THE GOD SQUAD

Last week, the National Council of Churches in Kenya called for new elections -- and was roundly slapped down by politicians of all persuasions and many ordinary Kenyans. The NCCK did not mince its words, dubbing the president "moribund" and the prime minister "ineffective". It went on to accuse the bloated cabinet of stealing development funds, worsening the drought through corruption, ignoring thousands of internal refugees and dragging their feet on constitutional reform.
"We find it immoral that members of parliament ... spend most of their time peacocking around the country ... And while the MPs are getting their tax-free allowances to acquire the latest pleasures and luxuries, Kenyans are dying of hunger."
It was a real dressing-down from the country's largest church group. And it echoes many of the complaints made every day by ordinary Kenyans and even by ministers, who have been pointing fingers at their own associates, accusing them of corruption or worse ie Justice Minister and probable presidential candidate Martha Karua lashing out at the judiciary and particularly the Chief Justice for favoritism and cronyism in the appointment of magistrates; Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka accusing colleagues of "stealing as much as they can" to fill their war chests before the next election.
But one of the main arguments made against the NCCK's call was that elections simply cannot be held because there is no electoral commission -- the electoral commission of Kenya (ECK) was disbanded after the 2007 polls, accused of bungling the results. Early this week, a parliamentary team was meant to nominate a new polls chief but that decision has now been delayed until Thursday, according to the Nation. Among other tasks, the new Interim Independent Electoral Commission will have to compile a new voters' register as the old one is defunct since the abolition of the ECK.
It's a bit of a worry, though, if the main argument against having snap polls to address widely acknowledged problems of corruption and incompetence is that the government is too ineffective and divided to even set up the institutions needed to hold a vote. Something of a Catch-22.

KEEPING TIME

One of the advantages of having a restless two-year-old is that you get to watch a lot of early morning television -- although, you do have to be able to watch and assimilate while reading "Spot Goes To The Park" and keeping a cup of hot coffee away from sleep-befuddled toddler hands. So this morning, just after 6 a.m., I was delighted to find a hilarious item on Citizen TV news about a conference of Arab investors in Nairobi this week.
According to the report, the conference was due to start at 8.30 am on Monday, but well after 10, Kenyan officials from various ministries had still not appeared. Cue shots of the Arab investors sitting down at long conference tables, looking grumpy, shots of empty chairs, cutaways to the clock. Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta appeared quite miffed, and the presentation from one official -- who said Monday morning was evidently not a good time to host a conference -- was truly hilarious. There is a serious side to the story too.
Do you really want people who have money to invest in a country suffering from drought, a budget shortfall of millions of shillings, political instability and endemic corruption to be kept waiting? Kenyatta said yesterday that Kenya needed 480 billion shillings to achieve its growth objectives. The country is increasingly looking to the Middle East and Asia for fresh funds -- an Africa-wide trend that has seen Kuwait invest in Sudanese farms and dams and China pour money into infrastructure and extraction industries across the continent, to name but two examples. But competition for funds is fierce, and credit-crunch-scarred investors are becoming increasingly wary and demanding. If the Arab investors in Nairobi on Monday were rating potential investment destinations on issues of governance and efficiency, Kenya might find itself a ways down the list.

COALITION END-GAME?

It seems everyone is waiting for Kenya's coalition government to fall apart. But who is going to blink first when the risks are so high? Stagnation may, afterall, be preferable to a potentially very dangerous vacuum and elections that, most agree, whenever they come will be troublesome and very possibly marked by violence. However, standing still carries its own dangers and surely at some point the internal bickering within the coalition must become untenable. Not to mention the damage being done by the lack of leadership in a time of global economic crisis which is expected to really start hitting Kenya this year. Growth forecasts have now been revised down to 3 percent for the year to June -- down from 5.8 percent previously, and a sturdy 7 percent growth in 2007. There is a 25 billion shilling shortfall in the 08/09 budget, so belts must be tightened -- perhaps those inflated salaries in parliament? Tourism, remittances, exports -- all will be affected by the global recession. If ever leaders of stature, of vision and of courage were needed, it would seem to be now.
Instead, this week a meeting of the Permanent Committee on the Management of the Grand Coalition Affairs was cancelled because of a government row over the deaths of two human rights activists in Nairobi and a subsequent protest by students which turned ugly, among other political bickerings.
Many commentators seem to agree that the coalition is doomed...but what do Kenyans think? Is there hope that the Grand Coalition could make way for a better team, or simply a feeling that the devil you know is better than the devil you don't?
Prime Minister Raila Odinga seems to be taking the biggest political hit right now, with many questioning his decision to back the students' protest, not to mention increasingly strident voices being raised against him within his own party. And all the time, President Mwai Kibaki remains mostly silent, though he has blamed the media and civil society groups for fuelling discontent. As politicians bluster with an eye or two always on 2012, reports of intimidation and evidence of the ineluctable spread of a culture of fear continue to mount, as in this story about human rights activists fleeing the Mount Elgon area after police investigations into their contributions to U.N. special rapporteur Philip Alston's report on extrajudicial killings.

NAIROBI PROTESTS

More trouble on the streets of Nairobi today -- a thousands-strong student protest over alleged police killings degenerated into rioting and looting in the centre of the Kenyan capital. http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE5292FB20090310
I briefly wondered this week if I should stock up on essentials -- water, biscuits, beer -- but then thought I was being paranoid, which is probably true. Call me Cassandra. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that students wouldn't be students if they did not protest against the establishment, today's violence feels like the beginning, not the end. The students were apparently joined by unemployed youths, and others from the many slums of Nairobi as well as professionals. Heaven knows there seems to be enough anger and frustration around to bring people onto the streets, even in a country with a lot to lose, relative to other African states, a strong middle-class and years of corruption behind it.
I had a strange, thought-provoking chat with a man in Limuru at the weekend. He was definitely not middle-class, and as he dragged on his cigarette, he opined: "We look to Zimbabwe and see what happened there." It might seem an exaggerated comparison, and indeed the histories and current circumstances are so different, but if a Kenyan is looking to Zimbabwe as a vision of a possible, albeit very pessimistic future, it is very depressing.
Fear seems to be gripping a large segment of the Kenyan population -- the flipside of the impunity that appears to have a stranglehold on the security forces and the political class. This article from the Daily Nation this week makes chilling reading -- it investigates alleged torture and executions by the army in Mount Elgon -- claims the military deny -- and the retribution that still awaits those who dare to speak out about the events a year ago. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/543462/-/u33lps/-/And now in Samburu, an operation is underway against cattle rustlers that appears marked with the same callous abuse of power by those with guns. http://www.eastandard.net/InsidePage.php?id=1144008415&cid=4&ttl=Leaders%20condemn%20Samburu%20security%20operation
Kofi Annan said today he is sure the Kenyan Grand Coalition, which was born out of the post-election violence of 2007/8 -- will survive but notes that it must reform. Reform is the word on everyone's lips -- but talk is cheap and increasingly discounted in Kenya.

TAKING TEA IN LIMURU

On Sunday -- one of those beautiful, blue-skied days that seem to make the birds sing louder and the air feel fresher -- we headed to Kiambethu Tea Farm in Limuru for lunch and a little learning with some friends. It was a smooth drive, just a short hop up a mercifully free Waiyaki Way, marred only by some of our convoy being stopped by the police over out-of-date driving papers. Once off the main road past the Bata sign, the emerald expanses of the tea plantations stretched up hills and curved around the road, looking like particularly inviting soft blankets but really made up of knee-high bushes planted almost on top of each other. The air was rich with the smell of the tea plants and the more mature aromas coming from the tea-producing factory nearby. People in their Sunday best traipsed along the road on the way home from church: children in elaborate frilly dresses and pretty hats, women in smart ensembles, men in fresh shirts and even jackets despite the broiling heat. Kiambethu is owned by third-generation white Kenyans and is reached by rattling up a loose-stone road before turning into a tree-covered drive and coming to a halt in front of a low house with a shady verandah, Colobus monkeys on the roof and a rich lawn that just demanded to be stretched out on.
After a cup of tea (of course!), owner Marcus Mitchell took the adults into a shady, lived-in sitting-room of faded sofas and flower etchings to talk about the tea-planting process, while the children headed for that delightful lawn and its maze of flowerbeds. A cheeky Colobus monkey hung upside-down from the roof to snatch bananas from the hands of children held aloft by the guide. Our youngest was game to try, and delighted when the hairy hand of the monkey touched her, as her older sister looked on half-enviously, half-frightened. The monkey scoffed the banana and then threw the skin back down -- something our girls found deliciously naughty. The children rampaged around the lawn, darting in-and-out of the flowerbeds and running shrieking from the very docile dogs. Then it was time for a walk among the few acres of indigenous forest left on the farm, past some well-fed, fat cows that one visitor commented looked like they had come out of an ad for a dairy product. In a land of rhinos and big cats, they nonetheless entranced the children. Other favourite sights included a chameleon and a brilliant green grasshopper. Our almost-toothless guide filled us in on the different trees and their importance to the Kikuyu, stressing that this was why they had to keep locals out. Lunch was eaten in the shade of the trees on the lawn -- like a big, well-organised family picnic. We helped ourselves to a fabulous buffet of salads, meat, cheesecake, home-made butter and soft, soft bread before lazing with more tea on the canvas chairs set out nearby. A great day out, and really close to Nairobi if you take the road to Runda past Village Market and head out that way. Best to book in advance.

WHAT NEXT?

After yesterday's protests by members of the Mungiki sect, news this morning that two human rights activists had been shot dead on a central Nairobi street. http://af.reuters.com/article/kenyaNews/idAFL636946220090306
Gunned down in their car just hours after the government had said their organisation -- the Oscar Foundation -- was a front for the Mungiki, a deadly criminal gang with a record of beheading those who defy it. Another student was shot dead when the police went to retrieve the body of one of the activists. http://www.kenyanpundit.com/. Three police officers were arrested.
Whoever is to blame -- whether it is renegade police officers, officially banned death squads, private bodyguards or as some say members of the Mungiki sect http://sukumakenya.blogspot.com/2009/03/rip-oscar-kamau-kingara-and-john-paul.html --the killings deal another blow to Kenya's increasingly paralysed and tainted government and its allies in the security services.
It's hard to know when a country is on the brink of a crisis. From years in West Africa, I've learnt that trouble usually comes when you are least expecting it. The storm clouds appear to be gathering over Kenya. It doesn't mean the rain is imminent, but the atmosphere is gloomy and there is a heaviness in the air that speaks of frustration, despondency and fear.
The U.N. special rapporteur Philip Alston, whose report on extra-judicial killings in Kenya was released last week and who met the two murdered activists when he visited Kenya -- has called for a foreign investigation by the likes of Scotland Yard or the South African police -- that's a pretty clear vote of no confidence in the Kenyan authorities on all levels.
Prime Minister Raila Odinga has said: "I fear we are flirting with lawlessness in the name of keeping law and order. In the process, we are hurtling towards failure as a state."
It's a damning statement from one of the leaders of east Africa's strongest economy. The question is how far has the country to go?

Mungiki

I learnt a lot about Kenya's Mungiki sect today. It started with a text message as I was coming home from dropping my eldest off at school: the playgroup for my youngest was cancelled because of Mungiki protests on the roads, and fears that mothers and children in SUVs might be caught up in them. My little one was most disappointed -- and explanations about the Mungiki -- which apparently means gang in Kikuyu -- and extrajudicial killings were just not going to cut it with a frustrated two-year-old. So I took her to Village Market -- still seeing no trouble on the roads. During the day, I learnt a little more about the Mungiki who seem to have a stranglehold on life in some of Nairobi's poorer districts and in towns in the Rift Valley and Central Provinces.

Today's protests were organised by the Mungiki to call for the implementation of a report by a special U.N. rapporteur, Philip Alston, on extrajudicial killings by the police. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jV9xNnrl729T0lEmOyfGN6bcQQIQ
Human rights groups and family members say many of the hundreds of people who have disappeared or been executed by alleged police death squads were suspected of being members of the Mungiki, and the political wing of the Mungiki has come out in the support of Alston's report. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/535856/-/u2ijkv/-/

The Mungiki are mostly young men -- some sporting dreadlocks -- who run protection rackets, mainly targetting drivers of the ubiquitous and crazily-driven matatus or minibuses. They demand a cut from the drivers, but also apparently run rackets in construction and other businesses. They draw their beliefs from traditional Kikuyu rites and are pretty fanatical. In some districts, I was told, they ban women from wearing trousers and have their ears to the ground on what goes on inside people's houses. They are violent, deadly, allegedly beheading some young men who refused to join their ranks. They are abstemious, shunning alcohol and drugs. You know who they are, but they don't always look dangerous -- they speak in low tongues, gather in groups but you know that if you cross them, "you will get it."
Clearly, Alston's report on extrajudicial killings has touched a raw nerve in Kenya -- some say he is just revealing what every Kenyan knows ie that the police act with impunity and that the judicial system is toothless. But others argue that faced with the threat from the Mungiki, the police have no choice but to shoot-to-kill. And critics like Alston, they argue, are at best misguided and at worst simplistically interpreting events of which they have no real knowledge.
The anger felt by residents of the neighbourhoods ruled by the Mungiki is clear: today two suspected gang members were lynched in Thika. http://www.eastandard.net/InsidePage.php?id=1144008118&cid=418

Today's protests mainly disrupted life for those people using matatus to get to and from work -- those who can least afford a day's lost pay.
But, like much else in Kenya these days, the Mungiki story is not just a tale of idle-boys-gone-bad. There is a political angle. Some say politicians have been more than ready to use the Mungiki during campaigning to add a little muscle to their message. It is difficult to put a genie of political patronage back into the box. The government said on Thursday that Alston had helped to spark the protests, basically by giving the Mungiki legitimacy. http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE5240KZ20090305

LOST YEARS?

My eldest daughter turns five at the end of March. It's a very big deal -- she is making plans, inviting every face painter she meets, and taking notes at the parties she has been to here in Nairobi. Birthday parties in London were extravagant affairs -- but they didn't have fire-eaters as the party we went to last weekend did! So the bar has been set quite high.
In 2012, she will be eight -- it seems such a long way away. She will have lost teeth, grown new ones, she'll be reading, tying her own laces, sleeping alone in her bed (hopefully!), she'll have learnt to swim without armbands, she'll be past the Backyardigans and onto Hannah Montana and High School Musical (or whatever the 2012 equivalent will be), she'll be casting a much more critical eye on my clothes, she'll be in a new school, she'll have discovered the joy of maths, she may even be living in a different country.
I started thinking about all these changes because I was mulling how often politicians here refer to 2012 -- it seems to be dictating every move, every decision, every pollitical play -- already. I know this is not unique to Kenya: politicians do focus on getting re-elected ridiculously soon after the final votes from their victorious election have been counted. But this over-riding obsession looks likely to condemn Kenya to three years of stagnation at best, with a possible explosion of violence at the end of those lost years.
Just a few examples:In an interview in the Sunday Nation, Agriculture Minister William Ruto said Justice Minister Martha Karua had approached him wanting to form a political alliance. She denies this, and has reportedly already said she plans to stand in 2012. Last week, the Nation also ran a story saying that parliamentarians in the Rift Valley and Central Provinces wanted to forge an alliance between Ruto of the ODM and Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta of President Mwai Kibaki's PNU party to win the election -- bringing together the votes of Ruto's Kalenjin supporters and Kenyatta's Kikuyu backers.
Even abroad, everyone is looking to 2012 http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=973&catID=21
It's a worrying thought - poignant even -- when you look at today's Nation which has a front-page photo of Mark Nyauma Maugo who was the best candidate in last year's Form Four examinations. In 2012, Mark and the cheering students surrounding him in the picture will be in their 20s, looking for jobs and a future. And what will happen then?
Kofi Annan recently articulated what needed to be done: "The root causes of last year's crisis need to be comprehensively addressed if the country is to avoid a repeat of the violence. These include constitutional and institutional reforms, land reform, and reducing the huge gap between the haves and the have-nots. Other priorities are creating more jobs for youth, equal access to opportunities, promoting ethnic harmony, ending the culture of impunity, and promoting transparency and accountability," he said.
It's a long list -- three years might even be too short, but what hope if those three years are to be sacrificed on the altar of the basest kind of political ambition.
**************************************************************
On another story -- the assassinations of the army chief and president in Guinea-Bissau this week http://af.reuters.com/article/guineaBissauNews/idAFL227561220090302 I heard a few newscasters referring to this as a return to the bad old days in Africa. Surely, Guinea-Bissau is an example of a pernicious new risk in Africa - the poisonous influence of drug money on fragile economies and shaky political structures. Sure, Guinea-Bissau has had coups a-plenty in the past -- and the two dead men shared a decades-old history of animosity -- but the flood of narco-dollars pouring into this poor country only herald more abuse of power, more instability and more corruption to fuel popular discontent. Far from being a return to the bad old days, this may be a warning shot across the world's bows about the dawning of bad new days in West Africa. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/daniel-howden-the-new-cocaine-capital-of-africa-1635903.html