KIBERA, Kenya — In the Kenyan slum of Kibera these days, the ancient cadences of the Muslim call to prayer compete with election propaganda blaring from loudspeakers.
With opposition candidate Raila Odinga holding onto a razor-thin lead over incumbent President Mwai Kibaki, every pollster describes Thursday’s vote as too close to call. It’s a rare tight race on a continent where sitting presidents are usually re-elected, and in a country where an incumbent has never before faced a credible challenge.
Kenya’s roughly 3.5 million Muslims — out of a predominantly Christian population of 34 million — may be the deciding factor.
“It’s the first time that religious issues have played such a prominent part in national politics,” said Karuti Kanyinga, a political scientist at the University of Nairobi’s Institute for Development Studies. “Because the race is so close, candidates are looking for any issue that may pull voters over to their side.”
The campaign has featured promises to clean up Kenya’s notoriously corrupt government and thinly veiled appeals to tribal loyalties. Crowds of people supporting the rival candidates shouted tribal epithets and threw rocks at each other during rallies Monday, prompting police to fire tear gas.
But the race has also has focused to an unusual degree on Muslim grievances. There are concerns about delays in granting mainly Muslim ethnic minorities national identity cards, without which they cannot work, vote or own land, and about the constant poverty in the slums and along Kenya’s coastline, where many residents are Muslim.
There also are perceptions among Muslims that they are being targeted in a war on terrorism in which Kibaki has allowed terror suspects to be deported from Kenya and sent to neighboring Ethiopia for questioning, in some cases by U.S. agents.
When Odinga signed an agreement in August with one leading Muslim forum promising to end the deportations and launch an inquiry into the practice, it dominated headlines for days.
Kibaki, who has said little about the deportations, responded in October by setting up a committee dedicated to looking at Muslim grievances, including the deportations. However, no date was set for the committee to report on its findings and the president has not publicly commented on it since it was established.
An investigation by The Associated Press earlier this year confirmed some terrorism suspects were being deported from Kenya and sent to Ethiopia for questioning. Human-rights activists have criticized the Ethiopian government’s human-rights record, but it is a strong ally of the U.S. in the war on terrorism.
Saidi Osman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum said that before Kibaki, “no president in Kenya or Africa had removed citizens of his country to another country without due process.”
In the wake of widely publicized protests over the deportations, “Muslims in Kenya have decided to punish Kibaki and vote him out,” Osman said.
