Kenya's woes have warnings for South Africa

Kenyans have been frightened by the extent and scale of post-election violence and displacement, but what has shocked them most is how fast the economy has faltered.

Tourists exited in droves when violence broke out after Kibaki assumed power. On an Airbus to Nairobi from Johannesburg that can hold 300, there were 30 passengers; all but five were Kenyan residents. Airlines serving Nairobi are at present running at a loss.

For this tourism-reliant economy, December and January should be peak earning times when northerners escape frigid winters and South Africans and Australians flock to the beaches of Malindi and Mombasa and the game-viewing havens of the Masai Mara, or scale Mount Kenya or Kilimanjaro (which most access from Tanzania).

Instead hotels are empty and staff hover anxiously in empty restaurants fearing job losses if tourists don’t return. “You’re welcome,” the Kenyan greeting to every visitor and in response to every thank-you, is said with greater urgency and poignancy.

Patrick Koinange, a Nairobi taxi driver and a Kikuyu (it has become necessary in Kenya to mention ethnic affiliations in a conflict that is heavily tribal) complains bitterly that he has had no work since Christmas Eve. “When the violence came people were too frightened to leave their homes. I returned to work on the 7th and since then have had two fares. People are starting to starve; they have not been able to work.” And many food stores are still closed, or have been looted.

His cousin, in the town of Eldoret, “is a young man who was doing well; he had four minibus taxis and a clothing store, but the rioters” — which sounds like “lioter” in his Mount Kenya accent where ls sound like Rs — “came and destroyed his shop. They looted clothes worth five million Kenyan shillings; they burnt two of his taxis. Now he is destroyed. Insurance won’t pay for this; it is riot damage.”

Multiparty democracy, he has decided, “is a bad thing; it causes trouble. Under [former president Daniel arap] Moi the economy was going down but it was peaceful. Kenyans are peaceful people. This situation is very bad.”

The centre of Nairobi and wealthy areas such as Muthaiga where the Kikuyu live (who form 20% of the population and are the same tribe as President Mwai Kibaki) have remained quiet because of a strong police presence. The large, sprawling slum of Kibera, reputedly the largest slum in East Africa and where a good deal of violence occurred, is still a no-go area. Even ambulances are timid about entering it.

Médecins sans Frontières, which closed the slum’s primary clinic when violence peaked, reopened the clinic on Wednesday this week but allows no Kikuyu staff in. Their lives would be in grave danger. In Kibare, people have scant services; a survey by Dr Elizabeth Masuku last year showed that HIV is high in men living in Kibare, in part because they have low access to clean water to wash — on average twice every 10 days — and dirt and the virus accumulates under foreskins, making HIV infection more likely.

There is not a supermarket still standing in the slum; all have been torched or looted. Maize-grinding centres found in every Kenyan town have been destroyed and hunger is now a significant issue. National roads are too dangerous to drive along without military escorts. Some areas of Nairobi are still no-go zones even for ambulances.

A 22-year-old man who saw his mother and two sisters raped and murdered in front of him before their house was torched in Kibare last week has the bad breath of a person who has not eaten for days. He speaks in a low monotone to a voluntary counsellor. His life has ended, he says; he wants to die.

Anger and fear fuel each other. Kibaki, a Kikuyu, came in promising change in 2002 and hasn’t delivered. In good part, Kenyan anger is that of people oft betrayed. More than once, former president Daniel arap Moi resisted leaving office. Kibaki (72), who came in on promises of reformation and change, is now playing the same game. His announcement on December 27 that he had been re-elected, which European Union election observers and significant members of the Kikuyu-dominated Electoral Commission contest, sparked the violence.

On Wednesday, people in a Nairobi restaurant spontaneously applauded when television broadcast a demand from the head of the Kenyan Law Society that Kibaki step down and new elections be called.

This is the same anger that saw South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki heckled at Polokwane. But what has made it more deadly is the cleaving along ethnic lines of the present situation in Kenya. It is a tribalism that has been carefully nurtured in recent years by politicians.

The leadership of the South African government and the African National Congress would be wise to take careful heed of the Kenyan situation. Mbeki’s refusal to comment on it — or to send aid — should be viewed with more than a little apprehension.

The words of Nelson Mandela at the 50th anniversary gathering of the United Nations on October 23 1995 have been ignored by African leaders, and now need to be heeded. He said: “What challenges us, who define ourselves as states-persons, is the clarion call to dare to think that what we are about is people — the proverbial man and woman in the street. These, the poor, the hungry, the victims of petty tyrants, the objectives of policy, demand change.”

African leaders have failed to take action against Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. There is scant pressure against Kibaki because the precedent of a continent speaking out against those who ignore democracy and rig elections could turn against them if they too decide to ignore the will of their people.

Over 55 years of African independence, the leaders who said they were bringing liberation have mostly enslaved their people. Events at Polokwane and Kenya, although disturbing, are harbingers of hope. Africans are tired of the lying games of their leaders. They want real democracy; they want palpable change not just in the creation of an ultra-rich black elite, but also in the extension of basic human rights to all — clean water, decent education, leaders who get fired and jailed if they are corrupt, effective healthcare.

These are not huge demands, but to fulfil them will create a revolution in African lives and ultimately in the prosperity of the continent — which over the past 20 years has slid backward into deeper poverty, according to the World Bank. Change also demands ethical leaders, a rare trait in African governance.

Little has changed since Robert Rotberg, director of the Programme on Interstate Conflict at Harvard University’s JF Kennedy School of Government, wrote in 2000: “If sub-Saharan Africa is ‘in a mess’, to quote Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s founding president, it is a mess made by its leaders. Where visionary leadership lifted Asia out of poverty since the 1960s, too many African heads of state presided over massive declines in African standards of living while carefully enriching themselves and their cronies.

“Some of Africa’s current and recent leaders are capable, honest and effective. But kleptocratic, patrimonial leaders — like President Robert Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe — give Africa a bad name, plunge its peoples into poverty and despair, incite civil wars and bitter ethnic conflict. They are largely responsible for declining GDP levels, food scarcities, rising infant-mortality, soaring budget deficits, human rights abuses, breaches of the rule of law and prolonged serfdom for millions — even in Africa’s nominal democracies.

“These authoritarians, many of whom win or manipulate elections and claim a democratic facade, have proved hard to control and harder to oust … The elected autocrats, sometimes termed illiberal or quasi-democrats, have built-in advantages that are hard for even popular opposition movements to overcome: incumbency; state financing for official political parties; state control of television, radio and newspapers; friendly security forces; crackdowns on opposition rallies; control over the voter rolls; and such tricks as gerrymandering, stuffing ballot boxes and fiddling with the election count. Most of all, ruling parties know how to intimidate voters, particularly semiliterate rural voters acquainted with only one ruling party since independence.”

Eight years after he wrote those words, little has changed. Dan Connell and Frank Smyth wrote in Foreign Affairs, March 1998, of African leaders who promise change: “Once entrenched, each preached some form of nationalism, only to evolve cynical regimes which did little for their own people while shamelessly enriching their leaders’ inner circles.” We’ve experienced this in South Africa. Our challenge is not to allow the deterioration Kenya is experiencing and of which Rotberg warns.

In the meantime, you can help. There are desperate shortages of food, medical supplies, blankets, sanitary towels, clothes, cooking utensils … please donate either to the fantastic Nairobi Women’s Hospital (which is also treating many men and boys who have been raped or abused) — [email protected] — or www.urgentactionfund.org (specify that this is for Kenya relief).

Charlene Smith is in Nairobi