This is the first of a new series of articles in the African Security Review which will focus on specific current issues of importance in Africa. To make sense of events, it is necessary to include some background information in order to contextualise them. As countries are revisited in the series, the background information will become less extensive, and readers will be referred to earlier pieces. Apart from providing an explanatory narrative of emerging situations, an attempt will be made to identify the issues likely to attract attention in the near future, and account for their salience.

KENYA: ENLARGING THE RIFT?

On 3 January 1998, the Chairman of Kenya's Electoral Commission, Samuel Kivuitu, declared that enough election results were received and counted from the polling of 29-30 December for him to declare that President Daniel arap Moi had been re-elected. According to the final results, Moi had won 40,12 per cent of the presidential vote, against the 31,09 per cent of his nearest rival, Mwai Kibaki. More to the point, in order to avoid a second round of polling, which would have pitted the two leading candidates against each other within three weeks, the results showed that Moi had more than satisfied the constitutional requirement by securing at least 25 per cent of the vote in six of the country's eight provinces.

The parliamentary contest, held at the same time, proved a closer race. Moi's Kenya African National Union (KANU), secured 109 elected seats in the newly expanded National Assembly against the opposition's combined total of 101. In the previous Parliament, the balance had been a more KANU-friendly 110 to 78. Another twelve seats await presidential appointment following nominations from the parliamentary parties, each according to their relative strengths in the Assembly.

Since Moi's electoral victory came as no surprise, and given the fractured nature of the opposition challenge, much of the media's attention focused on the chaotic conduct of the election process itself. Though the level of violence had stayed well below that of 1992, the mismanagement and bungling of the polls, which had to be extended to a second day in many areas, and widespread accusations of rigging and corruption against the Electoral Commission, threatened at first to lead to an almost universal rejection of the results by the opposition. This danger has now been averted, due largely to the unexpectedly favourable parliamentary results and the acceptance of the urban populations of the outcome of the ballot. Attention has shifted to the efforts of Moi's new administration to address the serious economic and social difficulties confronting the country.

There will also be a great deal of interest in the play of forces within the ruling party, for under the present Constitution this must be Moi's final term of office. Indeed, it seems quite possible that the final stages of the Moi presidency will see a fundamental realignment of political factions, if not forces, within Kenya, and a concomitant raising of the stakes in the competition for power. In this context, KANU's relatively narrow overall majority in the Assembly may serve it fairly well, in that its members of Parliament may feel more constrained to follow the party line than to risk defeat on a vital division.

When Daniel arap Moi succeeded Jomo Kenyatta as President of Kenya, after the latter's unexpected death in 1978, there were few who predicted that his term of office would be a protracted one. Here was a rather obscure figure who, though he had been vice-president for eleven years, was scarcely one of the country's most prominent politicians, and hailed from the Tugen, a subgroup of the Kalenjin-speaking peoples of the Rift Valley who together comprise some eleven per cent of Kenya's population. Since Kenya's politics had been dominated by the Kikuyu, Kenya's largest population group, since independence in 1963, it was mistakenly assumed that Moi would act as caretaker while the Kikuyu party barons principally Charles Njonjo and Mwai Kibaki fought over the succession.

Although Moi's arrival began with a brief period of liberalisation, it was not long before the cycle of protests and repression that had characterised Kenyatta's final years began again. In 1982 following the June declaration of a de jure single-party state a coup attempt by part of the Kenyan Air Force was put down by the army. In its aftermath, Moi became increasingly severe with his opponents and during the late 1980s dozens were imprisoned.

Moi was re-elected in March 1987 in an election which was most notable for the controversial `queue-voting' system, whereby voters queued openly behind the candidate of their choice. After this, constitutional changes were rushed through Parliament unopposed, giving Moi increased powers, including the right to dismiss senior judges without redress. By this time, there was no effective political opposition within the parliamentary system leaving the opposition to various groups from modern civil society, most notably clerics, lawyers and students. In July 1990, there were widespread anti-government riots, and in the following year, the veteran Luo politician, Oginga Odinga, formed the National Democratic Party in defiance of Moi's refusal to accept multiparty politics.

However, in response to growing domestic and (especially) international pressure, multiparty politics were reintroduced in time for the December 1992 elections. Moi's supporters were quite relieved when the principal opposition grouping, the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD), split before the elections, permitting KANU to be returned to office despite some independent observers describing the poll as flawed. In the simultaneous presidential elections, Moi was clearly advantaged by divisions in the opposition. Although he secured only 36 per cent of the poll, the remainder of the vote was split largely between the leaders of the three largest opposition parties: Kenneth Matiba of FORD Asili (26 per cent); Mwai Kibaki of the Democratic Party (19 per cent) and Oginga Odinga of FORD Kenya (17 per cent).

Despite the disappointment of the 1992 election, and the obvious and essential advantage that the division in the opposition provided for Moi and KANU, personal and organisational factionalism actually increased over the next five years. A new phenomenon was the launch in 1995 of SAFINA, an opposition group led by Paul Muite and Richard Leakey that sought to provide a focus for opposition politics. This initiative lost momentum when the government appeared determined to deny it registration as a political party.

As the administration entered its final year in office, it came under renewed pressure to reform the Constitution that provided the ruling party with an almost unassailable advantage. Following violent protests and demonstrations, and under increasing donor pressure, the government eventually conceded in 1997 to the desirability of certain legislative and constitutional changes, although it emphasised the difficulty of passing all these reforms before the elections at the year's end. The effect of this concession was to split the opposition starkly between those willing to collaborate in the framing of the reforms and those who rejected the proposals in principle as cosmetic. The refusal to extend the life of Parliament also ensured that more extensive constitutional reforms were left in the hands of a 29-member review commission to be appointed under the new administration. The late promulgation of reforms providing for the first time in fifteen years for an official multiparty system, and for the reduction of civil service interference in politics (on 7 November) also ensured that even though the politicians had expressed their acceptance of the principles enshrined in it, there was little chance for the bureaucrats or security services to implement them before the election campaign.

Parliament was eventually dissolved on 10 November 1997. Two days later the Electoral Commission announced that presidential and parliamentary elections would be held on 29 December.

Moi's principal opponent in the 1992 elections had been Kenneth Matiba, who used his Kikuyu support base to mount a creditable assault on the presidency. The FORD organisation was by now fragmented into three separate and unstable alliances, each with its own personal and largely ethnically defined following. Matiba had decided to boycott the elections, and his mercurial political behaviour became increasingly erratic as the elections approached and it became apparent that his tactics would fail to have any significant impact. At the head of FORD-Kenya stood Michael Wamalwa, a Luhya who had won the party leadership after the death of Oginga Odinga. Raila Odinga, son of the latter, having failed to take control of his father's old party, had established the National Democratic Party, which formed the political home for many of his fellow Luo.

With Matiba out of the running, the Kikuyu voters could look to Mwai Kibaki's Democratic Party as their vehicle in their efforts to regain the political ascendancy they had once thought of as their right. Kibaki had maintained a careful political profile, eschewing the histrionics of some of his rivals, and playing only a modest role in the agitation for constitutional reform. He himself had served as Moi's vice-president for ten years, and as Kenya's finance minister for eighteen years before that, and some of his appeal rested on his experience of power. In 1992, he came third in the presidential race.

A candidate who attracted a good deal of media attention was Charity Ngilu, whose Kamba people could be expected to threaten Moi's claims to 25 per cent of the vote in the Eastern province.

Following donor pressure, SAFINA received its registration as a political party scarcely a month before the polls opened. It decided against fielding a presidential candidate.

During the campaign itself, there was relatively little violence, in contrast to events in Mombasa earlier in the year, in which clashes had led to a number of deaths and the flight of some 100 000 inhabitants. Most of these were originally from other parts of the country, and the suspicion was widespread that they had been driven out of their homes because they were opposition supporters. Effectively disenfranchised by their flight, they reduced the chances of a Moi setback in this vital electoral region.

Other disenfranchisement may have been effected during the voter registration process, which saw less than nine million over the age of eighteen qualify out of a total population of some 28 million people. The Electoral Commission, now partially independent, claimed that at least seventy per cent of those entitled to register, had done so.

The election process proved chaotic. In some areas, the delays in opening the polling stations on 29 December and shortages of voting materials led to a decision to extend the polling to the next day. Flooding in some parts of the country added to the Electoral Commission's discomfiture. Opposition claims of wholesale fraud and ballot-rigging were quick to emerge. By way of response, KANU adopted the original tactic of accusing the Electoral Commission of trying to rig the vote against the government. It seems likely, however, that KANU's joining in the complaint was the only possible reaction to so sorry a mess, if it was to escape responsibility. In the event, most observers concluded that the irregularities were largely the result of incompetence rather than design, with the possible exception of the Eastern province. The logistical effort required in so large an operation had probably been underestimated, and the time for preparation was too short.

Compounding the problem and adding to the air of distrust was the very slow counting process. Interestingly, though Kibaki and Odinga were loud in their condemnation of the presidential vote, they made no public objection to the parliamentary contest, which had been conducted simultaneously. The results revealed a few interesting inconsistencies in the public's selection of MPs and presidential choices, though this may have been in part the consequence of voters' reluctance to vote for a female candidate in a male-dominated society.

The appointment of the new Cabinet was awaited with great interest, more especially since twelve of the 25 incumbents had lost their parliamentary seats, eight of them during the nominations. Hints of indications about President Moi's preferences for the succession were eagerly pursued. His choices were enigmatic, to say the least. Whereas the last government reshuffle, less than a year ago, seemed to confirm the position of the faction known popularly as KANU `B', led by Nicholas Biwott and George Saitoti, the balance of the new administration would seem to favour its rivals in KANU `A', led by Simeon Nyachae, now the Finance Minister, and William ole Ntimama, Minister of Transport. Another KANU hard-liner, Bonyana Godana has been appointed to Foreign Affairs. Most notable was Moi's failure to name a vice-president, a position previously held by Saitoti, who was moved to the Ministry of Planning and Development.

Given Kenya's current economic straits, Nyachae's appointment to the finance portfolio drew some comment, as indicating an apparent insensitivity to the expressed concerns of the donors as does the KANU insistence on re-assuming the chairmanship of the Public Accounts and Public Investment Committees shortly before the dissolution of the National Assembly. Opposition chairmanship of these two committees had been assumed to induce at least a modicum of restraint in an environment characterised by massive official corruption and graft. The expectation had been that Moi would leave the team of Finance Minister Mudavadi and Central Bank Governor Cheserem intact to handle what are bound to be vital and difficult negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in mid-year. During his tenure of the finance portfolio from 1993, Mudavadi was widely credited with having accelerated the structural adjustment and liberalisation programmes with which Moi's administration had toyed for so long; he has now been moved to Agriculture. His successor is regarded as unschooled in financial affairs, however proficient a political operator he may be. The initial reaction from the financial community has been unfavourable, in that the appointment is interpreted as an act of defiance on the part of the President. Given Moi's track record as a manipulator, however, it could yet prove that Nyachae has been presented with the poisoned chalice, and that the ascendancy of KANU `A' will prove short-lived.

Looking beyond the internal struggle for the KANU succession, it is worth noting that the presidential campaign revealed a relative absence of ideological distinction between the candidates. This would suggest that there is considerable room for realignment and shifting alliances, even across party lines. The recent constitutional reforms, with their provision for coalition politics in power, make this even more feasible. Much will still depend on the alliances of interest being forged between `ethnic' conglomerates, and not least on the containment of growing hostilities within the Kalenjin family.

The balance of political forces, Moi's re-election notwithstanding, is probably as delicately poised as at any time since independence. Kenya watchers can look forward to an interesting time.