Anyone arriving in Kenya this past week could have been forgiven for thinking that the country was in the midst of another election campaign.
President William Ruto camped in central Kenya for five days until Wednesday inspecting government projects in different parts of the region, addressing large roadside crowds from the sunroof of his car and holding meetings with local leaders at a state lodge.
Although officially dubbed a presidential working tour, the visit had an unmistakable political symbolism about it having been arranged to coincide with the final lap to the August 9, 2022 election, which President Ruto won.
In what looked like a strategy to try to reassure a restless political base, the president and his entourage aimed attacks at opposition leader Raila Odinga — the region’s political bogeyman for many years — and gave more promises of development projects.
About 400km away in western Kenya, Mr Odinga emerged from a rare political hibernation to warn of a resumption of the opposition-led anti-government protests in September if ongoing bipartisan talks facilitated by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo to end political unrest in the country last month did not take off.
Read: Another round of talks starts to resolve Kenya’s political dispute
Speaking at funeral ceremonies for opposition supporters killed by police during the recent protests, Mr Odinga also renewed his criticism of the Ruto government for failing to lower the cost of living and imposing punitive taxes.
A year after the closely contested election, Kenya remains as politically polarised along ethnic and regional lines as it was before.
President Ruto, who defeated Mr Odinga by just slightly over 200,000 votes in the election where 14 million cast their ballots, has struggled to unite the country, with the opposition continuing to question his legitimacy and exploit the government’s perceived economic policy failures to rally public sentiment against him.
The results of all opinion polls conducted between January and July this year showed a majority believed the country was not going in the right direction under the Ruto administration.
The Supreme Court upheld President Ruto’s victory after hearing a petition filed by the opposition leader.
Read: Raila and Martha: We accept, but disagree with Supreme Court verdict
But the stage for a legitimacy nightmare for the new president was set moments to the declaration of the winner on August 15, 2022, after four of the then seven electoral commissioners disowned the results, terming them “opaque”.
After formally taking office in September last year, he moved swiftly to try to consolidate power and smooth his path to re-election in 2027 by poaching opposition legislators to vote with his ruling coalition in Parliament, ordering a clear-out of top officials in the security agencies deemed to have worked against his election and forcing out the electoral commissioners who questioned the validity of his victory.
However, his actions ended up shifting the ground for political contestation from parliament to the streets, with the opposition initially also suspicious of the courts.
Between March and July, anti-government protests called by the opposition shut down the economy and led to deaths of civilians, a majority from police bullets, in Nairobi and major towns across the country, prolonging the political tensions from last year’s election.
Read: Two killed, hundreds arrested in new round of Kenya protests
Kenya’s post-election grievances tend to rumble on long after voting day, with the line between one electioneering period and the next one often blurred. The fallouts from the disputed outcome of the 2017 election, for example, were only settled six months later in March 2018 following a surprise truce between then President Uhuru Kenyatta and his main rival, Mr Odinga.
In between there was a repeat election after the Supreme Court overturned Mr Kenyatta’s re-election victory and a controversial mock swearing-in of Mr Odinga as ‘the people’s president’.
With the toxic rhetoric in the run-up to the ongoing bipartisan negotiations casting uncertainty on the outcome, the political tensions from August 2022 could rumble on even much longer.
Source: The East African
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