A Violent Vote

Election season in Kenya kicks off with ominous signs

- Tonny Onyulo

AS COMMUTERS in the heart of Nairobi hustle past one another at the end of a recent workday, young men are buying machetes in a hardware shop before boarding a bus. The tools aren’t for clearing brush or splitting firewood. Peter Mwangi, who runs an electronics shop, is arming himself in case of election chaos. “I know there will be violence,” says Mwangi, holding a giant knife. “In the 2007 elections, we were not prepared. We were attacked, and I lost some of my relatives. But this time, it will not happen.”

Mwangi says his shop was looted during the violence in 2007 following the election of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, who is accused of taking power through vote-rigging. More than 1,300 were killed and about 600,000 were displaced from their homes during those protests.

Kenya next holds general elections on August 8. As the campaigning kicks off between incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga, the parallels to 2007 are striking. Back then, Odinga was running against Kibaki. Now, as then, suspicion of government election officials is high. The electoral commission and the courts lost credibility in the eyes of many in 2013, when the Supreme Court upheld Kenyatta’s election as president, despite widespread allegations of fraud.

“We are going to win this election very early in the morning,” says Kennedy Oluoch, who plans to vote for Odinga. “If they try to rig it again, like they did in 2013, Kenya will burn.”