I’m concluding a month-long, seven-nation swing through Africa. When I started the trip, Kenya was in chaos; today, everyone in Nairobi is making nice. The post-election crisis that threatened Kenya’s survival as a nation is over.
What did it? In short, what we witnessed was an African solution to an African problem crafted by African leaders. While the framework of the agreement calls for a Prime Minister and “power sharing,” both of which are familiar concepts reflected in the Westminster political tradition; the details of the agreement are uniquely African.
Why do I say this? Categorically, there were a couple of causes for the crisis. The first was clearly a major miscalculation by the Kibaki administration. What he seemed to miss was that his first term election was more than a changing of the guard. It really marked the beginning of a new day.
When former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi “allowed” the election four years ago to go forward, even though his hand picked successor would lose, he in effect empowered the people. Once that genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be put back in. People rose up in the aftermath of this year’s election irregularities because they were not willing to give back the power that was theirs.
The post-election protest was a statement that the people were committed to holding their leaders accountable for addressing age-old disparities that have left the vast majority of the population mired in poverty.
The other cause for the crisis was referenced in a soon-to-be released book on African Leadership Challenges published by the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University.
In a chapter by former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi, he makes several points that provide insight into the context of the crisis and the content of the solution. He notes that there have been three factors that have rendered African countries all but ungovernable:
1) the polyglot of tribes that were lumped together as a result of arbitrary boundaries drawn by colonial powers;
2) the residual tensions between those tribes that were initially stoked by colonialists as a part of their “divide and rule” strategy, and
3) the imposition of multipartism by Western donors and the resultant organization of political parties along tribal lines rather than ideological lines.
The still-to-be resolved provisions in the agreement support this assessment of the context of the crisis that embroiled Kenya. The outstanding provisions that call for constitutional, electoral, and land reform, all reflect the salience of the root of the problem as summarized by Moi.
Given the tribal baggage brought from the colonial era, the conflict that marked the outcome of Kenya’s contested election was predictable. More important than the specific details still to be resolved, the agreement reflects something more fundamental if multiparty democracy is going to work on the continent.
Elections, by definition, are about who won. Determining the winner of an election is, by and large, easy. The challenge in keeping countries stable, where tribal tensions are just beneath the surface, is keeping the out parties from feeling like “losers.”
This is a second point that Moi makes in the piece he contributed to the leadership book. It is a key element of the Kenyan agreement that has reconciled this fractured nation. An election decides who will lead the state; but a stable nation requires that everyone feels they are stakeholders in the state. It is this point that has implications for the rest of the continent.
This agreement is cause for optimism; not simply because the once tranquil Kenya is back on the road to stability. Elections are a contact sport; governance requires cooperation. A communal model of governance, as reflected in the Kenyan agreement, not only reflects the necessity to overcome the intrinsic divisions that define African states; but, it also reflects the personality of African culture. This agreement was not only essential for the “spirit of healing” to begin in Kenya; but may well be the key to the long sought stability Africa so desperately needs.
Charles R. Stith is a former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania and is director of the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University.
