Kenya goes to the polls amid violence
ON TUESDAY, Kenyans will cast their ballots for about 1 880 positions, including president and vice-president. Yet over the past year, the electoral process has been marred by violence perpetrated by politicians, party agents, protesters and security forces.
Will this affect voters’ decisions to turn up at the polls?
Surprisingly, violence before an election doesn’t drive down the vote overall.
As one of us (Stephanie Burchard) found, election violence occurs in roughly 50 to 60% of sub-saharan Africa’s elections. Most incidents tend to be violent harassment and intimidation of voters and candidates, although about 20 to 30% of elections experience politically motivated assassinations.
Some violence is strategic – deliberately organised to affect the outcome of the election – whereas other violence is incidental, breaking out as result of protests that devolve into riots. Incumbent parties and politicians usually instigate strategic election violence, but opposition parties also mobilise election violence.
When observers talk about election violence in sub-saharan Africa, they’re almost always discussing violence that occurs before elections. In fact, pre-election violence makes up roughly 90 to 95% of violence associated with elections.
Fortunately, post-election violence is rare; however, when it does occur, as in Kenya in 2007, it tends to be much more severe, resulting in hundreds or thousands of fatalities.
Our conclusion in a recent article was that election violence doesn’t affect overall voter turnout in Africa. It’s a view that contradicts the thinking of leading development institutions such as USAID and the UN Development Programme, and of some political scientists, who have presumed that such violence generally suppresses voting.
At first glance, our finding doesn’t make sense. Coercion and intimidation should scare voters away from elections that they fear will turn violent. After analysing almost 300 elections in sub-saharan Africa from 1990 to 2014, however, we find there’s really no systemic difference in turnout between elections where campaigning was peaceful and elections where violence took place.
There are three primary reasons that politicians use violence during a campaign: suppression, mobilisation and displacement. They might be using violence to dissuade citizens from voting for a specific party or candidate, to compel them to vote for a specific party or candidate, or to displace them so they do not vote at all.
Furthermore, if used at the same time, these violent strategies can effectively cancel one another out in the aggregate.
By understanding that politicians have multiple motivations for violence, observers are better positioned to develop programs and interventions to mitigate and prevent these attacks.
Since Kenya became a democracy, pre-election violence served all three of these purposes, as we highlight in the elections of 1992, 1997, and 2007.
In 1992, the Daniel arap Moi regime orchestrated clashes between Kalenjin and non-kalenjin ethnic groups; more than 1 500 people died and about 300 000 were displaced. As a result, far more Kalenjin – who generally supported arap Moi’s government – went to the polls, while tens of thousands of opposition voters could not vote.
In 1997, local politicians and armed supporters of the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) in Coast Province attacked and drove out ethnic Kikuyu, Kamba, Luo and Luhya, seen as anti-kanu. Human Rights Watch documented that the armed groups mobilised support for KANU by turning local grievances into anger against these perceived “outsider” ethnic groups and promising land, property and jobs to those who helped chase them out.
The Waki Commission report after the 2007 election showed that supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga tried to force Rift Valley citizens to vote for him; others – very often Kikuyu – were forced to flee if they refused.
What’s been happening in the lead-up to Kenya’s election this weekend?
As the August 8 polls approach, a familiar pattern has emerged. During the May and June primaries, rival candidates and their supporters harassed, intimidated and assaulted each other.
In 19% of the 224 polling stations monitored by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, candidates and their supporters used violence to eliminate political opponents, prevent other candidates from running, disrupt voting and intimidate those considered outsiders.
In other reports, politicians in drought-stricken Laikipia in the Rift Valley encouraged herders to invade farms in exchange for money and the promise that they could keep the land in exchange for supporting the sponsoring politician.
According to our research, those responsible for administering the upcoming Kenyan elections can prevent more violence and intimidation prior to the election (and in future elections) in several ways. These are:
1. Secure the anonymity of the voting process.
2. Make it easier for displaced citizens to vote at the nearest polling centre.
3. Punish perpetrators.
Bekoe is an associate professor at the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies in Washington.
Burchard is a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia. – Washington Post