Kenya

Now affirmed by the Supreme Court, the Ruto administration will have campaign promises put to the test.

With a divided electoral commission and legal challenges in the works, Kenya’s presidential election is neither the disaster some feared, nor the unambiguous success hoped for by champions of democracy.

Kenya’s next president will have to win more than just votes to gain legitimacy.

Kenya's pivotal role as a regional powerbroker could be compromised by domestic distractions related to this year's presidential election.

Numerous countries will hold elections in 2022. Here are ten to watch. 

The judicial ruling which found the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) in Kenya unconstitutional could force Kenya's politicians to pay greater heed to the limits on power outlined in the country's 2010 constitution.

Surrounded by regional turmoil and managing complicated domestic politics, the pressure is rising on Kenya, a critically important economic and security partner to the United States, to help shape a future in which its citizens can thrive. It will take deft diplomacy and real leadership for Kenya to navigate through the months ahead, and Washington should look for ways to help it succeed. Kenya’s neighborhood is growing rougher by the day. Ethiopia’s multiple internal crises threaten its stability, and its border conflict with Sudan and ongoing tensions with both Sudan and Egypt over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam could lead to war. Somalia’s current electoral impasse threatens to unravel decades of work toward a viable political dispensation to help bring order and accountability to one of the world’s most troubled states; meanwhile it is embroiled in a maritime boundary dispute with Kenya that is as much a symptom as a cause of the countries’ fraying relations. South Sudan’s failures of governance [PDF] continue to fuel endemic instability, while Uganda’s recent deeply flawed elections cast serious doubt on the trajectory of the country going forward, as its intractable government seems to be on a collision course with the demands for change of its youthful population. Tanzania to the south is a comparative bastion of calm, but the terrorist organization operating in northern Mozambique has made incursions into Tanzanian territory, raising ominous fears about the future of the east African coast.  Domestically, Kenya is gearing up for elections in 2022. Historically elections have been flashpoints for political violence, and a great deal of government effort in recent years has been devoted to avoiding a repeat of the past. Whether it is sufficient to overcome the country’s toxic ethnic politics, or the elite interests that often fail to respond to the desires and frustrations of young Kenyans, remains to be seen, especially in light of the challenging social and economic headwinds that COVID-19 has brought to the country. For the United States, finding common ground with Kenya has never been more important. Kenya holds a seat on the UN Security Council for the next two years, and it should be a vital partner in addressing multiple peace and security crises as the Biden administration seeks to reinvigorate multilateralism and support for a rules-governed international order that can effectively tackle global challenges. But Kenya is certainly capable of going in the wrong direction. It took such a step earlier this week, demanding that UNHCR present a plan for closing the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps, home to hundreds of thousands of primarily Somali and South Sudanese refugees. For years the Kenyan government has been concerned about security threats emanating from refugee camps, but by positioning itself at odds with the international community over norms around the treatment of refugees and forced returns, the Kenyan government undermines confidence in its own commitment to just and effective global governance. Kenya has painful experience with very real security threats, but lasting peace can be won only by driving an agenda that addresses the broader regional context. Kenya’s voice on the world stage can be an important part of a more assertive Africa, but only if its leadership is prepared to conceive of its role in that larger context, and to take a more strategic and less tactical approach to foreign-policy decision making.

The economic impact of COVID-19 has exposed the underlying fragility of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Kenya, already the subject of scrutiny over corruption, pollution, and debt concerns. BRI fueled an ambitious infrastructure push in Kenya.

Nolan Quinn is a research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Africa Program. The revelation that a Kenyan member of al-Shabab was charged with planning a 9/11-style attack on the United States has served to underline the Somali terror group’s enduring presence in East Africa and the region’s continuing relevance to U.S. national security. Shabab has terrorized the northern reaches of the Swahili Coast, which runs from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique, for well over a decade. More recently, a brutal jihadi insurgency has emerged on the Swahili Coast’s southern tip. Ansar al-Sunna (ASWJ), known among other names as Swahili Sunna, ramped up its violent activities in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province in 2017 before spreading more recently into Tanzania. The risk of a further rise in jihadism along the Swahili Coast is serious—and growing. The Swahili Coast has long been recognized as having a rich, eclectic culture shaped by interactions with predominantly Arab traders. (Much of the coast once fell under the rule of the Sultan of Oman.) The region has been strongly influenced by Islam, in contrast to the Great Lakes region further west, which is predominantly Christian. Additionally, much of the mainland is dominated by Bantu ethnic groups, while many coastal residents maintain an identity distinct from their continental peers. As in much of Africa, arbitrary borders drawn during the period of European colonialism separate the region, lumping coastal and mainland residents together across several states. The separation of the Swahili Coast laid the foundations for a re-emergence of pre-independence feelings of marginalization. Many coastal residents, who chafe at government institutions and economic policies seen as favoring Christians and wabara (“people of the mainland”), have called for decentralization of power and even secession from their respective states. Separatist fervor—particularly strong in the Mombasa-Zanzibar corridor—has been stoked by groups such as the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC) and Uamsho (“awakening” in Kiswahili). While both have been defunct or dormant following crackdowns on their leadership, a purported effort to reinvigorate the MRC—already met with a spate of arrests by Kenyan police—illustrates that discontent is still very much present along the coast. In this context, the growing popularity of Salafist ideology in East Africa is worrying. The trend, facilitated by the historical exchange of people and ideas with other littoral states in Africa and the Middle East, has resulted in the displacement of the tolerant, Sufi-inspired Islam that has long been predominant on the Swahili Coast. Salafis’ strict textualist approach raises several objections to Sufism that have been used to motivate attacks by ASWJ in northern Mozambique [PDF] and al-Shabab in Somalia. Less violent—but still occasionally violent—Sufi-Salafi competition has also been on the rise in Tanzania. Several factors suggest that disgruntled wapwani (“people of the coast”), especially youth, are at increased risk of Salafi radicalization. To start, unemployment is widespread on the coast. Joblessness is concentrated among youth and the well-educated—the demographics that have most enthusiastically subscribed to Salafist teachings globally. In Cabo Delgado, ASWJ fighters have clashed with Sufi elders seen as heretical by the Salafi-jihadi group. Yet financial rewards [PDF], such as small loans to start a business or pay bride prices, also appear to be important recruitment incentives. While al-Shabab and ASWJ have gained international notoriety for their insurgent activities, allied groups focusing on youth recruitment in East Africa play a sinister role in enabling their success. Islamist groups such as the Muslim Youth Centre (MYC)—later renamed al-Hijra—in Kenya and the Ansaar Muslim Youth Center (AMYC) in Tanzania have both sent fighters to Somalia and offered refuge [PDF] to returning jihadis. And in Tanga—the coastal region of Tanzania where AMYC was founded and reports [PDF] of small-scale attacks by Islamists have occasionally surfaced—police have in the past uncovered Shabab-linked child indoctrination camps. Swahili’s function as a lingua franca in East Africa is also helping Islamist groups grow in the region. MYC leader Aboud Rogo Mohammed, a radical Kenyan imam who was sanctioned by the United Nations for his support of al-Shabab, targeted Swahili speakers with his repeated calls for the formation of a caliphate in East Africa. Tapes of Rogo preaching in Swahili allowed disaffected youth in Cabo Delgado—many of whom speak Swahili but have a weak or no understanding of Arabic—to access extremist viewpoints, accelerating their radicalization. The jihadis now take advantage of Cabo Delgado’s linguistic, cultural, and business links to coastal communities—in Tanzania in particular—to recruit and expand ASWJ’s operations. Meanwhile, al-Shabab and the Islamic State group, to which ASWJ has been formally aligned since June 2019, utilize Swahili in original and translated media publications. Many of the responses to such activities have been counterproductive. Between 2012 and 2014, Rogo and two of his successors were killed in three separate, extrajudicial shootings blamed on Kenyan police. The killings caused riots in Mombasa, and Rogo’s posthumous influence points to the futility of a “whack-a-mole” approach that tries to silence firebrands. Several mosques and homes in Mombasa were also controversially raided, with hundreds arrested. Yet according to the International Crisis Group (ICG), a shift in strategy since 2015 from heavy-handed policing to community outreach has successfully reduced jihadi recruitment along the Kenyan coast. Tanzania and Mozambique, however, appear to be repeating Kenyan mistakes. The overly militarized response to ASWJ has failed to quell a fast-intensifying insurgency. And in Zanzibar, where some researchers have argued electoral competition has forestalled Salafis’ embrace of jihadism—despite Uamsho’s evolution from religious charity to secessionist movement to nascent militant Islamist group—worsening repression and the ongoing detention of Uamsho leaders ensure the situation remains volatile. Even mainland Tanzania, seen as more pacific than Zanzibar, has seen a recent uptick [PDF] in terrorist violence; Tanzanian security forces, according to ICG, have responded with arbitrary arrests and forced disappearances of coastal Muslims. The threat of rising support for Islamist militancy in East Africa should not take away from efforts to address calls for secession: separatist movements can, of course, turn violent. However, in areas where separatism is rife, ham-fisted clampdowns on Muslim preachers and their followers risk strengthening radicals’ hand. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres—speaking in Nairobi—warned, the “final tipping point” to radicalism is often state-led violence and abuse of power. A shift from separatism to endemic radical Salafism would re-frame narratives of coastal exclusion along more explicitly religious lines, causing new problems for governments. While calls for autonomy and independence draw strongly on questions of identity, they remain political—and therefore open to conversation and compromise. A growing Islamist movement, meanwhile, would recast such debates in rigid, ideological terms, thus giving rise to a zero-sum scenario in which dialogue is nigh on impossible.

The 2013 al-Shabab attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall lasted four days and left sixty-seven shoppers dead, the youngest an eight-year-old child. The attack was fully captured on the mall's security cameras and broadcast around the world. The attack was seen as a response to Kenyan military activity in Somalia against al-Shabab that began in 2011. At the time, the attack became, for the developed world, the face of jihadi terrorism in Africa. It also highlighted the incapacity of the Kenyan security services: soldiers and police fired on one another and looted shops. Since then, Westgate has receded in importance as terrorist attacks have accelerated. In 2015, al-Shabab killed 148 in an attack on Kenya's Garissa University. A 2019 al-Shabab attack in Nairobi killed twenty-one; a January 2020 attack on a Kenyan airfield killed three U.S. citizens. Al-Shabab remains active in Somalia. Terrorism in other parts of Africa overshadows Westgate. For example, in West Africa jihadi terrorism appears to be strengthening in the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin. In southern Africa terrorists are newly active in Mozambique. As for Westgate, the mall partially reopened in 2015, and altogether in 2018. Among food, clothes, and other routine merchandise, it continues to purvey the Western luxury goods that are anathema to jihadis. At present, mall security is provided by an Israeli company.  The four apparent perpetrators of the Westgate attack were killed at the time. However, the forensics were sloppily done, offering no assurance that some perpetrators did—or did not—escape. Three were subsequently arrested for allegedly helping the attackers. All are ethnically Somali and two are Kenyan citizens. The three were indicted in 2013; after numerous delays, two were convicted on October 7 and will be sentenced on October 22. The third, the one who does not hold Kenyan citizenship, was acquitted. Some four different magistrates were involved as the judicial process slowly unfolded; there was no jury. Testimony was heard from 140 witnesses, but apparently telephone records of the defendants’ conversations with the perpetrators before the attack was the primary basis for conviction of the two. When it opened, Westgate was seen as an icon of Kenya's middle class and of the "Africa rising" narrative. Following the 2013 attack, it symbolized the horrors of terrorism. Now, it is essentially a footnote, except perhaps in Kenya itself.

The African media has closely followed the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, almost always in solidarity with the protesters. Especially among African human rights groups, the American focus on police brutality resonates strongly. While generalization is risky about a continent with more than fifty states and one billion people, it can be said that for most Africans, the policeman is not your friend. The popular perception is that police brutality is the norm. There has been reporting on police brutality in enforcing COVID-19 restrictions, especially in Kenya and South Africa, where Western media is based. In Kenya, human rights activists report that the police have killed twenty-two people while enforcing COVID-19 restrictions. On July 4, residents of a small town in western Kenya burned down a police station to protest the police killing of a trader, whom police accused of selling fake sanitizer. As of early June, human rights activists in South Africa were holding the police accountable for at least ten deaths while enforcing COVID-19 restrictions. In response to the public outcry, President Cyril Ramaphosa promised that the police officers involved would be held accountable. Police use of excessive force is an old song in Africa, and reform is difficult. Police forces tend to have been established by the former colonial powers, and they are national—a gendarmerie—rather than local. They are often poorly trained and paid; many resort to petty corruption simply to feed their families. Too often their culture is oriented toward protecting the state, just as it was during colonial rule, rather than serving the public. The elites that control and benefit from the state often dismiss cases of abuse and are slow to institute meaningful reform. In many African countries, the police are one element in a system of institutional underdevelopment. Where the rule of law is feeble, courts are often corrupt, and prison conditions can be unspeakable, people will take justice into their own hands. There are reports of mobs lynching an alleged thief caught stealing in a city market, for example. Hence, too often the police function as a weak, under-resourced occupying power, too ready to resort to excessive force.  Hence, meaningful police reform may require the overhaul of the entire legal and judicial system and a fundamental, positive realignment of governments with the people they ought to serve. Such a reform program is not so simple or easy on a continent in the midst of a pandemic and one in which the quality of political leadership is often poor.