Political tension is threatening to split the 18-month-old Kenyan government of national unity as constitutional reform activists gear up for another weekend of street protests. It is reported that police shot eight people (including two primary school pupils) in Kisumu in western Kenya, after a clash with demonstrators at Saba Saba celebrations on Wednesday.
This follows hot on the heels of other violent clashes with Kenyan police, in which at least one person was killed and 27 others, eight of whom are children, were arrested.
This week, inside a humid shebeen at Dagoretti Corner, a dusty hive of meat markets and informal businesses on the outskirts of Nairobi, a sweating Rastafarian named Charles Sospeter led a group of revellers in dreadlocked, drunken song.
The melody was the same as that which had rung across Kenya when President Mwai Kibaki’s National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) defeated Daniel Arap Moi’s Kenya African National Union (Kanu) in December 2002. But the words to the popular song had changed.
A dancing Sospeter explained: ”We no more sing, ‘Yote yawezakana bila Moi [anything is possible with- out Moi].’ Now you can hear we are singing, ‘Yote yawezakana bila Mwai!”’
Kenyans are no longer intoxicated by optimism. These days they are dancing to a different, far more disenchanted tune. ”Time has healed our false happiness,” Sospeter scoffed.
Shortly after his inauguration as president, Kibaki — basking in the glory of world leaders lauding a rare ”triumph of democracy” in Africa —promised 500 000 new jobs within his first year of rule, a South African-styled truth commission to document his country’s past suffering under brutal dictatorships, and a new Constitution within 100 days of taking office. The promises came to nothing.
But the people forgave the affable, ever-smilingKibaki — until last Saturday, that is, when the president’s coalition partners, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), called a rally in Nairobi — in defiance of Kibaki — to demand the ratification of a draft Constitution adopted by Kenya’s statutory National Constitutional Conference in March.
The police commissioner, however, banned the event shortly after he had given it the green light — and little more than 24 hours before it was scheduled to begin. Snarling dogs, riot police and razor wire sealed the Uhuru Park venue. But the protesters took to the streets instead.
Word of the chaos in Nairobi soon spread to Kisumu and more violent clashes ensued. As 2 000 people chanted ”pamoja tuangamize Kibaki [together let us destroy Kibaki]”, the police opened fire with live ammunition, killing an unidentified man.
A police spokesperson later claimed the deceased had been part of a mob who had cornered an officer and threatened to ”hack him to death”, forcing the policeman to shoot.
But the scene had been set for confrontation days before the aborted rally when Kibaki reshuffled his Cabinet, demoting several LDP ministers from key positions while giving his former Kanu enemies the pick of the top jobs.
Kibaki created a new post of Minister of Energy for Simeon Nyachae, a veteran politician, who had declared himself ”an enemy of Narc” during the 2002 election campaign.
It was all too much for the LDP to swallow. After all, said its leaders, the LDP had garnered many votes for Narc in 2002 — yet it was now sidelined in favour of former rulers still detested by many Kenyans.
Narc MPs, whose support for Kibaki had previously been unconditional, began to rebel. Koigi wa Wamwere said Kenyans had rejected Kanu in 2002 — yet Kibaki had ”insulted” them by returning the ”hated” party to government.
Wamwere, a firebrand MP widely respected in Kenya for surviving lengthy imprisonment and vicious torture at the hands of Moi’s security branch, accused the president of betraying Kenyans. ”President Kibaki has hammered the last nail in the coffin of Narc.”
But the extent to which Narc has fractured since the halcyon days of 2002 came from Health Minister Charity Ngilu, considered a moderate in the ruling coalition, when she broke ranks and unequivocally condemned the banning of the rally.
”We promised Kenyans change and the police action portrayed the government in a bad light, as all Kenyans have a right to be heard,” Ngilu stated.
As the street-fighting in Kenya made headlines, so the political dogfight over the draft Constitution has intensified. Its opponents say it takes too much power away from Kibaki, and gives too much power to a proposed executive prime minister — a post long coveted by Raila Odinga, LDP stalwart and Minister of Roads and Public Works, and a man Kibaki’s supporters accuse of leading a ”rebellion” against the president.
”Someone stole the Narc revolution and broke our rainbow dream. The Kibaki administration is built on a lie,” said political scientist Mutahi Ngunyi. ”In December 2002 we did not vote for a person known as Mwai Kibaki. We voted for a team and a team presidency. And [Kibaki] stole our dream.”
The pressure is on the government. The protesters have thrown down the gauntlet, telling Kibaki and his police force that they will again attempt to hold rallies throughout Kenya this Friday
Through it all, the draft Constitution — a document praised only a few months ago by the international community as one of Africa’s most liberal — has disappeared in a haze of tear-gas smoke, its contents drowned by the noise of shattering shop windows, forgotten in the echoes of the shotguns originally sponsored by the Kanu regime, but now firmly embraced by Kenya’s Rainbow warriors.