'Rigging of elections' in Kenya, Africa is not an objective reality

Absent of another shocker from the Courts or the IEBC, in two weeks we will undergo our five year General Election ritual. Like all Kenyan elections, the 2017 version has its own drama, though there’s nothing spectacularly new, the players being permutations of the same ones we have interacted with over the last five elections. There is however a false but popular narrative in some circles, including among respectable professionals, which predicts that there will be a bloodbath, similar to 2007, if the “elections are rigged.” This narrative has two major problems. On one hand, its champions never articulate who the determinant of whether elections have been rigged will be. Is it the citizenry collectively? Is it the losing aspirants? Is it the thousands of observers accredited by IEBC?

Unfortunately, in Kenya’s political terrain it is the losing aspirants who generally declare elections rigged. In the five elections we have held since 1992 there has only been one election, in 2002, which our leaders declared free of rigging. However, anyone who has read the parliamentary petitions following that election and who remembers how Narc dished nomination tickets to losers and issued “direct nominations” to dozens of its supremos knows there was nothing fair about the 2002 election. However, since our leaders declared them fair, they were fair.