Remediation
Misery, they say, loves company, which is why I can’t help but turn towards Kenya to make better sense of what is happening here in Pakistan. On December 27, 2007, while we were frantically flipping between television channels, reluctant to accept that Benazir Bhutto had in fact been assassinated, Kenyans were informed that Mwai Kibaki had been re-elected as president in what seems to be a shamefacedly rigged election. Since that fateful date, swathes of Sindh have erupted into flame, stocks have plummeted, banks have burnt, Pakistan Railways has been derailed, and senseless arson and violence have claimed the vehicles, and worse, lives of many. Meanwhile, according to the Kenyan Red Cross, over 300 Kenyans have been killed in post-election turmoil; while up to 100,000 have been displaced. The image of a smouldering church in which 50 people fleeing election violence — most of whom were children — were burnt alive is seared in the minds of horrified onlookers across the world. Much like Sindh, western Kenya remained ablaze for days.
Sadly, the similarities between Pakistan and Kenya do not end there. In both cases, the fate of a leader has disappointed a nation. Bhutto’s passing has left Pakistan in a frenzy, with little understanding of how to decipher her death or stumble towards a democratic set-up. Kenyans, on the other hand, have had to see Kibaki ’steal’ — to use the words of his opponent Raila Odinga — the election by resorting to rigging. His actions have rankled with Kenyans who remember that when he first came to power in December 2002, he was hailed as a reformer who promised clean governance in the wake of Daniel arap Moi’s corruption-ridden stretch in office. Of course, the disappointment of Pakistanis and Kenyans stem from vastly different causes, but the loss of hope, the sense of despair, and the frustration that national politics refuse to evolve for the better are bound to feel similar.
Interestingly, the violence in both countries has been tinged by ethnic tension. It is telling that while addressing the nation after Bhutto’s soyem, her husband Asif Ali Zardari felt the need to remind Sindhis mourning her death that Punjabi supporters of the PPP – many of whom were trusted bodyguards, handpicked by Zardari himself — had died alongside the Mohtarma. His words urging Sindhis not to blame Punjabis for the tragedy that had occurred on their soil no doubt helped defuse a looming ethnic flare-up. In Kenya, too, election violence has ignited longstanding ethnic rivalries between the Kikuyu and Luo tribes, and many fear that the pandemonium sparked by polling will lead to civil war. The controversial Mr. Kibaki hails from the Kikuyu tribe, which counts for 22 percent of the Kenyan population and controls much of the country’s retail sector and enjoys political power. Odinga, meanwhile, is a Luo who campaigned for change, echoing the desires of his tribesmen who were left behind during Kenya’s economic boom. Although the Kikuyu and Luo have lived together peacefully, they have now divided along electoral and ethnic lines, and there is a fear that an endless cycle of vengeance will be put in place as a result of this election-related violence. International observers are also worried that the ethnically mixed Kenyan army will not provide an adequate antidote to the violent protesters, and may disintegrate along ethnic lines as well.
Corruption, too, taints the worsening situation in both Pakistan and Kenya. Closer to home, the controversy around Bhutto’s cause of death, the conspiracy theories around the identity of her assassins, and the mangled official investigation into the incident have enraged PPP supporters and others who believe that access to justice should not be such an impossibility. The postponement of the elections and Musharraf’s decision to deploy the army to monitor polling has raised further concerns about how free or fair the February 18 election will be. In Kenya, corruption wears a different mask, as supporters of Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement are appalled at the explicit manner in which Kibaki rigged elections in his favour. The head of the Kenyan electoral commission admitted that he was forced into prematurely announcing election results, declaring Kibaki the winner, by the president’s allies. In parallel parliamentary elections, which observers regard as credible, Odinga’s party defeated Kibaki’s Party of National Unity, ejecting more than half of their cabinet from their seats. Still, in terms of public polling, Odinga’s clear lead began to dwindle when results filtered in from Kibaki’s home province. In other words, Kibaki clearly doctored the outcome of an election that independent observers have declared did not meet international standards.
The recent spates of violence in both Pakistan and Kenya have similarly snared the attention of the global community, owing to the respective geopolitical importance of both countries. Pakistan, with its heightened role in the ‘war on terror’, its nuclear stores, its access to the energy reserves of Central Asia, and its growing Taliban menace, is a country that no one in the West wants to see further destabilized. For its part, Kenya has been the model of stability in an otherwise problematic continent, and no one wants it to become the next African failure. After all, the country is a popular tourist destination, the regional headquarters of the United Nations, a centre of African trade as well as an expanding aid industry, and another important ally in the US-led ‘war on terror’.
Perhaps because of their geopolitical importance, Pakistan and Kenya have found the West to be complicit in the crises currently unfolding in both countries. Much has already been written about the involvement of the US in engineering Bhutto’s return; the insistence on brokering a power-sharing agreement between Musharraf and Bhutto to create a democratic façade, and the inability to conceive of a Plan B. Similarly, the international powers that be had ample warning of Kenya’s impending breakdown. Writing in The Financial Times, Michael Holman explains that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund did not step in to address charges of corruption against Kibaki when they had the chance. In February 2005, Kenya’s anti-corruption chief opted for self-exile in Britain, where he disclosed the extent to which Kibaki’s regime was corrupt, offering up taped conversations with cabinet ministers as evidence of the misuse of donor funds.
It is clear in the cases of both Pakistan and Kenya that western powers continued to prop up sham governments because they couldn’t brave the pitfalls of genuine systemic change. They could not contemplate severing important alliances in the ongoing ‘war on terror’, nor were they willing to wait out the countries’ gradual shifts towards true democracy. While remaining hopeful for the chances of its favourite regimes, the international community stalled the democratic process in both Pakistan and Kenya.
So what can be learnt from the uncanny similarities that have emerged in the wake of election-related violence in Pakistan and Kenya? Are we to hopelessly conclude that formerly colonized nations — entrenched in the politics of ethnicity and tribalism and susceptible to rampant corruption — are not suited to democracy? In both countries, most of the violence and destruction of the past week has been perpetrated by those who have nothing to lose; in other words, those who are disenfranchised, unemployed, and uneducated. In Pakistan, the pattern of looting and mayhem had little to do with party politics and the grief of Bhutto’s supporters.
Similarly, in Kenya, significant numbers from among the 55 percent of Kenyans who live below the poverty line took the streets, looting, torching, and expressing the resentment of the have-nots against the haves. Once again, then, we find that the only path to stability and democracy will be the one least trodden, the one that prioritises primary education, vocational training, employment, and a shot at social mobility over political wrangling, corruption, and international intervention.
