half the population slipped below the poverty line. In the runup toMoi’s two hairbreadth electoral victories, in 1992 and 1997, more than 3 000 people died in politically-stirred clashes.
There have been fewer clashes this year because the two leading candidates, Uhuru Kenyatta, Moi’s choice and the son of Jomo, Kenya’s founding father, and Mwai Kibaki, the leader of the opposition and expected victor, are from the same Kikuyu tribe.
Instead, much of the violence has directly targeted politicians, with two of them murdered last week, and another having his eye gouged out. According to a study by the French Institute for Research in Africa, in recent months seven rural Kenyans have been killed every week in clashes.
All Kenyan politicians employ a ‘jeshi’ – meaning ‘army’ in Swahili, and ranging from Auma’s six bodyguards, to militias several thousand-strong. On Wednesday, Joseph Nyaga, one of a dozen former Ministers campaigning for Kibaki, complained that his rally in central Gachoka constituency was broken up by his rival’s jeshi shooting arrows into the crowd.
With every poll predicting a landslide victory for Kibaki, Human Rights groups are warning of an increase in government-sponsored violence on polling day. But if, as before, this allows Kanu to claim victory, the fighting is unlikely to stop. Raila Odinga, a powerful opposition figure and another defector from Kanu, threatened last week to storm State House to force Moi and his cronies out. Moi’s response: ‘I dare you.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â