Saturday, 22 December 2007

Kenya's presidential race signals democratic growth Jeffrey Gettleman Friday, December 21, 2007 c/o IHT

Kenya's presidential race signals democratic growth
By Jeffrey Gettleman

Friday, December 21, 2007
SUSWA, Kenya: At the sound of the chopper blades, a thousand Maasai tribesmen crane their necks upward.

It is as if their savior is dropping down from the sky.

"Railaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" they yell.

The tribesmen turn into a stampede, whooping and hollering and poking their gnarled wooden clubs in the air. An enormous cloud of dust swallows the chopper as it lands. And then out comes Raila Odinga, one of Kenya's most flamboyant politicians, a man who when he is not buzzing over the savannah in a helicopter is getting chauffeured around in a red Hummer, who favors purple suits, whose son's name is Fidel Castro and who may very well become Kenya's next president.

The election is Thursday, and for the past several months most polls have predicted that Odinga, 62, will unseat the current president, Mwai Kibaki, though some recent surveys show the president catching up, with the race now too close to call.

Kibaki, 76, is vintage old guard. He is from Kenya's dominant tribe, the Kikuyu; he has been a member of Parliament ever since Kenya's independence in 1963; and he is a reliable friend of big business and the United States (his campaign ads are even in red, white and blue.)

Odinga seems different. For starters, he is Luo, one of the country's largest tribes, but one that many Kenyans feel has never gotten its fair due. And despite Kenya having one of the most mature democracies in Africa, many people here still vote strictly along tribal lines.

Kenya's 37 million people are split among some 40 distinct ethnic groups. And unlike many politicians - especially Kikuyu ones - who would rather not acknowledge tribal frictions, Odinga is confronting them head on and has made inclusion and an end to discrimination the cornerstones of his campaign.

"Ethnicity is the disease of the elite," he said, adding that throughout Kenya's history, money, land and opportunity have been sprinkled around unequally, based on tribe.

But it is not as though Odinga is working class. His father was one of Kenya's first limousine liberals, a businessman and former vice president who despite his vast wealth and land holdings espoused socialist values. The Odingas were clearly fond of the East Bloc, and when it came time for college, young Raila was sent to East Germany, where he received a degree in mechanical engineering.

"You know, in the '60s, those days of imperialism, when you had the Americans in Vietnam, in Cambodia, and colonialism was there, there was apartheid in South Africa, it was very fashionable to be leftist!" he said with a laugh.

He even played left wing in soccer.

Odinga returned to Kenya to teach at the University of Nairobi and run the family's gas cylinder business. He also became an opposition leader, when it was incredibly dangerous to do so. In 1982, he was accused of plotting a coup against then-president Daniel arap Moi and spent eight years in jail, most of it in solitary confinement. He was beaten and tortured.

Since then, his Marxist politics have mellowed, though he still talks a big proletarian game. He says his priorities are to focus on poverty, unemployment and corruption and grant the regions outside Nairobi, the capital, more autonomy.

"I'm a social democrat," he said. "I would like to see a more democratic and open society in which the private sector plays a major role but in which we address the issue of equity."

The big question is, if he wins how much will Kenya change? The economy has been humming along, with a growth rate of about 7 percent and a billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry. And there is peace, which is nothing to sneeze at in a neighborhood that includes war-wracked Somalia, Sudan, and Congo.

Macharia Gaitho, a managing editor at The Daily Nation, Kenya's biggest newspaper, does not think that Odinga will disrupt that stability.

"I see a Jekyll and Hyde character," Gaitho said. "On one level he can be very radical, he can react on emotions, he can set himself up as a populist leader who responds to the masses. But on the other level he is very pragmatic. He is a business man, with ties across all ethnic lines."

But some voters, especially Kikuyus, do not trust him. They say that Odinga profits from tribalism as much as he rails against it.

"Even if Kibaki could have improved this economy by 80 percent, believe you me, the people in Raila's tribe, they would not vote for him, because they are kinsmen," said Andrew Macharia, a City Council candidate who is supporting Kibaki. "It's a sorry state that our politics are tribal-based."

The president's inner circle has accused Odinga of making promises he cannot keep. Amos Kimunya, the finance minister, dismissed Odinga's economic plans as "domonomics," a play on the Swahili word for mouth and meaning something like "talk economics." Odinga's proposals "will cause debt to balloon, interest rates and inflation to rise," Kimunya wrote in a recent opinion piece.

The neck-and-neck race between Odinga and Kibaki, which could result in a run-off, seems to be evidence of how far Kenya's democracy has come from just a decade ago, when it was still under the grip of Moi, who has been widely criticized as a dictator and who is now campaigning for Kibaki.

Today there is a free press, 2,548 candidates running for Parliament and genuine issues separating the leading parties, like strong central government versus federalism. Electoral politics here are not saddled by the deep cynicism that dogs Nigeria, Africa's most populous democracy, or the one-party domination of South African politics.

Odinga, who has been a member of Parliament for the past 15 years, has taken full advantage of Kenya's open system and used his flair for appealing to the masses to reel in millions of Kenyans who feel marginalized by the Kikuyu elite. He has also charmed many Muslims upset at the Kibaki government's various crackdowns in Muslim areas as part of its counterterrorism campaign.

"The best way to explain this is not who is popular but who is so unpopular," said Chweya Ludeki, a political science professor at the University of Nairobi. "Raila's harvesting from Kibaki's unpopularity and the perception that the president has favored his ethnic group."

Though the cabinet includes members of many tribes, the ministries that matter - like defense, justice, finance and internal security - are all run by Kikuyus. The government's response has been that it hires the most qualified people.

Many of Odinga's supporters are worried that these politicians might try to steal the election. Already the government's own human rights commission accused Kibaki's party of using public resources, like government planes and vehicles, for campaign events.

There have also been some pretty nasty cheap shots. Even Odinga's foreskin was thrown into the fray. Circumcision is a rite of passage in many tribes, including the Kikuyu but not the Luo. If a man is not circumcised, the whisper campaign goes, then he is not a real man.

Many voters, though, are not falling for this. Odinga draws thousands of fans everyday, like the recent rally in Suswa, a small town between Nairobi and Narok.

"Roads! Electricity! Water!" Odinga belted out.

The crowd roared. It was a jostling mass of orange: orange hats, orange T-shirts, orange shopping bags, even orange shukas, the signature cloaks Maasai herders wear.

Orange is the official color of Odinga's party, the Orange Democratic Movement, and Nalanju Punyua, a woman selling sodas, said Odinga looked fabulous in orange.

"Raila's absolutely beautiful," she said. "He's a very strong man. He could walk all the way from here to Narok."

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