Why democracy is crippled in Kenya
Can democracy ever work in Africa? That is the depressing question posed by the violent aftermath of Kenya's election. Tribal violence is spreading and if you doubt how serious the situation is becoming, read Adrian Blomfield's extraordinary eyewitness report in today's Telegraph.
Rival groups clash in the Mathare slum, Nairobi
Two factors have crippled democracy in Kenya:
1) No sitting president has ever lost an election and stepped down peacefully. For the moment, it seems clear that Mwai Kibaki is determined to stay in office despite mountains of evidence that he lost the election and the official result was faked.
2) Votes are cast along tribal lines. Hardly anyone votes according to what they believe. Policies, ideology, the performance of the president none of this matters. Instead, people's votes are determined by what they are. Of course there are exceptions to this rule. But on the whole, Kikuyus (about 20 percent of the population) vote for Kibaki because he is one of their own. Raila Odinga, the opposition candidate, probably won the election because he managed to build a coalition with all the other tribes, including his own Luo people.
So elections in Kenya are just a disguised census, telling you the tribal balance of the population. And if the sitting president loses, he just announces fake results and stays in power anyway. With some exceptions, this is true across Africa. Perhaps the democratic experiment is not worth the bother.
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