Supporters rally just before Kenya’s opposition leader, Raila Odinga, held a swearing in ceremony for himself on Jan. 30. Odinga claims the election was stolen from him and contends he is the rightful president.
Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
It has been depressing to watch as Kenya’s presidential election saga has gone from fraud to hope to sham, and now to dangerous brinkmanship. It’s hard to see what the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, hopes to achieve with his faux inauguration as the “people’s president,” or what President Uhuru Kenyatta plans to do next now that he has outlawed Mr. Odinga’s National Resistance Movement. The space for a democratic resolution of the crisis has grown mighty thin, but the alternative could be disastrous.
The spiral began with a presidential election in August, which President Kenyatta seemed to win handily. Mr. Odinga challenged the vote, and to general surprise the seven-judge Supreme Court agreed and ordered another election within 60 days.
It was not to be. The ruling party passed amendments to the election law that made it all but impossible to challenge future results. Then the same Supreme Court, asked this time to postpone the do-over vote, suddenly couldn’t round up more than two judges, short of a quorum. Mr. Odinga boycotted the vote and threatened to hold a swearing-in ceremony as “peoples’ president”; Mr. Kenyatta threatened to block it.
The “inauguration,” in effect a giant opposition rally, finally did take place in Nairobi on Tuesday. But the government declared the National Resistance Movement, the name the opposition adopted after the boycotted second election, a criminal group.
What intensifies the feud is the fact that elections in Kenya are a fierce struggle for power and spoils between parties often organized along ethnic lines. Mr. Kenyatta is Kikuyu, and his deputy, William Ruto, is Kalenjin; the two groups have held the presidency since independence in 1963. Mr. Odinga is Luo; when he was seemingly robbed of a victory in 2007, two months of lethal violence erupted, ending with the creation of a coalition government.
That could happen again, but both sides need to step back before it’s too late. Business and civil society leaders and international diplomats must use whatever leverage they have to press both sides for restraint and some sign of a willingness to talk and compromise.
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