Kenya’s fresh election is preposterously flawed

CLUTCHING a large rock on his shoulder, Sam Ogada is ready for battle. “This”, he says, gesturing with it, “is the only language our government understands”. A little way down the street, in Kisumu, a large city in western Kenya, piles of burning tyres spew black smoke into the air. Policemen, dressed in full camouflage and clutching assault rifles, mill about. The sting of tear gas hangs in the air. On the streets men have fashioned bricks, stones and tree branches into crude roadblocks, where, when not fighting with the police, they ask somewhat menacingly for donations from passing motorists.

The people of Kisumu are used to this. The city is the stronghold of Raila Odinga, Kenya’s veteran opposition leader. It has been a centre for discontent with Kenya’s government for as long as most Kenyans can remember. In 1969 the first president, Jomo Kenyatta, visited but had to be rescued from an angry crowd by policemen firing a hail of bullets. Yet people here, who are mostly of Mr Odinga’s Luo tribe, seem angrier than ever. “We have been marginalised for 50 years”, says Adam Mbatah, another protester. “It is as if we are not part of this country.”

The focus of their anger is the repeat of Kenya’s presidential election, due to be held on October 26th (as The Economist went to press). The election was scheduled after the Supreme Court spectacularly threw out the results of a vote on August 8th that would have returned to power the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta (the son of Jomo and scion of the Kikuyu tribe). Without commenting on whether the result would have been affected, the court said that the process of counting votes was too flawed to be credible. But instead of arranging a more transparent election, Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is pressing ahead with one that appears to be even more flawed than the original.

On October 10th Mr Odinga withdrew from the race, claiming the new vote would not be fair. In Kisumu his supporters echo his words, shouting “no election in October” at protests.

When Mr Odinga withdrew, it seemed like a last roll of the dice. Although the IEBC made plenty of errors in the tallying and transmission of votes, there is little proof that the election in August was rigged, as Mr Odinga claims. Short of the cash needed to continue campaigning, Mr Odinga’s boycott seems to have been a desperate attempt to avoid an election he would probably have lost anyway.

Yet since he left the race, his stated reasons for doing so have been vindicated. On October 18th Roselyn Akombe, one of the IEBC’s commissioners, fled to America claiming to have been threatened for advocating reforms. Later that day Wafula Chebukati, the chairman of the commission, said that he could not guarantee credible elections in an atmosphere of intimidation. Compounding the sense of an organisation under siege, its chief executive officer, Ezra Chiloba, left suddenly to take a three-week holiday.

On October 25th this supposed exercise in democracy became more farcical still when only two of seven Supreme Court judges arrived at work to hear a last-ditch plea to postpone the election yet again. With the court deprived of a quorum, it could not rule. One judge, Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu, stayed away after her bodyguard was shot and injured on a Nairobi street the night before the hearing. The other judges offered a variety of excuses. One was abroad; another said she had missed her flight to Nairobi.

Many Kenyans, even those who do not support Mr Odinga, worry that Mr Kenyatta is determined to push ahead with an election, no matter how preposterously flawed. Kenya’s economy has slowed sharply this year as businesses have held back investment until after the election: a contested poll in 2007 led to violence that cost more than 1,000 lives and plunged the economy into crisis. Some argue that with Kenya’s budget deficit forecast to reach 12% of GDP , funded almost entirely by inflows of foreign investment, the country can ill afford another few months of uncertainty. And Mr Kenyatta’s supporters feel, not unreasonably, that Mr Odinga is holding the country hostage in an attempt to win concessions or a power-sharing agreement.

Yet the election, even if it proceeds without violence, will not produce the legitimacy that Mr Kenyatta needs. If the Supreme Court were to apply the same standard that it did to the poll in August, it could hardly endorse this one. And even if the judges are cowed, Mr Kenyatta will have to contend with continuing protests. In Nairobi on October 25th Mr Odinga called for “national resistance”, including boycotts, strikes and other economic disruption. Some of his closest allies even talk about secession. “If a government subverts the sovereignty of the people… people are entitled to rebel”, says Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, the governor of Kisumu county.

In Nairobi’s slums, where people of dozens of different tribes live side by side in crude tenements and tin shacks, anger could overflow into ethnic violence. In Mathare, a particularly mixed slum near the city centre, Kikuyu residents say that they have sent their children to the countryside until they feel safe again. The Luo residents of Kisumu do not feel safe either. “He is killing our children”, shouts Yvonne Onyango, a housewife, of Mr Kenyatta. “But he does not have enough bullets to kill all us Luos. We will keep fighting.”