NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenyans are once again waiting anxiously to see whether their president and prime minister will do something that may seem elemental: sit down and talk to each other.
In the past week, a poisonous, seemingly ego-driven standoff between the two has had protesters hitting the streets, ethnic tensions rising, the nation’s currency taking a dive and diplomats hustling about town, begging the adversaries to stop playing politics and come to their senses before things get ugly — again.
“It’s pathetic,” said John Githongo, Kenya’s former anticorruption chief who now runs a grass-roots political organization. “It takes a letter from Obama to get the president and prime minister finally to meet.”
The deadlock this time is over the suspension — or attempted suspension — of two ministers whose departments were tainted by enormous scandals.
At the Agricultural Ministry, a recent audit found that in 2008, while Kenya was in the throes of a crippling drought, the government sold tons of grain from Kenya’s strategic grain reserves to politically connected middlemen and fake companies.
Many of the middlemen were not millers who could turn the grain into food and get it to the market. Instead, they were political cronies who were essentially given options to buy the grain at highly subsidized prices and then they sold those options to real millers for a huge profit, the audit found. The result was that food prices skyrocketed, emergency grain reserves dwindled, the middlemen made a killing and people in the hinterland starved.
At the Education Ministry, millions of textbooks have mysteriously vanished, along with chunks of donor money. Free primary education had been considered one of the government’s few shining accomplishments. Now that too has been tarnished.
President Mwai Kibaki suspended some of the civil servants accused of graft. But Prime Minsiter Raila Odinga wanted to go further. Corruption is Kenya’s nemesis, and human rights groups estimate that billions of dollars of foreign aid intended to lift people out of poverty has gone into politicians’ pockets. But impunity rules. And up until now, very few, if any, senior-level politicians have been punished.
On Feb. 14, he called a news conference before flying to Tokyo on business and announced that the agriculture minister, William Ruto, and the education minister, Sam Ongeri, were both suspended. There was a symmetry to the move, at least on the surface. Mr. Ruto is a member of Mr. Odinga’s party, while Mr. Ongeri is a close ally of the president.
But scarcely four hours later, Mr. Kibaki nullified the suspensions, saying that Mr. Odinga had no such powers and that he had overstepped his role. Apparently, the nation’s two top leaders, ostensibly partners in a grand coalition government (often dismissed here as a “grand letdown”), had not spoken.
Mr. Odinga’s allies called for a boycott of cabinet meetings — which could paralyze the government — and for Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, to come back.
Mr. Annan is credited with persuading Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga to call a truce after a flawed election in 2007 that drove Kenya to the brink of disaster. Back then, getting the two in the same room, let alone prodding them to a compromise, was no small feat. The S O S recently cast out to Mr. Annan was a less-than-subtle clue that Kenya could be sliding back to those difficult days.
Still, there has been no repeat of the bloodshed that swept this country in early 2008, when Kenyans split along ethnic lines and rampaged against each other, taking more than 1,000 lives.
But last Sunday there was a chilling reminder. Moments after Mr. Odinga announced that he was suspending Mr. Ruto (with whom he has recently had a falling-out), protesters set up roadblocks in Eldoret, Mr. Ruto’s ethnic stronghold, shutting down the main east-west highway in Kenya, just as they had in 2008. And this was not simply rowdy youth. The roadblocks were led by none other than Eldoret’s mayor.
“The protests that erupted in Eldoret town,” said an editorial in The Daily Nation, Kenya’s biggest newspaper, “should have set alarm bells ringing.”
“It is one thing to suspend civil servants and personal aides, but completely another to do the same to ministers who are often regarded as tribal chieftains,” the editorial went on. Such a move could be interpreted as “an attack on whole communities.”
Just like in 2008, as the political positions began to harden last week and tensions began to spread, the diplomatic corps here in Nairobi swung into action. Ambassadors called in their contacts on both sides and even the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, P. J. Crowley, sent a terse statement from Washington, warning Kenya’s leaders “to work swiftly to resolve these differences” and that “now is not the time for political posturing.”
The result: Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga have agreed to meet, possibly as early as Sunday. While a 10-minute telephone chat between them midweek was enough to quell an increasingly jittery Kenyan stock market, and while many Kenyans are relieved, they are also a bit bitter.
“Our leaders don’t listen to us, they listen to you all,” said Maina Kiai, a human rights activist. “That’s what makes them bend.”
Kenya today is different from what it was before the disputed election. There are a lot more hard feelings. And quite possibly a lot more weapons. Kenyan police officers recently unearthed a cache containing 100,000 bullets, several guns and other military gear. The fear is if there is a Round 2 of political violence, there could be even more bodies.
Mr. Githongo, who eventually abandoned his battle against corruption because of death threats, described the political situation as “comical” and “dangerous.”
“Our lives are in the hands of these two guys who are acting like children, children playing with a pistol,” he said.
-New York Times
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