For five months, Ruth Adhiambo has been holed up in a tent in a church lot far from her shanty home, her fish-peddling business and the ballot box where she is supposed to vote in Kenya’s presidential election this month.
The young mother grabbed her children and fled in August after gangs of marauding youths attacked the coastal slum where the family lived. The thugs threw a gasoline bomb into Adhiambo’s tiny kiosk and cut her brother and a nephew with panga knives.
The home of her neighbor, Christine Kio, also was burned down, leaving Kio’s 8-month-old son, Peter, with a blackened and deformed hand.
“The raiders were throwing leaflets every place, telling us we had seven days to give up our land,” Adhiambo said. “We’re afraid to go back. We fear because of the election.”
In Kenya, nearly two decades into the reign of President Daniel arap Moi, the violence that killed dozens this year along the Indian Ocean coast passes for electoral reapportionment.
Human rights monitors, clerics and journalists say it was Moi’s ruling party, the Kenya African National Union, that engineered the raids.
The party’s goal, they say, was to sweep out “up country” tribe members like Adhiambo to assure the party of a voting majority along the coast; the specter of more violence hovers over the election, now set for Dec. 29.
Moi, an autocrat in the mold of other corrupt African despots, is favored to win his fifth five-year term. While post-Cold War currents have ousted the likes of Mobutu Sese Seko, an old ally in Zaire (now Congo), Moi again is seen to have outmaneuvered Kenya’s badly divided political opposition, through means fair and foul.
A few months ago, as rioters shouted “Moi-butu must go!” in the streets of Nairobi, reform activists thought they finally had harnessed Kenyans’ rage against their country’s deterioration since Moi came to power in 1978. The shrewd Moi agreed to just enough reform to regain the advantage.
Lamenting what may be another lost opportunity, his opponents say their best chance is to force him into an election runoff against one of 14 presidential candidates who will split the opposition ballots in the first round of voting.
“This election is to buy Moi another lease on life,” said Gibson Kamau Kuria, a human rights lawyer who spearheaded the reform drive this year. “For Kenya, Moi’s reign is one long period of going downhill. Unless there are peaceful reforms, the poor will be going after Moi like dogs.”
Kenyans say this year’s violence resulted from the corruption, oppression and decay that afflict this country. Under Moi’s predecessor, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya was East Africa’s showcase of modernization, prosperity and stability, and a place where foreign tourists felt at ease in the wildlife reserves and beach resorts.
For all its problems, Kenya is one of the continent’s economic hubs and still outshines many of its neighbors. Even so, it has become one of the 25 poorest countries in the world, with citizens complaining that roads are decrepit, medicines are not available and they can’t afford to send their children to school.
This month, the nation’s 25,000 nurses went on strike, seeking more pay and benefits. Public hospital wards emptied, and mothers were giving birth to babies on street curbs, but the government barely responded.
Many blame Kenya’s woes on its pervasive corruption, perhaps best exemplified by the Goldenberg scandal, in which government officials and businessmen allegedly colluded in 1993 to steal $400 million in public funds. Moi’s son, Gideon, has been linked to the scandal.
This month, Moi announced a promotional campaign in France to attract tourists and business executives to the $70 million airport he built at his birthplace of Eldoret, a rural town 200 miles across Kenya’s savanna from Nairobi, where few planes fly.
A tribal compromise gave Moi, 73, the presidency upon Kenyatta’s death. As a member of the tiny Kalenjin ethnic group, Moi was seen as a small threat to leaders of Kenya’s larger, mutually suspicious tribes. He proved surprisingly shrewd, exploiting ethnic rivalries and clamping down on political opponents to hold power for two decades.
His government has been repeatedly condemned by human rights organizations in recent years for arbitrary justice and mistreating opponents in prison.
“I am not a dictator,” Moi has said repeatedly this year as the comparisons to Mobutu have rolled in.
In an independence day speech this month, Moi condemned election-related violence and warned voters to ignore “absurd” and “utterly false” claims by his opponents.
In 1992, as Kenya prepared for elections, Moi was under intense pressure from opposition leaders and international donors to abandon the country’s one-party state and adopt democratic reforms. Many observers did not think he could survive such moves.
He accepted the registration of new parties and then ultimately won with 36 percent of the vote. The opposition was split among other candidates, and the campaign was marred by violence, arrests of opposition leaders and widespread condemnation of vote rigging.
During the campaign, the ruling party also was blamed for inflaming ethnic violence in the northwest Rift Valley that left up to 2,000 dead and scared off tribal members not disposed to vote for Moi. His government said the violence showed the inevitable result of political freedoms.
This year, a broad coalition of church leaders and political reformers mounted the biggest challenge to Moi yet, demanding constitutional reforms that would reduce the president’s power.
The campaign caught on with disillusioned Kenyans, who took to the streets for months of protest. Moi responded with force, and more than a dozen protesters were killed by security forces.
His moral authority weakened, Moi soon promised to allow reforms. In October, he agreed to lift colonial-era laws restricting freedom of speech and assembly, allowing more access to state-run media, giving opposition members seats on the election commission and vowing to give Cabinet posts to the opposition.
The agreement took the steam out of the protests, which had been muted by the violence. But reform leaders called the legal changes a “cosmetic” attempt to once again split the opposition, partly by dangling the new Cabinet posts in front of some of Moi’s political rivals.
Moi’s critics cried foul again this month when he named a crony, Zaccheus Chesoni, as the country’s chief justice. As former head of the election commission, Chesoni had overseen the flawed 1992 elections and he now will have final say on legal challenges to this year’s election results.
One other divisive step Moi took before the elections was finally to register the Safina political party of Richard Leakey, the paleontologist and conservationist who has been trying to broker a united opposition to Moi.
The registration came only eight days before the November deadline for candidate nominations, too late for Safina to put up a presidential challenger. But Leakey said the elections still could give Kenyans the chance to express their outrage at Moi.
“I don’t think it’s time to throw in the towel at all,” Leakey said. “I don’t think anyone has forgotten that this country is in a mess and who put it in that mess.”
But Leakey recently complained that opposition parties face constant harassment and that the elections will be unfair.
At a rally in a downtown Nairobi park, Leakey complained that all parties but Moi’s Kenya African Nation Union have been harassed. “Violence hits everybody in this election except KANU,” Leakey said. “It’s appalling.”
“This is not going to be a free election, it is clearly controlled by President Moi and his top echelons,” he said. “The electoral commission is toothless.”
The opposition is hoping that Moi stumbles on the legal requirement that he win at least 25 percent of the ballots in five of Kenya’s eight provinces.
Failing that, he will have to face the second-largest vote-getter in a runoff.
Along the coast, Kenyans are hoping to get through the elections without more of the violence that erupted around the southeastern port city of Mombasa, where tensions are high between local people who have backed Moi’s party and “up country” people who have come in search of work and support opposition figures.
In a report issued this month, the Kenya Human Rights Commission cited evidence that the thugs who attacked Likoni and other villages were recruited, trained and armed beforehand.
The report concluded that senior ruling party officials may have conspired to create a sense of instability in the nation to strengthen the party’s hand. Two local leaders in the party were arrested shortly after the attack.
Some say the plot may have backfired, because locals also were targeted in the raids and later atrocities by soldiers sent in to end them. But the plot certainly succeeded in discouraging voting by members of the Luo and other tribes who normally oppose Moi.
“They wanted us to run,” said Adhiambo, a Luo. “Many went back up country, and they will not vote now.”
